The concept of the college football coaching buyout reached its historical apex Sunday, when news broke that Texas A&M would dismiss Jimbo Fisher amid his sixth season as head coach. That dismissal would figure to entail the school and its boosters paying Fisher the remainder of his contract, which infamously totals around $76 million.
“After very careful analysis of all the components related to Texas A&M football, I recommended to President [Mark] Welsh and then Chancellor [John] Sharp that a change in the leadership of the program was necessary in order for Aggie football to reach our full potential and they accepted my decision,” Athletic Director Ross Bjork said in a statement. “We appreciate Coach Fisher’s time here at Texas A&M and we wish him the best in his future endeavors.”
The move makes Fisher perhaps the first of all the fired coaches in the sport’s termination-mad history to face removal after a 51-10 victory, which Texas A&M got Saturday night over Mississippi State to improve Fisher’s record at the school to 45-25, 27-21 in the fearsome SEC, 19-15 since he signed an extension in late summer 2021 and 6-4 this season. On Sunday morning, Billy Liucci, executive editor of TexAgs.com, was first to report that the Texas A&M board of regents had decided the Fisher era would conclude.
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That board voted to give him a 10-year, $75 million contract in December 2017 and to extend that deal by four more years in September 2021, raising his salary above $9 million in that turn. Two years and two months later, Liucci reported that the “decision was reached at the recommendation of the athletic department/university president during last Thursday’s Board of Regents meeting.”
It became the latest, wildest chapter for a school and a football program whose record never seems to match its self-image. Texas A&M hasn’t won a national championship since 1939, when Homer H. Norton coached the Aggies and, indicative of a less-moneyed era, also coached the baseball team in 1943-44. It has had one season of double-digit wins this century, going 11-2 in 2012 with Coach Kevin Sumlin, and it has gone 175-121 (.591) with five different head coaches since 2000.
It also came less than two seasons after Texas A&M, mastering the college sports era in which players can profit off their names, images and likenesses, signed a recruiting class widely gauged as No. 1 in the country.
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When Texas A&M hired Fisher from Florida State near the end of 2017, it did more than replace Sumlin, who had gone 51-26 across six seasons. It achieved the first instance since 1977 of a coach who had won a national championship at his previous program — Florida State won under Fisher in the 2013 season — leaving that program directly for another program. So pleased was the university that it decided $75 million had been insufficient and presented Fisher with “custom A&M-embroidered Lucchese cowboy boots,” according to the Associated Press.
“Gone are the days when we settle for a good football team,” Sharp said at the time. “We expect to compete soon for championships.”
Fisher, a West Virginian who had coached at Samford, Auburn, Cincinnati, LSU and Florida State, went for immediate ingratiation. “I’m a tobacco chewer and I wear my boots and I shoot my guns and I throw my fishing rod,” he said at his intro. “And I grew up on horses.”
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The athletic director at the time, Scott Woodward, called Fisher “the right coach at the right time for Texas A&M.”
The Aggies went 9-4 in 2018 and beat North Carolina State in the Gator Bowl, then went 8-5 in 2019 and beat Oklahoma State in the Texas Bowl. Then came the covid season of 2020, the season of limited crowds and gigantic distractions. Texas A&M went 9-1 with the only loss by 52-24 at eventual national champion Alabama early on, and Fisher campaigned for a place in the College Football Playoff, one of the dreams of those doling out $75 million. His echoing of a sense of grievance about elites mistreating Texas A&M seemed to chime in perfectly with his environment.
Texas A&M finished fifth in the selection committee voting behind Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Notre Dame, then the Aggies scored a 41-27 win over North Carolina in the Orange Bowl. The final AP ranking left them at No. 4, their highest closing ranking since 1939, when the team went 11-0.
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By 1947, the school had fired Norton, largely because of eight straight losses to Texas, a rival Texas A&M had eluded by joining the SEC in 2012 but one with which it will reunite starting in 2024, when Texas joins the SEC.
The 9-1 season convinced the bosses that Fisher would do at College Station what he did in Tallahassee, even as a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback, Jameis Winston, had bolstered Florida State then. That bit of urgency got further steam with the idea that Fisher might return to LSU, where he was an assistant from 2000 to 2006. Woodward, the athletic director who hired Fisher to A&M, had moved to LSU in 2019.
“It is an honor to be the head football coach at Texas A&M, and although I am proud of the strides we’ve made, we ain’t done yet!” Fisher stated then.
“I am confident that he will continue to raise the Texas A&M football program to new heights,” then-Texas A&M president Katherine Banks stated.
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The 8-4 season that followed in 2021 had a 3-0 opening followed by a 20-10 loss to Arkansas and a 26-22 loss to Mississippi State, foreshadowing the sideways sailing that would persist. Still, Fisher reveled in that top-ranked recruiting class of February 2022, and when Alabama Coach Nick Saban lamented that his school’s boosters needed to keep pace, suggesting that A&M had bought the class, Fisher called a news conference in May 2022 and lambasted his former boss at LSU, labeling him a “narcissist.”
That stoked some fire and vigor, but those started ebbing two games into the 2022 season, with a 17-14 home loss to Appalachian State, when the contract and its extension began to look like historic miscalculations. That season would include a six-game losing streak to Mississippi State, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida and Auburn, which finally ended with a 20-3 home win over Massachusetts. It left Texas A&M bowl-ineligible for the first time since 2008.
On Saturday night, the Aggies, who lost this year at Miami and narrowly to conference rivals Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi, gained bowl eligibility.
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