Firing head football coach Ed Orgeron this season would cost LSU $12 million in buyout money, according to contract details obtained by The Advocate:
Firing Ed Orgeron now would cost LSU $12 million and probably mean the end for his boss, too
Orgeron’s buyout figures are big.
Photo by Sean Gardner/Getty Images
Orgeron’s two-way buyout with the program is $12 million this year and drops every subsequent year of the contract. It slips to $8.5 million in 2018, $6 million in 2019, $4.5 million in 2020 and just $1 million for the final year.
LSU named Orgeron its interim head coach a year ago, when it fired Les Miles after a 2-2 start. Orgeron went 6-2 to close the year, including a Citrus Bowl win against Louisville and Heisman Trophy quarterback Lamar Jackson. Athletic director Joe Alleva gave Orgeron the full-time job in December 2016, signing him to a five-year deal worth $3.5 million per year. That’s big money, though plenty of coaches make bigger.
The Tigers have started terribly under Orgeron’s permanent leadership. They are 3-2 after an upset home loss to the Sun Belt’s Troy on Saturday. That makes the Orgeron buyout issue a significant one, because the buyout makes it way less likely that Orgeron could lose his job any time soon.
If LSU feels buyer’s remorse, it probably won’t act on it.
Two reasons for that:
- The buyout money’s really big. Paying Orgeron $12 million not to coach would mean paying for three expensive head coaches at once, because LSU would surely hire a replacement and pay him at least around what Orgeron makes, in addition to Miles’ buyout. Its obligations to Orgeron would probably go down somewhat if he took another coaching job somewhere else, but LSU would still be stuck with a giant tab. Teams pay buyouts to fired coaches all the time, but this would be on the bigger end of the spectrum.
- Firing Orgeron would almost have to mean firing athletic director Joe Alleva. It’s rare for an AD to fire two head coaches in a short time, and it’s really rare for one to do that and get to keep his own job. Maybe LSU’s administration will decide at some point that it wants to make a wholesale change, but doing it right now would just be a lot.
So the Tigers, for now, are likely to stick with whom they’ve got.
That’s just an educated guess from the outside, rooted in those two points. Firing Orgeron would be both expensive and disruptive, with the potential to shake LSU’s entire athletic department. It doesn’t seem like a practical thing to do at midseason, and especially not at midseason less than a year after Orgeron’s hiring.
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