As of initial publication of this story, Jimbo Fisher has been Texas A&M’s head coach for nearly seven months under a head-turning, 10-year, fully guaranteed $75 million deal. Conventional wisdom would lead you to believe that he’s under contract, right?
It’s June, and Jimbo Fisher hasn’t signed his Texas A&M contract. It’s not weird.
Contracts are complex, and even if it takes months to get them officially executed, coaches aren’t exactly doing their jobs on good faith alone.
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Well, nothing about a college football coach’s job is conventional, and their contracts are omnibus documents heavy on the legalese. Take Jim Harbaugh’s, which included an insurance payment to give him two separate payments of $2 million that Michigan will get back when he dies.
So it’s a bit of a surprise, but not terribly shocking, that Fisher’s deal hasn’t been fully executed yet, per Texas Monthly (school officials expect it to be done in “a few weeks”).
“Twenty years ago, the services of a coach were secured with a handshake,” said Robert Lattinville, an attorney who specializes in employment contracts for college- and professional-level executives and coaches. “Then the money got so much — it got so inflated — and the consequences of not having a coach under contract were heightened.”
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A&M spokesperson Kelly Brown said Fisher has a memorandum of understanding with the university and is being paid at the rate announced in early December.
“There’s no disagreement over the contract and there’s nothing contentious going on behind the scenes,” she said in an email.
This is all pretty par for the course.
An agent told SB Nation that he recalled one of his first contract negotiations not being executed until August.
“Some of these schools have such disconnect between athletic department and university counsel and administration,” he said.
Butch Jones’ first deal at Tennessee wasn’t signed until August 22, 2013, but he entered into an initial agreement with the Vols on Dec. 7, 2012. The finalized details of Kirby Smart’s first deal at Georgia weren’t reported until June. Lovie Smith’s first deal with Illinois (which he entered into in March 2016) wasn’t signed until Sept. 8, after the regular season started.
College football coaching contracts are long. One of Nick Saban’s contract extensions, for instance, is 34 pages, and that’s a normal length. Things can get particularly dense when it gets to courtesy cars, private jets, tickets for family members, and buyouts.
Most coaches are hired in December or early January, when a previous coach is either fired or leaves on his own volition. The bulk of those deals get fully executed in short order right around Signing Day, if not before. That’s primarily so coaches can get on the recruiting trail immediately.
And recruiting appears to be a hangup with Fisher’s deal, because he wants to be particularly involved with the negotiations regarding the new federal tax code.
In an email, Brown enumerated the reasons for the delay in the signing of the contract: “Fisher wanted to get through recruiting before taking a deeper dive into the financial details and negotiations,” she wrote. “A&M and Coach Fisher were looking at alternative compensation strategies related to tax planning that could have advantages for both sides.”
She added that revisions to the federal tax code also slowed the contract-negotiation process down, as both sides were considering what its impact would be.
Fisher, and all coaches, aren’t exactly flying blind when they do their duties without fully executed deals.
If the term “memorandum of understanding” is familiar to you for some reason, it might be because the disastrous Tennessee coaching search at one point centered around one.
An MOU is an abridged version of the broadest and most important details of the contract (money, term, etc.). Both parties work on the nitty gritty after the fact because coaches need to hit the road to recruit for their schools in addition to their other duties. It’s a similar type of agreement that lets rookie NFL players train with their teams in the offseason before they sign their rookie deals.
Fisher’s actual contract — whenever it’s finally done — is unique not so much for the dollar amount, but for the guaranteed amount.
I wrote this back when he was hired:
I spoke to an agent Friday evening who expressed a big concern within the industry: For a sport that sustains itself on incremental change, Texas A&M just threw a bomb into how salaries are structured at the top level. The game has changed.
Salaries rising isn’t a new thing, particularly for the last 20 years, since Bobby Bowden became the first coach to get near the million dollar annual salary. But Fisher’s guaranteed amount will make negotiations for future coaches an interesting proposition.
That means contracts will become more complicated, and you’ll see a few more each year creep further into the offseason.
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