Money’s on the Nightstand, Jimbo Fisher

After the disappointing Sumlin administration, Texas A&M decided it so loved Jimbo Fisher they paid Florida State $7 million to disentangle him from that university so they could entangle him with a ten-year contract worth $75 million of their own. After holding par for two years with the 8-5 – plus or minus one – rut A&M nurtured into a comfortable groove, Fisher led the Aggies to a remarkable 9-1 2020 record in the all-SEC schedule gauntlet COVID year. The powers that be decided they loved Jimbo $1.5 million a year more that day than yesterday. A Gene Stallings-less (I maintain he would have known better) Board of Regents upped the contract to ninety-five point six million dollars effective January I, 2022.

It didn’t work out. Winning became a problem, but under Fisher A&M was able to assemble talent. So much so that Lane Kiffin, college football’s equivalent of the intellectual dark web, pointed out how great recruiting classes were at A&M while making sure to hint that Fisher’s done less with more and, in this age when buying players is a-okay as long as you have a plausible money laundering Name, Image, and Likeness story handy, that it was cash and not the coach that brought the five stars to College Station.

“I don’t know how you collect much better. So, congratulations to their group that collected these guys,” Kiffin said at a press conference the Monday before playing Fisher and A&M. Kiffin is good at twisting knives. Blake Toppmeyer wrote in USA Today last week, “Just when I thought Kiffin might be finished dunking on Fisher, he hung on the rim.” After the “collected” comment, someone asked the Ole Miss coach if the team or fans might rally around a coach having a rough time of it.

I’ve liked Lane Kiffin for a while. He was fun at USC and he greatly upset the Tennessee Vols fan base which commends him to me in ways I’m incapable of fully expressing, but I decided Lane Kiffin was one of my favorite football personalities after a remarkable play call during the 2014 Florida vs Alabama game. Alabama’s first offensive play with Kiffin as Offensive Coordinator against an SEC opponent started with 13:58 to go in the first half. The minute and two seconds before saw the Tide defense earn a three and out followed by a punt to give them the ball at their own thirteen. Alabama lined up five wide in shotgun.

Kiffin’s offenses never fit neatly into a trend. He could go fast and put up eye-popping numbers, but I remember when the RTDBL (Run The Damn Ball Lane) buttons and t-shirts were popular. I was on that train for a while until I looked at the numbers. Somehow this seemingly pass-happy offense was putting up somewhere in the range of two-hundred rush yards per game and that was with all the jet sweep gains credited to passing. If I had to pin a description on him, I’d say he’s a master at creating and exploiting mismatches. His timing is vicious and he makes it look easy.

A tight end in motion saw one player shift inside. It was man on man, at least on the Alabama right side. Running back Kenyon Drake was lined up far right – top of the screen – as a receiver and there was Kiffin’s mismatch. In most passing situations, a linebacker is fine covering a running back. The problem for Florida was that Kenyon Drake, though a bruising hitter, was more a scatback; a fast and shifty guy. Florida middle linebacker Antonio Morrison had the one-on-one assignment but he was left on an island. Kiffin lined up his best wide receiver, future pro Amari Cooper, on the left. That pulled Florida’s top coverage player Vernon Hargreaves, also a future pro, to the bottom. The safeties slanted towards Cooper too, leaving Drake one considerably slower man than himself to beat. Blake Sims took the snap, Drake ran slightly towards center and then cut back down the line; a simple slant and go. Sims, a converted running back who under Kiffin would go on to break Alabama’s single season passing record that year, hit Drake in stride for an 87 yd touchdown.

It wasn’t until after the game that I saw the sideline film of Kiffin. It’s hard to say exactly when because I’m relying on someone else’s split screen, but just after the snap, maybe right before Sims began his throwing motion, maybe when Drake made his cut, Kiffin’s arms went up to signal touchdown. He set the pieces, moved one around, and knew before it happened. It was fantastic.

When A&M gave Jimbo the 2022 contract extension, they gave him unprecedented job security in addition to the $9 million a year. They gave him the largest buyout clause in college football history. When they finally made their move and fired him Sunday morning, they did so knowing it’d cost them $77.5 million to make Fisher go away.

People are in jail for murdering their spouses. That’s the closest analogue I can think of for what happened here. They loved him to the tune of $95.6 million dollars and then loathed him so much they’d give him more money than anyone in football has ever been given to stop doing what he was doing. Monetarily, that’s devotion to repulsion in two years.

Neither side should be happy. Negotiations for buyouts anticipate such things. Texas A&M can grumble about the price, but they get a reset on their program, and they wanted that more than they wanted the money. Fisher can grumble about being shown the door but given the chance to set a go-our-separate-ways dollar amount his agent (I’m not going to look it up. I’m sure his agent’s Jimmy Sexton. It’s always Jimmy Sexton) put up a pie in the sky number and A&M bit. The only loser here is me, because I’ve had an amazingly good time these last three years reminding my Auburn friends that in order to part ways with Gus “Send all the linemen illegally downfield!” Malzhan, they spent a record $28.5 million in buyout money ($21.45 million directly to Malzhan, a Sexton client, natch.) I had fun doing that but now… Malzhan’s haul was about a third of what Fisher’s getting.

College coaches’ oversized personalities are an indispensable part of the game. Spurrier pissed off Tennessee fans when he said, “You can’t spell Citrus without UT.” Bear Bryant called Auburn a cow college. This Kiffin/Fisher spat has been entertaining.

It’s no longer unusual for an embattled coach to get fired midseason after an unexpected or embarrassing loss. The writing’s on the wall. Everybody knows it’s just a matter of when and then the guy gives up five touchdowns to a perennial basement dweller or makes an FCS team’s year. The school’s administration sees cover in bad press and an angry fanbase, so they rip the Band-Aid off and hope to get a coaching search head start on all the other colleges and universities whose coaches are getting bad press and have angry fan bases. Fisher got fired after a 51-10 win over Mississippi State.

It looks like the decision to fire him was made Thursday night, but the powers held back on an announcement so as not to disrupt team preparation before a conference game. They’d wait until Mississippi State was in the rearview to deliver the already decided upon news. The Saturday after State, the Aggies play Abilene Christian so a little disruption’s not likely to matter one way or the other. That means the call was made after the previous week’s game, the game where Lane Kiffin, the only SEC West coach Fisher can’t claim a victory over, and his Ole Miss team beat A&M 38-35 in overtime.

I’ve heard it said by various radio personalities that it’s not a specific issue between the two coaches. They just don’t like each other. That fits. Kiffin asks if A&M should pay a luxury tax on their recruiting class. Fisher calls Lane a clown act. Kiffin beats Jimbo on Halloween and asks, “Maybe Jimbo has a Joker outfit for me.” Back and forth. It’s great popcorn stuff.

Back to Kiffin’s press conference. Blake Toppmeyer was waiting for Kiffin’s answer to a question about whether he thought players and fans might rally around a coach in trouble. Fisher’s troubles aren’t new. He’s been on the hot seat since losing the second game of the 2022 season to Appalachian State. The joke was that A&M would love to fire the guy but they had $85 million reasons (or whatever the buyout was at the time) for keeping him around. Despite whatever good vibes and happy thoughts the Aggies’ vaunted “12^th Man” fanbase were able to muster, the team didn’t even make a bowl game.

“I don’t know that the rally-around-him thing works,” Kiffin answered.

With the win, Kiffin got to drop the back breaking straw on Jimbo’s tenure at Texas A&M. I can’t say for certain that he saw that coming, that he knew he was showing Fisher the door. But I watch that press conference and it reminds me of when Sims threw to Drake… I think he knew. Hands up. Touchdown.

He’s not commenting, but the internet’s top candidate to replace Fisher at Texas A&M is Lane Monte Kiffin.