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The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/James_Lankford on 2025-10-28 19:05:44+00:00.
People can choose to spend their money however they want, but sticking with the assumption that funding for these buyouts comes from individuals who want to help the favored universities, I took the reported buyout amounts and equated that to the number of annual scholarships that could be offered at each school using that money. That total comes out to about 5000 annual scholarships.
This recent ESPN article puts the total FBS buyouts so far this year at about $168 million, broken out by school, with the bulk coming from the buyouts at LSU and Penn St. The cost of attendance is the annual cost estimate for an in-state undergraduate student from each school’s financial aid website (for example, here is LSU’s). These typically include tuition, housing and meals, as well as transportation and living expenses. Those differ by university, and I’m taking as given each school’s cost estimate. Caveats here are that these are all one-off, one-year full-ride scholarship amounts, to approximate the lump-sum buyouts schools are typically on the hook for. You can also equate this to total full-cost-of-college amounts by dividing totals by 4, or in other words, about 366 students can attend their full four-year plan of study at LSU completely free of charge.
Universities of course can’t really dictate how their boosters/donors are giving, but you gotta wonder about the universities’ return on some of these. Having a successful football program can act as a great advertisement for the university, but when compared against what could potentially be hundreds of graduates that otherwise wouldn’t have attended, there’s surely a point where that number outweighs the revenue from firing the coach. In other words, in lieu of one coach buyout, a university could have 400 new individuals following LSU programs, buying merchandise, and attending games, potentially for decades into the future (not to mention the societal benefits of a college degree).
| School | Buyout | Cost of Attendance | # of Scholarships |
|---|---|---|---|
| LSU | 54,000,000 | 36,844 | 1466 |
| Penn St | 49,000,000 | 35,118 | 1395 |
| Florida | 21,000,000 | 24,180 | 868 |
| Oklahoma St | 15,000,000 | 33,700 | 445 |
| Arkansas | 9,800,000 | 32,690 | 300 |
| VT | 6,000,000 | 40,624 | 148 |
| UCLA | 5,000,000 | 43,137 | 116 |
| Oregon St | 4,000,000 | 36,747 | 109 |
| UAB | 2,400,000 | 35,457 | 68 |
| Colorado St | 1,500,000 | 35,722 | 42 |
| TOTAL: | 4956 |