Who needs patience when you have television money? The latest weekend of college football saw two more Power Five coaches lose their jobs, with Colorado moving on from Karl Dorrell and Wisconsin surprising everybody by dumping Paul Chryst. It marked the fourth Sunday in a row in which at least one Power Five coach was shown the door, following Nebraska’s Scott Frost, Arizona State’s Herm Edwards, and Georgia Tech’s Geoff Collins.
All five were let go with the idea that the schools firing them wanted to get a “head start” on finding their replacement, which is a common motivator leading to coaches being fired earlier and earlier every year. If Nebraska had waited until October and fired Frost on the same day Dorrell and Chryst were fired, it could’ve saved itself $7.5 million. Wisconsin will reportedly owe Chryst more than $16 million to no longer do his job. Wisconsin athletic director Chris McIntosh says Chryst’s buyout is “significantly less” than reported, so it may drop somewhere between $8 and $10 million. What a bargain!
It seems as if coaching buyouts are like crypto. Nobody knows what they are, they only know they exist, and somebody is supposedly paying for them.
Whatever the case, seeing so many coaches being let go so quickly in the season is still jarring, and Chryst’s firing might be the most jolting of all. Frost entered the season on the hot seat with a reduced salary. He was in a win-or-else position and then lost to Northwestern and Georgia Southern. He was begging to get the boot. Herm Edwards entered the season with an NCAA investigation hanging over his head, which put him on shaky ground even if his boss was his former agent. Geoff Collins hadn’t won more than three games in his first three seasons at Georgia Tech and was always likely to be fired. Colorado looked like one of the worst teams in the country — not just the Power Five — and was 4-13 since the start of 2021. It was only a matter of time for Dorrell.
But Chryst? Chryst won at least 10 games in four of his first seven seasons with the Badgers and went 9-4 last season. He won three Big Ten West titles (but lost all three Big Ten Championship games, twice to Ohio State and once against Penn State), a Cotton Bowl and an Orange Bowl. His Badgers went to the Rose Bowl following 2019.
Chryst went into the weekend with 68 wins at Wisconsin, the third-most in program history. He was one win shy of…
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