One coach engaged in a lengthy affair with his executive assistant, entered her home without permission and landed in jail.
Another was investigated for accepting a loan from a booster and making questionable purchases with a school-issued purchasing card. A third was accused of having an affair with an undergraduate student and appearing at a public event while intoxicated. A fourth said his players “do not deserve to wear this uniform” in a postgame rant.
The circumstances vary, but the recent firings of Michigan’s Sherrone Moore, Kent State’s Kenni Burns, Ohio’s Brian Smith and Kansas State’s Jerome Tang were connected by two magic words: “For cause.”
Although coaches are hired to win games, their contracts do not include losing as a just cause for dismissal. That’s why Jimbo Fisher could flop on the field and still receive a $77 million buyout, the largest in college football history.
But schools have started to push back against paying those increasingly large buyouts by invoking those magic words and firing a coach for a specific cause listed in his contract, like criminal cases (Texas basketball’s Chris Beard, though the domestic violence case against him was ultimately dropped) or NCAA violations (Tennessee’s Jeremy Pruitt). A $40 million buyout becomes $0, or is at least negotiated down from the initial figure the school had agreed to pay if it terminated the coach “without cause.”
From 2016-20, only two FBS head football coaches were fired for cause: Pruitt and David Beaty at Kansas. The number increased to seven from 2021-25, including Burns, Moore and Smith in the past year. Other recent for-cause terminations in men’s basketball include Tang, who is finalizing a deal to return to Scott Drew’s staff at Baylor, and LSU’s Will Wade in 2022.
Although many of the off-field allegations were serious, decisions and lawsuits can hinge on technicalities. Michigan State fired Mel Tucker, who had $80 million remaining on his contract, before its sexual harassment investigation was complete. It cited “admitted and undisputed behaviors which have brought public disrespect, contempt and ridicule upon the university.” Northwestern fired Pat Fitzgerald during a hazing scandal, but later said evidence didn’t establish that a player ever reported the conduct to him or that he condoned or directed it.
It can be difficult to fully separate the firings from the on-field results. Of the seven recent football firings, six underachieved (Burns was 1-23) or at least showed signs of slipping (Tucker, Fitzgerald). Tang’s firing came amid a 1-11 start in Big 12 play.
In a wrongful termination suit filed in March, Burns argued Kent State explored how “to justify a termination for cause” after he “ultimately did not achieve the level of on-field success the university expected.” Burns’ buyout amount is in dispute, but it’s relatively low at around $2 million on the top end. Attorney Martin J. Greenberg, who has negotiated coaching contracts for decades, has observed a pattern pop up.
A school investigates the questionable conduct of an embattled coach, then uses that investigation to fire him for cause. The coach sues the school over his dismissal, often leading to a financial settlement. “The trend seems to be to find the magic words that are undefinable, maybe illusory, fire the coach for cause, then there’s negotiations (on a buyout),” said Greenberg, the founder of Marquette’s National Sports Law Institute.
The reason is obvious: The cost to fire an underperforming coach has skyrocketed.
When Florida fired Ron Zook in 2004, his buyout was $1.8 million (about $3 million in today’s dollars). When Florida fired Billy Napier in October, the Gators owed him $21 million — and that wasn’t even one of the three largest buyouts this cycle. The massive figures have changed administrators’ cost-benefit analyses. Schools once worried that fighting buyouts could be a red flag in future negotiations or cause coaches to air dirty laundry on their way out. But those fears receded as the market shifted and athletic departments added the major expense of paying players.
“They’re like, ‘F— it, we need that $40 million,’” said one agent, granted anonymity in exchange for candor. “The money got larger, so they’re incentivized. It’s almost like the risk is worth the reward for it to be for cause.”
The stated logic behind for-cause firings starts with the idea that if a coach’s conduct is egregious enough, it can cause major financial or reputational harm to the athletic department or entire university.
“These donors or boosters, they’re investors,” said Jeff Hunt, an educator and author who has worked with schools as a crisis management consultant through the Legend Labs firm. “If a stock is sour, people aren’t investing.”
To guard against that, schools have beefed up their contracts, as detailed in a 2016 study by a pair of Vanderbilt professors. From 1995-2001, almost 13 percent of football coaches’ contracts had zero for-cause provisions. From 2008-13, that figure dropped to 3 percent. Most had five or more, making these clauses more prevalent for football coaches than school presidents.
The reasons still vary by contract. NCAA violations, contract breach and misconduct like fraud and violence are standard causes; those are the three broad buckets in Brian Hartline’s deal with South Florida, just as they were when Jeff Scott joined the Bulls two hires ago. Willie Simmons’ agreement with FIU lists two dozen occasionally overlapping reasons. Most, like North Carolina’s Bill Belichick, are somewhere in the middle (eight, including felony conviction, prolonged absence and “failure to promote the fair and responsible treatment of athletes”).
The trouble comes when you try to specify which actions actually sour a school’s stock. Hunt said criminal acts (like Moore’s arrest) are one clear line. Others are trickier to spell out in contracts and hinge on the interpretation of Greenberg’s magic words.
With Tang and Kansas State, the question is whether Tang’s February rant about his players — “These dudes do not deserve to wear this uniform” — qualifies as “objectionable behavior.” Ohio fired Smith after concluding he had an extramarital affair with an undergraduate student that caused “disrepute, scandal, and ridicule.” Would a judge agree? What, exactly, are the practical meanings of “moral turpitude,” “embarrassment,” or “conduct which offends against morality and public decency?” The answer might depend on the region of the country and whether a school is public or private.
“These words are legal words that really take a finder of fact,” Greenberg said. “In most instances, the finder of the fact is the university.”
Buyouts give that university millions of reasons to find that the facts justify a for-cause dismissal — more than $18 million reasons, in Tang’s case. Pruitt argued in a 2025 lawsuit that Tennessee used an NCAA investigation as “cover for its decision to avoid paying Jeremy his just compensation.”
But money isn’t the only factor schools must consider. Different administrators have different risk tolerances for litigation. Conduct that could warrant for-cause termination at one school, such as Nick Rolovich’s refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine while coaching at Washington State in 2021, might not matter at a different school.
And, of course, there’s the scoreboard.
“We’ve seen this play out through time,” said Josh Lens, a former Baylor compliance staffer and current associate professor of instruction at Iowa. “If the coach is successful on the court or on the field or on the diamond, what would be a scandal for another coach might not be a scandal for that coach.”
While it’s easy to read between the lines and assume a cause and effect — the coaches struggled, so schools searched for an excuse to fire them — the reality is nuanced.
Win-loss records are public, but other reasons for firing a coach might not be. In some cases, schools are privy to information about a coach’s behind-the-scenes conduct that isn’t available to the general public.
“Firing a coach ‘for cause’ who isn’t winning enough would be a recipe for a lawsuit,” said Julie Vannatta, who retired in 2022 after 30 years as chief legal counsel for Ohio State’s athletic department.
Then again, litigation is probably coming regardless. Of the last decade’s nine for-cause firings in football, seven filed lawsuits. Two were settled out of court (Beaty, Fitzgerald) and the rest are ongoing.
Even if a school’s case is strong, a lawsuit is still expensive; billable hours, like buyouts, haven’t gotten cheaper. Depositions waste the valuable time of coaches and administrators, and the unpredictable legal process can lead to the airing of old grievances or unwelcome verdicts — especially if a school overreaches.
Moore’s case illustrates another reason why for-cause firings could be on the rise: In the age of social media, it’s harder to keep unflattering details out of the public eye. If people are going to find out about a coach’s conduct anyway, the thinking goes, schools have fewer reasons to avoid the messy disclosures that could come with a for-cause firing.
“Avoiding the public spectacle has gone by the wayside in a lot of these cases,” said a lawyer who represents schools in contract disputes, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of ongoing cases. “Schools might be aware that the coach did something, but the world doesn’t know about it. Now the order of operations is different. At that point, the PR is already out there. There’s nothing to be saved by not getting into that fight.”
The messy status quo raises an obvious question: Why don’t schools list “too many losses” as a reason to fire a flailing coach for free?
“The answer is just the negotiation leverage that the parties have at the time they’re entering into that deal,” said Matt Fenton, a founder of the Florida employment law firm Wenzel Fenton Cabassa, P.A.
Corporate contracts often include performance-based metrics (like sales goals) in the for-cause provisions of C-suite executives. But many of the executives Fenton has represented have been unemployed when they signed that contract. That’s less common in college coaching, where many of the top candidates already have a good job and might have other options looming — options that won’t include losing as a reason to avoid a buyout.
“If you’re going after that hot new coach,” Fenton said, “then they’re not going to say yes to a deal like that.”
Perhaps the closest example came at Arkansas. If now-former coach Sam Pittman’s recent winning percentage dropped below .500, his buyout fell from 75 percent of his remaining compensation to 50 percent. He and the Razorbacks negotiated a number in the middle ($7.7 million) when he was fired in September at 29-27.
That model appears to be an outlier, which means millions of dollars hinge on how schools or courts define “moral turpitude.”
“There’s gotta be a better system,” Greenberg said.
Greenberg tried to implement one a quarter century ago during his contract negotiations for the late Randy Walker. Instead of Northwestern dictating the termination process or parsing magic words, the school agreed that an independent three-person panel (including a local judge) would hear any case. Jim Harbaugh proposed something similar at Michigan before leaving to coach the Los Angeles Chargers in 2024.
The idea never caught on in the industry. Neither did Greenberg’s proposal to scrap for-cause sections entirely so that buyouts are the same regardless of why a coach was fired.
Instead, the ambiguity has remained. Perhaps for good reason.
The rising buyouts have coincided with something else Greenberg has noticed: Fewer contracts include mitigation clauses that reduce what a school owes by how much the coach makes at his next job. Squishy for-cause language, then, is one tool schools can use to fight back.
“They like those subjective, vague terms,” Lens said. “The coaches, they want it to be very specific. What’s a scandal? What’s embarrassing?”
The answer depends on who’s being asked — and why.
