Texas A&M’s obscene $78 million coach buyout is sports obsession run amok | Opinion

Even in Texas, there must be a limit to how much we’ll invest in sports. Surely one of our flagship universities paying someone nearly $78 million not to coach football is it.

Texas A&M University no longer desires head coach Jimbo Fisher’s services. The problem is, his contract runs until 2031 at more than $9 million a year. Riding to the rescue are donors, in the great Texas tradition, whose wealth exceeds their patience or ability to let A&M athletics officials do their jobs. So, Fisher is gone, with huge checks to come.

Plenty of people will shrug. It’s not university or taxpayer money, after all. The final total, they assure, will be negotiated down. And while A&M is shattering the record for paying a coach to stay home, this is what it takes to compete at the pinnacle of college football (not that the Aggies, under Fisher or anyone else, have done that in a long time).

But those are weak excuses. This payout is obscene. It’s bad judgment. It’s unbecoming of one our state’s most important institutions. The Legislature — which, let’s remember, governs state universities on our behalf — should ask difficult questions and try to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

The fact that private money will foot the bill may cause plenty of people to simply say “Oh, well” and then quickly move on. But even top donors max out; money paid to Fisher can’t fund scholarships, equipment and facilities elsewhere in A&M athletics or — crazy as it sounds — academics. And once again, the arrangement empowers big donors who help universities get into these messes like clockwork when the savior coach from just two years ago can’t do better than 7-5 and a trip to the Chicken Soup Bowl.

Just two years ago, A&M and its boosters thought enough of Fisher to give him a fresh 10-year, $95 million extension. Everyone involved, from Chancellor John Sharp to A&M’s athletics officials, should review their consideration of the matter and whether they should have insisted on a lower buyout amount or some other protection. Either then or now, someone showed flawed judgment, and sloshing around money just papers over it.

Perhaps the only good thing that can be said is that, thanks to recent changes in the sport, players hooked by Fisher’s recruiting promises can change schools easier than in the past. And many can finally make real money of their own through “name/image/likeness” deals.

Yes, top-tier college football is awash in money. In many ways, it’s preferable to the old days of boosters sneaking around to give athletes cars and cash, only to see highly selective enforcement of NCAA rules. But stories like Fisher’s buyout make the entire enterprise look gross, and that’s well before considering what any of this has to do with higher education or important research done at vital state institutions.

There’s a trickle-down effect, too. Texas and the Dallas-Fort Worth area have long drawn unwelcome national attention for overindulging in high school sports, particularly expensive stadiums. Even Arlington ISD is spending $34 million on a new multi-sport facility to serve two high schools. It’s hardly lavish or indulgent, but that’s still a lot of money for a district where enrollment is at best steady and two stadiums already stand.

Better coordination and cooperation among local school districts could allow for sharing or renting of stadiums to make the most of what the area already has. Some teams would have to play on Thursdays and Saturdays in such arrangements. Surely the memories will be just as warm without the Friday Night Lights.

Perhaps the fever is breaking. Voters in Prosper, the rapidly growing Collin County community, recently rejected one bond proposal that would have borrowed $94 million for a new stadium. Other proposals to renovate or construct schools and a performing arts center and to invest in new technology passed easily. Voters, it seems, are exercising judgment when their leaders fail to do so.

Perhaps the day will come when we look back on Jimbo Fisher’s payday as the time a similar reckoning came to college sports. Heck, he might even earn a statue on campus — as a monument to the return of common sense, if not winning Aggie football.