It’s OK to say it: Paying Mark Stoops $38M to not coach is just insane | Opinion
Is it worth discussing systems that are completely integrated into society and yet also completely nuts?
I’m speaking, of course, about the recent firing of University of Kentucky football coach Mark Stoops, a man who managed to be the winningest coach in UK football, but could not stop the last straw humiliation of a 41-0 loss to nemesis University of Louisville.
Like everyone else involved in college football, Stoops was paid an absolutely bonkers amount of money: $9 million a year. But because he didn’t do it well enough and win enough games, Stoops will walk away with a buyout sum of $38 million. Yes, read that again, he will be paid $38 million to not coach UK football.
Does that make any sense at all?
None. And yet here we are, caught up in the madness of college sports, which is also completely normalized.
Generally, it’s already nuts we have created a professional sports system out of higher education, a system seen nowhere else in the world. That football and basketball coaches are usually the highest paid public employees in every state is deranged. (Yes, I’m running out of synonyms.)
It’s not that we play high-stakes sports to pay for academics; we play them to pay for bigger and better sports.
Recent restructuring in college sports has made things more complicated. For decades, athletes made millions for universities without seeing a penny. Now athletes are being paid, but the NCAA settlement and NIL deals have put universities behind financially. For now.
UK met the moment by hatching a limited liability company called Champions Blue. This new company immediately received two loans from UK— $31 million to meet the required payments to athletes, capped at about $20 million next year, and $110 million for upgrading Kroger Field, including new luxury boxes and a club space. This loan also included a request for proposal for a “fan entertainment district on the campus that could include retail, dining, hotels and other entertainment options.”
Now, this is space off Alumni Drive could be used to build more dorms to house the increasing numbers of students coming in every year. But UK would rather let Lexington carry that burden, along with all it entails, such as more traffic and the destruction of historic neighborhoods.
Lexington needs more student beds and more affordable housing. It does not need more restaurants, shops, hotels and overpaid football coaches.
But I digress. With all these loans, how could UK afford to pay $38 million over 60 days? There were rumors he and UK might agree to spread the payments out over a longer period of time, but we don’t know because the Board of Trustees Athletic Committee canceled its Monday meeting.
By 11 p.m. Monday night, UK had announced its next coach, Will Stein, currently the offensive coordinator at the University of Oregon. UK officials will be too busy negotiating his enormous contract to tell us how they are buying out the last one.
But all this points to UK reaching peak corporate status, one in which various parts of what used to be a university have been parceled off into LLCs or into public/private partnerships. Just last week, we were told UK is entertaining bids for a corporate partner to oversee maintenance, grounds keeping and some medical services.
The last thing anyone talks about these days is educating students. As President Eli Capilouto said Monday morning, “It is critically important that we are competitive and successful in football. That is our goal. It is our focus. We intend to be successful.”
Translation: It’s critically important to win football games, so tickets are sold to pay off the construction at Kroger Field, and the juggernaut keeps going. If that means cuckoo for cocoa puff contracts and payouts and restaurants and hotels and all the things that have nothing to do with educating students or saving people’s lives, then so be it.
I know all the arguments. Big money sports attract students and boosters, revs up school spirit and support less lucrative teams, like tennis and volleyball. That’s all true. But none of that is fundamentally improving the UK, where professors and researchers are being told to save money, cut back and get ready for hard budget times ahead.
So to all those people deep in the system of college sports, it may feel perfectly normal to pay one coach $38 million to go away. But in the real world, it’s still completely nuts.
This story was originally published December 2, 2025 at 7:27 AM.
