Here are the details of the negotiated buyout Kentucky will pay Mark Stoops
Even at the darkest moments of Kentucky football’s 2025 season, the scenario where the Wildcats fired coach Mark Stoops outright always felt close to impossible.
Unlike most coaching contracts, which allow buyouts owed fired coaches to be paid in monthly installments over the life of the deal and subject to offsets from any salary earned at a new job in that time frame, Stoops’ contract specified he would be due 75% of his remaining salary ($37.7 million at the time of his firing) in a lump sum payment within 60 days of being fired. For that reason, the path to a coaching change at Kentucky always involved Stoops being willing to negotiate the amount or structure of the buyout owed to him.
Apparently, that’s what happened the day after a season-ending 41-0 loss to Louisville.
Stoops agreed to have just $3.94 million of his buyout paid within 15 days of being fired. UK will then pay him $6.75 million per year through April 2031. Those payments will be made in quarterly installments each fiscal year on July 1, Oct. 1, Jan. 1 and April 1.
“Don’t ever walk out of here thinking that I don’t have unbelievable respect for Mark Stoops and what he did here,” UK athletic director Mitch Barnhart said last week when asked by the Herald-Leader about the decision to fire Stoops. “We all need to be thankful for what he did. He did change the expectations for what we’re doing here. (New coach) Will (Stein) is thankful for that as well. … He wants to move forward and grow it from here.
“Mark was great. We worked our way through (the buyout negotiation). He’s a good man, and he gave a lot to this place.”
Stoops’ severance payments are not subject to mitigation based on any salary he earns at future coaching jobs.
The terms of the separation agreement were obtained by the Herald-Leader through the state’s open records law. As part of the agreement, both Stoops and UK agreed to broad mutual releases of legal claims and non-disparagement provisions. Stoops also agreed to cooperate with any university or NCAA investigations if needed, with his expenses to participate in those investigations covered by the university.
“Mark Stoops gave us 13 incredible years of his life,” Barnhart said. “We want to always focus on the end. I read a book the other day, and they talk about there are no happy endings. Not a lot of those in the games of sports. You don’t get a lot of happy endings where you get to walk off into the sunset and get to call it the way you want to call it. You don’t get that. Many times it ends in a head-down walk through the tunnel to find your family hanging out for you by yourself. It’s hard, really hard. And so, I want to focus for Mark on the eight years that he gave us in that middle stretch when we went to eight straight bowl games.”
The 60-day clause for Stoops’ buyout was added as part of an extension signed in 2017 and remained after his 2022 extension that made him one of the 10 highest-paid coaches in college football.
Even with the renegotiated structure, Stoops’ buyout would be the third-largest ever paid to a fired college coach, behind the $76.8 million it cost Texas A&M to fire Jimbo Fisher in 2023 and the $53.8 million it cost LSU to fire Brian Kelly earlier this season. Kelly’s buyout could go down, though, because he is required to try to find a new job, which would reduce the monthly payments LSU owes him by the amount of his new salary.
Penn State was originally on the hook for $49 million when it fired James Franklin earlier this year, but the two parties negotiated that down to $9 million when Franklin was hired by Virginia Tech earlier this month.
“To all my former players, coaches, staffers and the Big Blue Nation, from the bottom of my heart, thank you,” Stoops wrote in a statement posted to X, formerly known as Twitter. “Coaching at Kentucky the last 13 years has been one of the greatest honors of my life. I’ve felt your support, your pride and your love every single day. Kentucky has become my home, and I’ll be forever grateful to have been your head coach.”
This story was originally published December 8, 2025 at 6:54 PM.