7.5 million and 1 reasons Jimbo left FSU for A&M

If you’re just tuning back into college football, you’ll notice FSU’s coach is now at A&M. The reasons were (mostly) simple.

Jimbo Fisher is the most accomplished college football coach to change jobs in a long time. Fisher, now at Texas A&M after eight years leading Florida State, is the first coach since Johnny Majors in 1977 to leave one head coaching job (Pitt) immediately for another (Tennessee) after winning a national championship at the first school. Urban Meyer and Nick Saban would qualify this century, but both were out of the college game for a time.

While Willie Taggart coaches Florida State, Fisher’s on to a new challenge. The reasons why are mostly not complicated.

The first 75,000,000 reasons Fisher went to College Station are dollars.

Texas A&M wooed Fisher with a fully guaranteed 10-year, $75 million contract. That’s the biggest guarantee ever given to a college football coach.

It’s a big raise for Fisher, even though he was paid well at FSU. His 2017 pay was $5.7 million, sixth-highest in the country, according to USA Today’s salary database.

A&M really wanted Fisher and paid even more to get him than meets the eye. The Aggies had to cover a $5 million estimated buyout in Fisher’s FSU contract. They also had to shell out $10.4 million to fire ex-coach Kevin Sumlin, who negotiated a buyout that didn’t go down even after he took a head coaching job weeks later at Arizona. Fisher, for his part, owes no buyout to the Aggies if he leaves for another school.

All told, Fisher’s hiring cost Texas A&M more than $90 million, before factoring in buyouts for assistants and any logistical costs.

The other reason Fisher left FSU: His time in Tallahassee had gone south.

The Seminoles won 2013’s national championship, the last year of the BCS, and they made the inaugural College Football Playoff in 2014. Those years cemented Fisher as one of the best coaches in the sport.

But the Noles lost three games apiece in 2015 and 2016, falling from elite to merely really good. Then they cratered in 2017. They lost a mega-hyped opener to Alabama, and late in that game, quarterback Deondre Francois suffered an injury that put him out for the year. The Noles sputtered to a 2-5 start before recovering down the stretch, and they qualified for a bowl game by the thinnest margin possible at 6-6.

Over his years at FSU, reports and rumors connected Fisher to various jobs, including Texas, West Virginia, and Auburn. He was a serious candidate for LSU’s job in 2016, a flirtation he turned into a fat contract extension at FSU. So the Noles and their fans weren’t elated when Fisher courted another job the next season — especially that season, which at one point included Fisher screaming at an FSU fan who heckled him after a loss.

On another level, it was just time. SB Nation’s Bud Elliott explained while rumors swirled:

FSU’s given him basically everything he wants, and he gets to face an ACC schedule with SEC resources. But it is so hard to stay at a place for more than a decade, and he’s been in Tallahassee since 2007 as the OC, and since 2010 as the head coach. Some coaches are tremendous as change agents, but their style grates on people and eventually, people within the program resent the coach, tune him out, or both. Fisher is an incredible change agent, but it’s yet to be seen if he can be a maintainer. If he believes that he is better as a change agent, then starting over elsewhere makes sense.

Fisher says he never planned to leave, but the Aggies convinced him. Florida State then turned around and hired away Oregon head coach Taggart.

Fisher has a really hard job at A&M, but he’s off to a good start.

The Aggies have a great chance to finish with a top-five national recruiting class. Fisher spent his first few months in College Station doing what he did regularly in Tallahassee: convincing blue-chip prospects to come play for him.

The schedule in his first year is brutal, though. Two of the Aggies’ first four games are against Clemson and Alabama, maybe the two best teams in the sport.

The timing turned out to be just right for Fisher to make a move.

A&M wanted to level up after a disappointing last few years under Sumlin, and Fisher brought a championship pedigree. FSU had struggled enough that the school was willing to let him go without an epic fight. And the Aggies brought along a huge bag of money. Now comes the hard work of making the Aggies into SEC champions.