Sleazy Low for College Football

The University of Florida has all but fired its head football coach, Jim McElwain. But here’s the catch: They’d owe him $12.76 million in buyout money. The only way they can avoid the payout is to fire him “for just cause.”

So, now they think they’ve got cause to terminate the contract and walk from the buyout. 

The coach stated publicly last week that his family and some players received death threats as a result of this miserable season.

Florida officials can’t find any evidence to support the coach’s concerns. So that's their $12.76 million developing-excuse to fire him (they're reportedly negotiating a lower buyout using this as leverage.)

Maybe they should check Twitter, some Gator fan boards, post-game talk shows, neighborhood conversations … and allow for the fact that death threats come in different flavors.

After my brief experience of having a Chicago Tribune interview reproduced—and rewritten by Breitbart, with a splashy and highly misleading headline, I received really creepy and personal emails, voicemails, and calls to my unpublished cell phone. Death threats? Not close, but I felt unsafe enough to alert campus police. My point: If some creep says watch your backside, you might take that as a death threat.

And my work isn’t one-one millionth as consequential as the job of this head coach.

Back to sleazy: Pay up, UF, if you want to fire the coach who was probably a hiring mistake on your part. 

And if you don’t? 

Ohio State did a similar thing to its head basketball coach, Jim O’Brien. They were losing and wanted a new coach without paying the buyout. They found a pretext “for just cause” dismissal: the coach had loaned a player $6,000. Sure enough, this was true; and it violated NCAA rules. The loan was payment for airfare back to the player’s war-torn country of Serbia to spend time with the player’s terminally ill father-- and to provide cash for the dying father to get pain relief, and for the destitute family to pay for burial expenses.  O’Brien won $2.4 million from an Ohio court.