If you ever needed proof that college football is big business, Mark Stoops’ separation agreement from Kentucky should do the trick.
Key numbers:
- Employment officially ended December 1, 2025
- Total severance: $37,687,500
- Initial lump sum: $3,937,500 within 15 days
- Then: $6.75 million per year, paid quarterly, from 2026 through 2030
- Final payment hits in April 2031
- No mitigation, Stoops keeps every dollar, no matter what he earns elsewhere
In other words, Kentucky will be cutting Mark Stoops checks for more than five more years after he coached his last game in Lexington. And he gave them absolutely no discount at all to the Cats, who will pay every dime that was owed.
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Why Mark Stoops’ buyout will shape Kentucky football’s future
Layer Will Stein’s deal on top of that, starting at $5.5 million per year and climbing to $5.9 million, and the reality is simple:
Kentucky is spending roughly $11 million a year on its head coach position through the end of the decade.
That’s Alabama, Texas, and Georgia money… without Alabama, Texas, and Georgia results.
To be fair, this is the going rate in modern college football. You want stability, agents demand huge buyout protection. You want to make a change, you write a huge check. It’s the price of trying to play on the big stage.
But this specific agreement tells you a lot about where Kentucky is:
- The school knew it couldn’t justify Stoops’ salary and recent record together anymore.
- They also knew they couldn’t pretend to be an SEC contender while nickel-and-diming the next coach.
So they chose the most expensive option: pay huge money to not have someone, and then more huge money to bring in someone else.
The non-financial parts of the agreement matter, too. There are mutual non-disparagement clauses and cooperation language that let everyone save face publicly. Stoops gets his money. Kentucky gets a clean break. No messy lawsuit, no lingering war.
But on the field, the buyout has one big impact:
- It removes any illusion of a “soft reset” for Will Stein.
- You don’t pay one coach nearly $38 million to go away and then pay another coach almost $30 million to take over so you can drift along at 6–6.
Every bad Saturday from here on out will be judged against that price tag. Every close loss will be weighed against the fact that Kentucky is essentially paying elite-program money to fix the last era and launch the next one at the same time.
Stoops will be cashing checks through 2031. By then, we’ll know for sure whether those payments were the painful but necessary cost of leveling up…
Or just the most expensive “we were stuck” admission in Kentucky football history.