Presuming Oregon offered Kelly more money to stay I wonder how much more they the timing costs them? I think he was scheduled to make ~$3.5M next season. If they upped that to $4.5 or $5M, would they have paid that in December? Two weeks ago? If an assistant like Tosh can upend a recruiting class by leaving in mid January you’ve got to think losing Kelly and probably a decent chunk of the staff would have decimated Oregon’s class a week out from LOI day. An attractive new hire would have the school over a barrel, too. Could schools consider adding steeply escalating buyouts to contracts for January departures?

both sides of this story.
We won’t know til Chip makes a real statement. It’s reported he didn’t show for scheduled recruit visits today.

But if he does leave, I would bet that Cal and UW, maybe even USC and UCLA would be bigtime beneficaries of some good recruits de-commiting from the Oregon class.

right, but that buyout was a flat $3.5M, December 15th, January 2 or today but the blow to your program would have been worse the later it got. There’s obviously no good time for a coach to leave but late January would seem to give a college coach tremendous leverage. Maybe $3M before Jan. 1, $4M between Jan. 1 and 15 and $5M after that? I’m sure there’s some unintended consequence I’m not considering but LOI day seems to make CFB contracts unique.

Or maybe Chip is going to weather the storm instead of running for the cash grab? Either way, good for Oregon.

I’d like to get a couple more shots at beating them with Chip in place, we haven’t been too far off even with their emergence as a national power.

And ATQ handled this pretty well, considering. Seems to be much more fun to go off the deep end like at CGB, but that is just one Middle-Aged-Blue’s assessment.