Want to coach your alma mater in women’s college basketball? That’ll be $10 million

Teri Moren has a wild buyout clause in her contract. If she leaves Indiana for Purdue, her alma mater, she owes Indiana a whopping $10 million.

Contracts for coaching can contain a wide range of unusual or inventive provisions. Think about the Clemson contract for Dabo Swinney.

Swinney has a sizable buyout ($5 million) should he decide to leave for another school, similar to most football coaches. That buyout, however, increases by $2.5 million should he decide to attend his alma mater, Alabama. It would have cost Swinney $7.5 million if he had traveled to Tuscaloosa in January following the announcement of legendary coach Nick Saban’s retirement.

Therefore, while significant buyouts are typical in the contracts of major football and men’s basketball coaches (Texas A&M paid Jimbo Fisher an incredible $75 million to leave last fall, for example), this is typically not the case in the contracts of women’s coaches.

This explains why Teri Moren’s Indiana contract’s buyout clause is so peculiar.

Even though Moren’s contract, which pays her $1.25 million annually and places her eighth among women’s coaches paid this season, runs through March 2029, if she were to resign on April 1, 2024, her debt would only be $550,000.

If she decides to go to Purdue, her alma mater and a Big Ten rival located 115 miles northwest of Bloomington, to coach, that’s a whole other story.

In that scenario, Moren is required to give Indiana a massive $10 million. Really?

“In order to prevent me from leaving for Purdue, when (former athletics director) Fred Glass hired me (in 2014), he put an outrageous amount of money in my contract,” she chuckled. “I didn’t know such things were real. When he said it, I found it funny, but when I looked at my contract, I was like, “Holy cow, that’s in writing!”

At least in terms of pay, it’s probably the only occasion when Moren has felt on par with men’s coaches.