Charlie Weis’s Buyout Reportedly $21 Million

SI.com’s Peter King reported Monday in his weekly MMQB (Monday Morning Quarterback) column that Weis’s buyout is worth $21 million.

“Let’s put all of the Charlie Weis-to-the-NFL possibilities to bed, shall we? I’ve got the real number it would take to buy him out of his contract, which has nine years left to run at Notre Dame. That figure plus the fact that he doesn’t want to leave should take him out of the NFL pool for the foreseeable future.

The rock-solid, no-exceptions buyout number for Weis from Notre Dame: $21 million.”

This is the first time we’ve seen a concrete dollar amount associated with Weis’s buyout. The highest amounts I had seen previously reported speculated that the buyout was in the $10-15 million range.

Hopefully this helps put an end to the Weis to the NFL rumors for a while. With a $21 million buyout, it would take an NFL team around $40-45 million to get Weis out of South Bend if you consider that Weis would probably command a contract in the $4-5 million range over five or so years by NFL standards.

Some non-Notre Dame fans will see this number and think its absurd, but tell that to Louisville fans who just saw Bobby Petrino turn them into a top 10 team and then bolt for the NFL because his buyout was a mere $1 million.

In this day of coaches hoping from big payout to big payout, it’s nice to know that Weis’s buyout should be enough to keep NFL owners from inquiring about Weis.