Mia Khalifa couldn’t help but laugh at the announcement that Florida State had fired its football coach, Mike Norvell, a move that puts the school on the hook for a whopping $47 million to $50 million in buyout payments.
“$47 million buyout LMFAOOOOOOO IMAGINE BEING PAID TO GO HOME!!!!” Khalifa tweeted on X.
Her tweet, from Khalifa, a Lebanese American media personality and former adult-film actress, mocks one of the biggest buyouts in college football history. Florida State said Sunday it fired Norvell in his seventh season, one day after losing 36-24 to Clemson at home, putting the Seminoles at 3-5.
University president Richard McCullough announced Sunday afternoon. “We have made the decision to change the leadership of our football program.”
Interim coach Rick Stockstill, a former Florida State quarterback and director of scouting for the program, will coach the team until the school finds someone new through a national search process. Stockstill coached at Middle Tennessee for 18 years. Florida State has also fired its defensive coordinator, Tony White, whose defense was allowing 31.6 points per game this season.
Norvell has finished 41-39 at Florida State, 23-30 in ACC play and has lost 17 of his last 21 ACC games.
Pressure had been building for months. Florida State fired its athletic director, Michael Alford, in September, and a banner calling for Norvell’s firing was flown over Doak Campbell Stadium before Saturday’s game. Clemson coach Dabo Swinney condemned the banner after the game, but the crowd thinned in the second half as the Seminoles struggled.
Norvell’s contract guarantees him 85 percent of his remaining compensation if he is fired for any reason other than cause. Cost estimates vary: CBS Sports put the final bill at just over $48.6 million, including the money tied to the recently negotiated buyout, while Fox Sports, citing On3, put the number at $50.3 million.
Norvell was set to earn $10.3 million this season and has five years and $54.75 million left in his contract past 2026, according to CBS Sports. If Florida State had waited until the end of the season, the buyout would have been about $45.6 million, Fox Sports reported.
On3 said that if the buyout had come at the end of this season, it would have been paid off in roughly $800,000 monthly installments through 2031. The contract also includes mitigation language, meaning that if Norvell finds a new job, Florida State’s obligation will go down.
Khalifa’s $47 million figure is near the low end of the above estimates.
Norvell’s $49 million buyout would be the third-largest ever in college football, CBS Sports reports. Only the $77 million buyout Texas A&M owes Jimbo Fisher and last year’s $54 million buyout LSU owed Brian Kelly precede it.
Penn State faced a $49 million buyout when it fired James Franklin last year, but the two sides agreed to cut it to $9 million after Franklin became head coach of Virginia Tech.
The numbers show how lucrative guaranteed coaching contracts have become in the Power Four conferences. Florida State gave Norvell an extension through 2031 after the 2023 season, increasing his salary by more than $2 million after Nick Saban’s retirement at Alabama sent the coaching market into chaos. This made Norvell one of the 10 best-paid coaches in the nation and made firing him extremely expensive.
Norvell took over at Florida State from Memphis before the 2020 season and turned the program back into a championship contender. The Seminoles went 13-0 in the 2023 regular season and won the ACC title but didn’t make the College Football Playoffs, which included only four teams, after quarterback Jordan Travis suffered a season-ending injury.
The decline began in the following year. Florida State went 2-10 in 2024 and 5-7 in 2025, missing bowls in both seasons, before posting a 3-5 record this year.
This is not the first time Khalifa has called for the firing of the Seminoles. In September 2018, after a blowout defeat against Syracuse during Willie Taggart’s first year at the helm, she set up a GoFundMe campaign to raise $21.2 million to buy out Taggart’s contract. It had collected $31 in the first 18 hours, according to 247Sports. Florida State fired Taggart the following year and hired Norvell to replace him.
Stockstill will make his coaching debut this Saturday against Boston College. Florida State ends its regular season at home against its rival Florida on November 27.
