Tosh Lupoi's Cal deal: $4M a year, $14.8M to fire him

Ten months into the job, Cal finally has Tosh Lupoi's paperwork done, and now the numbers are out.

Chris Vannini

@ChrisVannini

Tosh Lupoi’s contract at Cal was finally finalized on Oct. 1. His salary starts at $4 million and goes up. Buyout to fire him is 80% of remaining money (with offset), so it starts at $14.8 million. Buyout for him to leave starts at $5 million.

That took a while. Cal named Lupoi its head coach on December 4, 2025, on a reported 5-year deal. Through the spring, the summer and the first chunk of his debut season, though, there was no finished contract. The Daily Californian reported that Lupoi had signed a term sheet and the long-form deal still wasn't done roughly 10 months after he was hired. So the guy has been running a Power 4 program on what amounts to a handshake and a cover sheet. Very Berkeley.

Now the numbers. A $4 million starting salary that goes up each year is a real raise for a first-time head coach who was a coordinator a year ago. Then there's the buyout. If Cal fires him, it owes 80% of the money left on the deal, which comes to $14.8 million right now. That implies roughly $18.5 million left on the contract. The offset clause is the escape hatch for the school: if Lupoi lands another job after a firing, his new salary comes off what Cal owes him. That's standard, and it's the only thing keeping that number from being scary.

The number that really matters is the other one. Lupoi can walk for $5 million. In this coaching market that's nothing. Any school that wants him writes that check as a rounding error. So Cal is set up badly both ways: it's expensive for Cal to move on from him and cheap for anyone else to take him. If he wins, the Bears have very little stopping a bigger program from calling.

And plenty of people would call if this works. Lupoi is a Bay Area kid who played defensive line at Cal from 2000 to 2005, then coached the Bears' defensive line under Jeff Tedford before leaving for Washington in 2012. After that came Nick Saban's staff at Alabama, where he was part of 2 national title teams, a stint in the NFL, and 4 seasons as Dan Lanning's defensive coordinator at Oregon. Cal even let him finish coaching the Ducks' defense through their 2025 Playoff run before he took over full-time. That resume gets a coach poached.

Cal's pitch has always been that Lupoi is a Cal guy who actually wants to be in Berkeley, and that's probably the only real protection here. The contract won't keep him if he wins and a blue blood comes calling. Whatever he wins over the rest of this season decides which buyout Cal ends up worrying about: the $14.8 million it would owe him, or the $5 million that lets him leave.