Which College Football Coach Gets Canned First This Season?
I posted this thread around this time last year and thought with the lack of real football-related material these days, I’d post it again. Not that I don’t love listing off my G.O.A.T foods, but who do you all see among the first college football head coaches to be fired this season?
My first thoughts go to Lovie Smith at Illinois or David Beaty at Kansas. Neither are high profile gigs and both have minimal expectations. Kansas especially. But I’m thinking if Lovie can’t get Illinois to a bowl game after three years at the helm, he’s gone. Beaty may get a longer leash than that, but I doubt he can survive another 1-win season.
USC was 1-3 in 2016
A long shot since I don't know if Pitt has expectations beyond "make a bowl" but I'll say Narduzzi. He hasn't shown the ability to get them past 8-5 and the program gained almost no momentum from knocking off Clemson in 2016.
I think Kingsbury is a good call too since he was almost fired last year.
Uhhh I don’t know what kind of expectations you think Pitt has, but Narduzzi is only three years in and winning 8 games in two of those three is more than enough to get him a long leash. Unless you’re predicting Pitt to go 1-11 or something catastrophic, Narduzzi is very safe. Especially considering the carousel of coaches Pitt went through before Narduzzi took the job.
Brian red face Kelly, Guz at Auburn he’s due for a bad year after he overachieved last year.
I’m going with the guy at Arizona St.
Kliff Kingsbury at Texas Tech feels like a good candidate. He runs the peak Big 12 team with all offense and no defense.
My dark horse is Herm Edwards. He's the wild card. He might get canned after 2 games because he paid a recruit 50 grand and his response will be "WELL NO ONE TOLD ME YOU COULDNT DO THAT"
Probably not this first guy fired, but I've read that Louisville may fire Petrino if he can't get to double digit wins. They haven't forgotten the 11-2 and 12-1 seasons under Strong and have a unique opportunity with a hot coaching candidate alumnus in Brohm. If they don't act this year, he might get hired by a richer school.
Between the basketball scandal and Papa John (lol), one wonders why Brohm or anyone else already at a Power 5 program would be attracted to the Louisville job right now.
Maybe because neither of those things are really related to the football program aside from the name of the stadium....
He grew up in Louisville, played football there, and was an assistant coach. His father played at Louisville and coaches HS nearby. He has more ties to Louisville than Harbaugh had to Michigan, so I don't think you could fault him for jumping at the opportunity to coach there. And with Petrino's history, Louisville would help their image by getting rid of him.
Maybe, but that won't happen until the end of the season unless something really crazy comes out. Or he loses every game or something.
Brohm will be able to do far better than Louisville if he has Purdue continuing on an upward trajectory. If he has an 8-9 win season and maybe scores a big win over Wisconsin (its at home, certainly possible) he’ll be able to get the best job available next season. And I think there will be a better job available.
I don't know how you fire David Beaty. He actually took the job at Kansas, after all, and that's a brave and selfless act unto itself.
Isn’t Kansas still stuck paying a couple former coaches? Do they REALLY want to add another coach to that list while begging another average mid major coach to go there?
Herm
Once again, people address this question all wrong. Sione provides a nice service by including the link to last year's thread, and it's a bit instructive (fwiw, I made a good call that Butch Jones was a mid-season firing candidate, but my prediction that the ND-UGA game would be between two teams that people thought were good and turned out to be bad was less impressive).
The question is not, which coaches are in the most danger; the question is, which coaches have the biggest chance to be fired DURING THE SEASON, an event that is incredibly rare in college football.
Mid-season firings are bananas events that programs generally want to avoid at all costs. Any coach currently employed is expected to at least have a chance to redeem themselves, and that typically takes a full season to determine. It is also a significant disruption to things like recruiting. It takes a pretty unique set of circumstances for a mid-season firing to even make sense, and many programs just won't do it no matter how bad their coach is (e.g. Michigan in 2014).
Coaches at generally bad programs are not likely candidates for this barring total personal meltdowns. These are programs where a late push to finish .500 or beat a big rival is enough to save a job, and as such they will get a chance to do so. DJ Durkin and Chris Ash aren't going anywhere; Lovie Smith has been a disaster, but Illinois already has experience with chaotic coaching changes and I'm confident they'd rather avoid another one if they can help it.
Tennessee last year had a frustrated fanbase, off-field issues, and a tough schedule that quickly put the team in an untenable position. They also had a guy on the staff in Brady Hoke who was the perfect interim coach, a man who had experience coaching a major team but who was (contra his own texts) in no way a legitimate candidate for the permanent job.
This year the choices for mid-season firings will be guys who were retained but under unsteady circumstances, guys whose seasons have a chance to be really disastrous, guys who have off-field issues that make them less secure. The sole exception here is if a catastrophic off-field event comes to light, but those are impossible to predict.
Helton is less than two years from a Super Bowl victory; he won't be fired midseason. Neither will Mike Leach, whose weirdness is already priced into the stock and who gets way better on-field results than Washington State can reasonably expect. Guys who are building or rebuilding programs have a lot of leash to at least show improvement through the season.
I find discussion of Larry Fedora to be persuasive; I concur with others who have mentioned him. Nobody else really jumps out to me, in part because a lot of the guys that were teetering last year got fired and replaced. Ed Orgeron, maybe, if things really fall apart down there, but that's about it.
Good points regarding this thread. Though mid season firings like Jones are rare, early firings are becoming more common as schools want to get a head start on the search as UCLA, Florida, and Tennessee did last year. One added consideration now is early signing day which teams were still figuring out last season. Seeing as how 80% of classes are signed in December, there's more urgency than ever to get the new coach in so he can start recruiting.
That's a good point, though such moves also require the quick hire of a successor to be effective, and thus a good lackey interim coach like Brady Hoke that nobody feels is getting the short shrift in the hiring process.
How far away are we from a team firing their coach mid season and poaching another coach before the season ends? We already have coaches interviewing before the season ends(Durkin in 2015), is it so far fetched to move that up a few weeks and hire in late October/early November?
Also, there are a few ex HCs out there who could be candidates for Group of Five schools and are currently unemployed.
Ogeron is the easy answer I believe if he has an 8-5 or worse year. I would have never hired Lovie Smith, but believe he has some leeway for two more years. I’m from Chicago land area and can’t understand why u of I had not had better b-ball and football teams. There is great talent in Chicago specifically for b-ball and Illinois itself has some good football players that they can just never seem to get, but I can only imagine Lovie sitting with a recruit. It’s like bubba from Forrest Gump pitching you and your family. He needs to go back to the nfl or retire.
Lovie is a very bright guy, but at the heart of it he's a pro coach and just not cut out for the various non-coaching hats the college coach has to deal with--mainly recruiting and dealing with boosters/alumni.
Illinois hasn't been able to land consistent Chicago talent for nearly 50 years. It's like their white whale. And one of the main reasons is that Illinois south of I-80 is a completely different world than Chicagoland. You might as well be going from south Chicago straight to rural Tennessee.
If Texas Tech is 2-4 after playing TCU I could definitely see Kingsbury being shown the door. And even if they're like 4-2 if they lose Kansas on Homecoming he'll be fired the second the game is over for sure.
*lose to Kansas
/grumble about editing
David Beaty, Kansas - New AD and 3 wins in 3 seasons.
On a side note [mods etc] why do in some occasions upvotes show the clicked state on some posts that I haven't upvoted?
Beaty is obvious fire-bait after the season with that kind of record, but a mid-season firing seems excessive when you're Kansas. You let the guy finish the job, give him his last couple of games to either fix things or at least go out on a high note, and then quietly ax him and hire a new guy to get things moving.
Kansas KNOWS they're going to be bad this year. You don't fire a guy for starting 1-4 when you expect that at the outset.
You also fire guys in mid-season or towards the end so that they don't have a chance to turn it around. I don't know how KU's schedule aligns but if he were to win 2 of his last 3 after starting 1-8 there might be momentum for him to buy another year.
There isn't one scholarship I-AA conference Kansas could win. Not one.
Probably one of Mark Dantonio’s assistant coaches. He will probably need a fall guy as the investigations continue.
Brian Kelly and his replacement will be Bob Stoops.
Barry Odom at Missouri is in over his head.
Herm Edwards won’t finish the season and he won’t be fired - probably just wander into the desert and never come back.
Urban Meyer
I'm gonna go with Mike ItsADigornio after another 3-9 season.
Jim Harbuagh