Blog Article

WEEK 3 – 2026 COACHES HOT SEAT RANKINGS

Mark Haines on September 15, 2026

Ryan Day led by 20 points in the fourth quarter Saturday night and moved 56 spots up the Coaches Hot Seat Rankings by Sunday morning.

That’s the biggest one-week jump anybody has made this season, and it happened to a man who went into the weekend sitting 115th with a playoff bracket on his mind. Texas took the last 21 points in Austin and won 24-23. Day didn’t coach any worse in the fourth quarter than he had in the first 3. He lost, and this board only speaks one language.

Here’s the read on Week 3.

Of the 86 games played, the ones that moved this board were the ones against opponents capable of winning them. Nearly every coach who cooled off did it by beating somebody with no business on a big-time schedule, and nearly every coach who heated up did it by losing to somebody real. The week graded the calendar more than it graded the coaching.

What moved and why

  • Ryan Day went from 115th to 59th, and it cost him 1 quarter. Ohio State led 23-3 entering the fourth at Texas and lost 24-23, which knocks down the 2-year win column and the record-against-ranked-teams column inside the same 15 minutes. He’s still 59th, so nobody should confuse this with a hot seat. The point is that 56 spots were sitting there the whole time, waiting on 1 bad quarter.
  • Brent Venables climbed 18 spots to 17th on a 17-10 loss at Michigan. Oklahoma walked in ranked 11th and walked out ranked 24th, and the column that punished him is the one counting games against the AP Top 25. He wins 73 percent of his games in the 2-year window and 38 percent against ranked teams. That second number is the entire profile, and it didn’t get better in Ann Arbor.
  • P.J. Fleck moved 11 spots into the top 10 after Mississippi State came to Minneapolis and won 38-13. It’s year 10, the Gophers were outrushed 252 to 13, and Fleck’s Monday answer was penalties and communication. “The penalties absolutely killed us,” he said, and he added that what he loves about this team is their fight. Fight is what you discuss when the rushing number is 13.
  • Jeff Choate rose 41 spots to 68th because Nevada lost 20-7 at Montana State. Losing to an FCS opponent in September is the cleanest way to heat a seat in this system, and Choate found it on the road in Bozeman.
  • Joe Moorhead cooled 10 spots, from 9th to 19th, for beating Robert Morris 45-10. Akron hung 45 on a team that has no reason to be on the schedule and it counted as a win, because it was. That’s 10 spots of relief bought at wholesale.
  • Dabo Swinney fell 7 spots to 13th on a 22-7 win over Georgia Southern. Clemson scored 22 points at home a week after LSU beat them 51-10, and a September date against a Sun Belt team cooled him anyway.

The top of the board

Greg Schiano is the No. 1 hot seat in college football at 0-2, and he earned it the hard way.

Rutgers lost 37-21 at home to a UMass team that hadn’t won a game since October of 2024, as a favorite of nearly 30 points, and Schiano called the performance embarrassing. 8 days later, the Scarlet Knights went to Chestnut Hill and lost 28-21 to a Boston College team that had already been beaten by 19 at Cincinnati. That leaves him with 5 wins in his last 14 games and none in the 2 most winnable dates on his schedule. His composite sits at 96.4.

Mike Norvell is 2nd at 92.4, a gap of 4 points, and the way he got there tells you what kind of week this was.

Norvell didn’t play. Florida State was on a bye, and he still earned a spot because everyone near him got worse. Luke Fickell dropped from 1st to 3rd for beating Western Illinois 36-9. The top of this board rearranged itself over games the top of this board largely sat out.

Schiano has been in it; he’d like everyone to know. Asked about the UMass loss, he reached for Teddy Roosevelt and told the room, “I’ve been in it for 39 years.”

39 years, and 5 wins in the last 14.

Top 25 on the board

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The seat nobody is watching

Tim Albin sits 12th on this board, and I haven’t found his name on a national list all month.

Charlotte opened as a favorite by more than 20 points against The Citadel, an FCS program, and lost 43-41 in triple overtime at home. The 49ers gave up 268 rushing yards and 6 rushing touchdowns to a team that runs the option without apology. A week later, Ole Miss beat them 41-9 in Oxford. Albin’s record at Charlotte is 1-13.

That’s the number, and it’s the reason the board has him ahead of Swinney, ahead of Beamer, ahead of Venables. The only win came against Monmouth last September.

“My heart hurts for the staff and the fan base,” Albin said after The Citadel.

He won a conference championship at Ohio in 2024. He has won 1 game since he left Athens.

Looking ahead to next week

Saturday hands this board 2 games with a hot seat on both sidelines.

  • Akron at Minnesota, noon. Moorhead is 19th, and Fleck is 6th, and 1 of them leaves Minneapolis with a September win over an FBS opponent. If it’s Moorhead, the top 5 gets a new resident.
  • Eastern Michigan at Wisconsin, 12:30. Creighton is 18th, and Fickell is 3rd, and Camp Randall is supposed to make this one boring. A close fourth quarter here lands on the 3rd seat, not the 18th.
  • USC at Rutgers, 3:30 on CBS. Schiano gets the 12th-ranked Trojans at home with AJ Surace at quarterback, the same Surace who threw 3 touchdowns and 4 interceptions at Boston College. Nothing on this date is built to cool the No. 1 seat.
  • Florida State at Alabama, 3:30 on ABC. Norvell hasn’t won a road game since November of 2023, a streak that now runs 1,024 days, and the bye did nothing to shorten it. Tuscaloosa either ends that number or makes it the story of his season.
  • NC State at Vanderbilt, 12:45. Doeren is 5th, Vanderbilt won 10 games last year, and this is the first result of his season that carries real information.
  • Charlotte at App State, 6:00. Albin needs a win badly enough that a respectable loss won’t buy him anything.

Bottom line

A September win over a team with a losing record is worth exactly what you paid for it.

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Week 2 Coaches Hot Seat Rankings

Mark Haines on September 9, 2026

Luke Fickell takes over at 1 after Wisconsin was outscored 28‑3 in the second half at Lambeau Field, and Dabo Swinney climbed 44 spots after losing by 41.

Luke Fickell had Notre Dame beaten at halftime, and 86 seconds later he was the hottest seat in America.

He had company. Every other man on this board who played a football game lost too, with 1 exception, and the exception got punished for it. Mike Locksley beat somebody 62‑0 on Saturday, and this board dropped him 3 spots. Dave Doeren never left the house and climbed 5.

Anybody who finds that backward can take it up with the scoreboard. It lied twice on Saturday and again on Monday night.

Dabo Swinney moved 44 spots.

The season is 5 days old.

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The Week 2 board

Figure 1. The Week 2 Coaches Hot Seat top 10, with each coach’s position on the Week 1 board published August 31.

1.    Luke Fickell and the 86 seconds

Give the man his 30 minutes.

Wisconsin led 13‑10 at the break at Lambeau Field, with 75,939 people in the seats, against a Notre Dame team that would be ranked 3rd in the country by Tuesday afternoon. Then the Irish scored 14 points in 86 seconds of the third quarter. DJ McKinney took a Colton Joseph pass 55 yards the other way, and nobody laid a hand on him. The Badgers managed 3 points the rest of the night.

Final score: Notre Dame 41, Wisconsin 13.

“I don’t have a great explanation for the second half,” Fickell said.

Nobody in Madison has asked him for one in 4 years.

Wisconsin has this instead:

  • 7,193 people quit buying tickets. A 13.1% drop, and an athletic department that believed them enough to write ticket revenue down 11.6% in its own budget. Chanting is free. Nobody cancels 7,193 season tickets by accident.
  • The record is 16‑22. 3 full seasons and 1 game in Madison, all of it pointing the same direction.
  • The schedule was supposed to be the gift. No Ohio State. No Oregon. No Michigan. No Indiana. Wisconsin cleared his calendar of every excuse it could find, and he opened against the 1 non-conference opponent left on it capable of embarrassing him.

They hired Luke Fickell to put a ceiling on a program that used to win 9 games a year in its sleep. 3 years later, the Badgers cannot locate the floor with a flashlight.

He takes the top spot from a man who lost by less.

2.    Greg Schiano and the 8 possessions

Greg Schiano scored a touchdown on his opening drive Thursday night and then took the rest of the evening off.

8 straight possessions, no points. UMass 37, Rutgers 21, in Piscataway, where Rutgers had the post-game fireworks show lined up in advance, seemingly expecting a win.

The winner deserves a good look. UMass went 0‑12 last season and came in on a 16-game losing streak. UMass had not beaten an FBS opponent since a win over Army in 2023. Rutgers was favored by roughly 28, and the Minutemen answered that opening touchdown with 30 unanswered points while Dylan Lonergan, imported from Boston College to solve the quarterback position, threw 3 interceptions and lost a fumble.

Now somebody in New Jersey must live with it.

The UMass head coach is Joe Harasymiak. From 2022 to 2024, he ran Greg Schiano’s defense and was twice nominated for the prestigious Broyles Award after building a top-20 national defense.

Schiano’s 2025 defense finished last in the FBS, all 136 of them, at 7.6 yards allowed per play. His old coordinator brought a winless roster into that stadium, and his team moved the ball whenever the mood struck. A bad Thursday looks nothing like that. Schiano watched his own methods work beautifully from the wrong sideline.

Schiano has coached 208 games at Rutgers across 2 tenures and won 99.

People in New Brunswick have been saying for years that Greg Schiano is the only man alive who can win in Piscataway. Thursday night was the first time that stopped sounding like a compliment.

3.    Mike Norvell and the 585 yards

The genius got outgained by 261 yards, won the turnover battle by 3, and lost anyway.

SMU beat Florida State 27‑24 on Monday night in a stadium that lost power and pushed kickoff back nearly 2 hours, and the lights were not the only thing in Tallahassee that went out early. The Mustangs put up 585 yards. Florida State managed 324, took the ball away 4 times, and converted all of that into 7 points. Bill Connelly’s postgame model gave the Seminoles a 1.4% chance of winning a game they lost by 3.

Doak Campbell booed him when the video board found him.

Norvell went 0‑4 in one-score games last season. He is 0‑5 now.

That number is the entire case against him, and it fits on a napkin. Hand this man 4 extra possessions, a home crowd and a 3-point deficit in the fourth quarter, and he will find a way to give it back. He has done it 5 times in a row.

Florida State still has not won a road game since November of 2023. Monday was at home, so the streak got the night off, along with everybody in garnet who was supposed to tackle Kevin Jennings.

He drops to 3 because 2 other men had worse weekends. Nothing in Tallahassee got better.

4.    Mike Locksley and the 62 points that cost him 3 spots

Mike Locksley beat somebody 62‑0, and this board moved him down, and the only thing he can blame is his own schedule.

Maryland gained 646 yards. Maryland ran for 365 on 40 carries. Maryland scored 6 rushing touchdowns. Maryland held Hampton to 85 total yards, and 10 of them on the ground. Hampton plays in the FCS and had never once in its history lined up across from a big-time program.

“Excited again that we were able to get a win for the first time in a long time,” Locksley said.

That is the head coach of a Big Ten football program describing a shutout of Hampton as a special occasion.

The awful part is that he is right. Maryland had not won a football game in almost 11 months. The Terrapins dropped the final 8 games of 2025 and then waited out the summer for Hampton to arrive and break the drought. The non-conference winning streak now stands at 19, the longest active run in the FBS. Nobody in this country beats the teams that agreed in advance to lose quite like Mike Locksley.

The seat cools 3 spots. It cools the way a stove cools when somebody opens a window.

Every game that made it hot is still on the schedule.

5.    Dave Doeren and the 0 snaps

Dave Doeren climbed 5 spots without leaving the house.

NC State did not play. The only football Raleigh has seen in 2026 is a 34‑8 loss at Virginia, 168 total yards, 3.3 per play, and a fan base that started the argument before this newsletter printed a number. He moved up 5 anyway, because 3 men above him fell off the board.

Richmond comes to Carter-Finley on Friday.

Fourteenth season, FCS opponent, 4 days after an idle Saturday, his own supporters spent relitigating him. Somebody in Raleigh should check on the man.

6.    Dave Aranda and the 1-point

Dave Aranda intercepted the other quarterback 3 times and lost by 1.

Auburn 17, Baylor 16, in Atlanta. Byrum Brown made his first start for the Tigers, threw 3 picks, and won. DJ Lagway went 27-of-54 for 333 yards and got Baylor into the end zone on 4th-and-goal with 9 seconds to play, and Aranda sent the offense back out for 2 points rather than take the tie. It died a yard short of the line.

Nobody in Waco is arguing with that call, and neither am I. The call was never the problem.

Aranda is 36‑38 at Baylor with 1 winning season since the 2021 conference title. A team that takes the football away from a first-time starter 3 times and still loses by a point had already told on itself long before anybody lined up for a conversion.

7.    Butch Jones and the 4 interceptions

Butch Jones led 3 separate times before halftime and handed Memphis the football 4 times, and only 1 of those facts made it into the final.

Memphis 42, Arkansas State 24. Trey Owens, the Texas transfer, threw for 325 yards in his first career start, and Jones announced afterward that Owens keeps the starting job. Memphis ran for 335 on its way to 523 total yards while Jaylin Carter scored 4 touchdowns, 3 of them after the break.

Jones is 26‑38 in Jonesboro across 6 seasons, and his point differential has finished negative in every one of them, including the 8‑5 that Arkansas keeps holding up as evidence.

6 years is long enough to stop calling it a rebuild.

Eight, Nine and Ten: The 44 spots and the 30 spots

2 men climbed into this top 10 from the middle of the board, and 1 of them covered 44 spots to get here.

Dabo Swinney, Clemson, 50 to 6. LSU won 51‑10 with better than 600 yards of offense, the worst beating of Swinney’s Clemson career. He spent the summer calling his own roster a bunch of nobodies. Lane Kiffin agreed with him in Baton Rouge, in public, by 41. The loss has fans and experts questioning if his older methods still work in modern college football. Candidly, I don’t think Clemson will fire him – his buyout is too high – but a negotiated exit or Swinney stepping down at the end of the season are both realistic options.

Bill O’Brien, Boston College, 40 to 10. Cincinnati won 34‑15 while JC French ran for 3 touchdowns and threw for a 4th. Boston College went 2‑10 a year ago and opened the sequel getting outscored by 19.

Joe Moorhead, Akron, 12 to 9. Wake Forest 38, Akron 16, with the Zips opening as a 24.5-point underdog. Moorhead is 13‑36 at Akron and has never finished a season above .500 there. This is his 5th.

The 3 who came off

Lance Leipold, Matt Rhule, and Chris Creighton are gone from this board, and none of them did anything to earn the favor.

Leipold sat at 5 a week ago. Creighton sat at 9. Their seats did not cool by a degree. 5 other men simply had a worse 5 days, and that is how a top 10 behaves in September. A coach doesn’t get relief around here. Somebody else just steps in front of him.

What Friday night settles

Greg Schiano goes to Chestnut Hill on Friday to play Bill O’Brien.

Number 2 on this board against number 10, 4 days after both lost to opponents they had no business losing to. Whoever loses spends next week explaining it to the other, and both know precisely how it will read in this space.

Somebody will be number 1 on this board next Tuesday, and it may well be whichever of them loses.

The rule for this week

Check who a man beat before checking whether he won.

Mike Locksley won by 62 and fell 3 spots because Hampton is an FCS program that had never played a big-time opponent in its life. Greg Schiano lost by 16 and climbed 6, because UMass went 0‑12 last year and the man holding the clipboard on the other side of the stadium used to work for him. The scoreboard reported both games accurately and got both wrong.

The only 2 men on this board who did not lose a football game over the weekend are ranked 5th and 7th on it.

Nobody made a mistake.

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Mike Norvell Won by 17 and Got Hotter. Dave Doeren Lost by 26 and Jumped to 10 on Our Board. Week 0 Wasn’t About Wins.

Mark Haines on August 31, 2026

Week 1 Coaches Hot Seat Rankings

Florida State wrote New Mexico State a $1.4 million check and got booed 20 minutes into the game it bought.

The money amounts to roughly $82,000 per point of the final margin, and the margin was 17. Mike Norvell, in his seventh season as Florida State’s head coach, was favored by 31.5 and led by 7 in the third quarter. His own building turned on him in the second quarter, after a touchdown drive by the visitors and a three-and-out by the hosts, and the invoice sat there the rest of the night.

That is the whole weekend in a single transaction. Across 8 games, 4 coaches walked out of Saturday hotter than they walked in, and only 2 of them lost. It reads backward only if you believe this board only measures wins. It never has. It measures whether a program looked like the thing it’s paying to be, and on Saturday a lot of them didn’t.

Something stated up front, because the window matters more than the label. Only 3 of the 10 coaches on our board played, so the weekend produced exactly 1 move. Dave Doeren enters the top 10 at 10, and Barry Odom comes off it. Doeren spent most of last season bubbling under, parked in the teens while the pressure built, and Saturday finished a climb that’s been 3 years in the making. Mike Locksley, Lance Leipold, Luke Fickell, Butch Jones, Dave Aranda, Matt Rhule, and Greg Schiano all open next weekend, and the rest of the board holds until they do.

Figure 1. Every Week 0 favorite measured against its closing spread. Orange marks the 4 favorites that failed to cover, including a Florida State team that laid 31.5 and won by 17. Source: closing consensus lines via BetMGM, Caesars, DraftKings and FanDuel, compiled by College Football News. Final scores via the CHS 2026 season workbook.

Mike Norvell and the 1,008 days

The number that walked into Doak Campbell Stadium with Norvell on Saturday was 1,008.

That is how many days had passed since Florida State last won a football game outside Tallahassee, a 24-15 win at Florida on November 25, 2023. The streak stands at 11 straight road losses. Week 0 couldn’t touch it because the game was at home, and neither of the 2 tells this newsletter named in the spring was on the schedule. No bus ride, no close fourth quarter.

That left a single question: Does this look like a program that has fixed something?

Florida State put up 419 yards at 6.3 a play and went 6-for-6 in the red zone against a team picked near the bottom of the FBS. Then the other column. New Mexico State converted 10 of its 17 third downs. Trey Hedden, the Aggies quarterback, went 10-of-13 for 158 yards on third down alone, including throws of 33 and 34 yards for scores. Ashton Daniels, the Auburn transfer running Norvell’s offense, finished 17-of-27 for 202 yards with a touchdown and an interception, and spent the night getting hit in a pocket that wouldn’t hold.

Norvell said during the offseason that he expected 2026 to be the best year of his life.

The season is 1 game old.

I am still waiting for the part where somebody at Florida State explains what’s different. Different quarterback, yes. Different play-caller, technically, since Norvell took the sheet back himself. Different result? New Mexico State cut the lead to 10 midway through the fourth quarter, and New Mexico State has gone 7-17 across the previous 2 seasons.

Here is the sentence that should follow him into September. Norvell has 4 losing seasons at Florida State. The 3 men who held the job before him produced 4 between them across the previous 44 years.

He won the game and got the worse half of it.

Dave Doeren and the 168 yards

Dave Doeren has coached NC State for 14 seasons, and Saturday spent about 30 minutes relitigating all of them.

Virginia beat the Wolfpack 34-8 and had it finished by halftime. NC State gained 168 total yards on 3.3 yards per play with 10 first downs, punted 5 times before the break, and turned it over twice. CJ Bailey went 12-of-23 for 84 yards with an interception and a lost fumble in the red zone. Beau Pribula, the Missouri and Penn State transfer now playing for Tony Elliott, went 9-of-11 for 155 yards with 2 touchdowns and led everybody on the field in rushing with 110 yards on 15 carries.

Doeren had won 8 consecutive season openers. He was 4-0 against Virginia. Both of those died on the same afternoon.

Now the structural number, the one that has always defined him. Doeren has 8 seasons of 8 wins or more at NC State. He has zero seasons of 10.

“It was disappointing as hell, to say the least,” he said afterward. “I own that. That’s on me. Everybody can blame the head coach. That’s great.”

Everybody did.

Doeren went into Saturday at 14 on our board and came out at 10. His fan base didn’t make that call; we did. But what a fan base does on the night of a 34-8 loss is one of the things this board reads, and NC State’s was loud enough to hear from here.

Figure 2. Offensive yards per play for all 16 teams that played in Week 0. NC State and TCU finished 15th and 14th of 16 in the weekend both coaches needed to go differently, and Florida State posted 6.3 against a team picked near the bottom of the FBS. Source: CHS 2026 team stats workbook, Week 0.

Sonny Dykes and the fewest points in 31 games

Sonny Dykes flew a brand-new offense to Dublin and came home with the fewest points TCU has scored since 2023.

The Horned Frogs lost 15-10 to a North Carolina team that went 4-8 last season. Jaden Craig, the Harvard transfer installed to replace Josh Hoover under new coordinator Gordon Sammis, threw for 175 yards. That is TCU’s lowest passing total since the January 2023 championship game against Georgia. The offense posted a 27% success rate, the worst mark of a Dykes tenure that started in 2022. The Frogs also took 11 penalties for 90 yards and jumped offside on fourth-and-1 to end it.

The Aer Lingus Classic has developed a habit worth knowing about:

  • 2022. Nebraska lost it to Northwestern and fired Scott Frost 12 days later.
  • 2023. Navy lost it and finished 5-7.
  • 2024. Florida State lost it and collapsed to 2-10.
  • 2025. Kansas State lost it, started 1-3, and Chris Klieman retired before the bowl.

That is 4 straight losers and 4 bad autumns. Dykes gets to find out whether that’s a pattern or a coincidence, and he gets to find out in public.

Chris Creighton and the 69 rushing yards

Chris Creighton got Eastern Michigan the 500th win in program history and couldn’t run the ball 3 yards at a time to do it.

The Eagles beat Sacramento State 28-17 and carried 30 times for 69 yards, an average of 2.3. Dontae McMillan ran for 1,014 yards last season at 5.7 yards per carry. Noah Kim carried the whole night instead, 27-of-38 for 279 yards with 2 touchdowns and a third on the ground.

The defense looks like it surrendered 17 points. It surrendered 11. Sacramento State blocked a punt and scored 6 on a defensive return, so the honest number for Creighton’s defense is better than the box score reads.

That’s the good news, and it’s thinner than it sounds. A 4-8 team that fixed nothing about how it moves the ball on the ground beat a program playing the first FBS game in its history, and needed a late interception to do it.

The 3 winners and what their wins were worth

Saturday produced 3 wins that will read differently in November.

  • Bill Belichick, North Carolina. In year 2, he got the first halftime lead over a major-conference opponent of his college tenure, and his offense had almost nothing to do with it. The Tar Heels scored 15 points with 0 passing touchdowns and 90 rushing yards on 29 carries while losing 2 fumbles, and the defense held TCU to 281 yards. He won a game his defense won for him, and after 4-8 he’ll take it.
  • Tavita Pritchard, Stanford. In his first game as a head coach, he watched a 23-7 lead turn into a tie, then scored with 1:41 left and added a scoop-and-score 29 seconds after that to beat Hawaii 37-27. By CBS Sports’ count, Stanford had been the worst closer in the sport over 5 years, so the debut counts as an exorcism.
  • Tony Elliott, Virginia. He replaced an 11-win quarterback and upgraded. Pribula’s 110 rushing yards were the most by a Virginia quarterback since 2020, and Elliott, sitting on a seat that was warm 2 seasons ago and an extension that runs through 2030, had the cleanest Saturday of anybody in week 0.

The 2 debuts and the 7.0 yards per play

Saturday added 2 programs to the FBS and gave Memphis the loudest argument of the weekend.

North Dakota State opened its FBS life by beating Jacksonville State 33-7 in the Fargodome, and the Bison are 10-5 against FBS opponents since moving to Division I in 2004. Sacramento State lost by 11 in its first game at this level under first-year head coach Alonzo Carter, and blocked a punt and scored on defense. Memphis went to Las Vegas and beat Dan Mullen’s UNLV 27-21, averaging 7.0 yards per play, the best figure anybody posted all weekend, and sacked Jackson Arnold 6 times after halftime.

Mullen won 10 games in his first season in Las Vegas and was voted the national first-year coach of the year for it. He opened his second by losing at home. Nobody is putting him on a hot seat over a single Saturday, and everybody in that building noticed.

The rule for the next 3 months

Watch the crowd before checking the score.

Florida State won by 17, and its own crowd booed in the second quarter of a $1.4 million tune-up. NC State lost by 26, and its own coach volunteered the blame before a reporter could ask him for it. Norvell has a fan base that has quit on the games. Doeren has a fan base that hasn’t quit on him yet. The distance between those 2 conditions is the entire difference between a bad Saturday and a hot seat, and a win-loss column will never show it to you.

The other 7 coaches on our top 10 Coaches Hot Seat Rankings board play their first game next weekend.

Stay tuned.

That’s a Wrap

Eight games, and neither coach who needed a clean Saturday got one.

  • Mike Norvell won by 17 and got hotter. Florida State paid New Mexico State $1.4 million to come to Doak Campbell, laid 31.5, won by 17, and heard boos in the second quarter. The road losing streak is untouched at 11 games and 1,008 days, because this one was at home.
  • Dave Doeren went from 14 to 10 on the Coaches Hot Seat board. NC State managed 168 total yards on 3.3 a play in a 34-8 loss; Barry Odom came off the top 10 to make room, and the fan base started the argument before we published a number.

The suits had a better week than the coaches

The SEC’s other 15 schools called a meeting, made sure LSU wasn’t invited, and spent it hunting through 48 pages of bylaws for a lawful way to throw a member out of the conference.

They haven’t found one. They’re still reading.

In another room, a committee voted to erase Week 0 and take 5 days off the January portal window, then stood up and called the whole thing clarity.

And the federal rulebook this sport has chased for 7 years slipped again, for a reason that has nothing to do with football and everything to do with men who’d rather be home campaigning.

Not one of those 3 stories has a coach in it. Not one of them has anybody who ever threw a block.

They’re all in the newsletter.

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Next week: The Diagnosis, Dave Doeren

Doeren is the winningest coach in NC State history and the second-longest-tenured coach in the ACC behind Dabo Swinney, yet in 13 seasons he has never won 10 games. That isn’t a slump, and it isn’t bad luck. It’s the product. NC State built a program that can’t fall far enough to fire him and can’t climb high enough to matter, and it pays him almost $6 million a year to hold it right there.

The number to carry in is 0. Across 13 seasons: 95 wins, more than any coach the school has ever had, 4 nine-win years, and 0 seasons of 10.

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Week 0 – 2026 Coaches Hot Seat Rankings

Mark Haines on August 25, 2026

Wisconsin Fans Stopped Chanting and Canceled 7,193 Season Tickets. That Is How You Measure a Hot Seat in 2026

Here is who has the least room to fail in 2026, and why it is not the order our own numbers produce.

Every coach in the top 4 was publicly saved by his own school last fall. A president or an athletic director issued a written statement explaining why the man was staying at Florida State, Wisconsin, Baylor, and Maryland. That detail matters to you for one reason: it means the school already ran the buyout, already weighed the alternative, and already told you in public which way it leans.

Nobody publishes that statement about a winning coach.

A vote of confidence is a receipt with a date. The top 10 sits below, with the number that puts each man there.

Lance Leipold at 5 is the exception nobody had to defend, which is exactly why he ranks behind 4 men who did.

The Board

1. Mike Norvell, Florida State: 7 wins in 2 seasons and 53 million reasons he is still employed

Florida State did something almost no athletic department has the nerve to do.

It publicly graded its own football program in writing and gave it an F. The president, the athletic director, and the board chair put out a statement agreeing the operation needed structural changes. Then they kept the man operating it. A school announced the building was on fire, named no firefighters, and renewed the lease.

Here is what the fire looks like in numbers. 7 wins across 2 seasons, which arrived directly after a 13-1 year, and 38-34 for the whole tenure. No road win since November of 2023. In 2025, the Seminoles outscored their schedule by 11 points a game and finished 5-7, and if that sounds impossible, it is because the entire margin came from beating an FCS team 77-3 and a MAC team 66-10.

Remove those 2 games and the 11 points become two-tenths of a point. Remove the tune-ups from anybody’s season, and you get the truth about them.

The buyout is the reason he is still employed and the reason this seat is the hottest in America. Walking away after 2025 will cost about $53 million. After this season, it drops to roughly 46. The price of the decision falls at the exact moment the evidence for making it arrives, and Florida State has already told you in writing which way it grades him.

He opens Saturday against New Mexico State. The hottest seat in the country gets a bye week disguised as a game.

2. Luke Fickell, Wisconsin: 7,193 fans quit buying tickets

In September, with Camp Randall chanting for his firing during the fourth quarter, Luke Fickell was asked what he wanted to say to the people paying to watch this.

He said they had to be just like the team.

The fans took him up on it.

Wisconsin sold 47,587 season tickets for 2026, down from 54,780. That is 7,193 people who decided their best effort was staying home, a 13.1 percent drop, and the athletic department believed it enough to write ticket revenue down 11.6 percent in the budget. A chant is free. A season ticket is not. When a fan base stops yelling and starts subtracting, the message has been upgraded.

Then the man holding the umbrella left. Chris McIntosh hired Fickell, defended him through 2 losing seasons, published the letter, and took a job at the Big Ten office. Shawn Eichorst walked into a building holding a coach he did not hire and a reputation that survives either outcome.

At media days in July, Fickell said the last 2 years had not been up to the standard and that he was not shying away from it. Nobody asked him to shy away from it. 12.8 points a game, 135th out of 136 teams, is not the kind of thing that hides.

This year the schedule finally cooperates. No Ohio State. No Oregon. No Michigan. No Indiana. The easiest Big Ten draw of his tenure arrives in the same season as a $21.3 million buyout and a new boss, and the sport rarely removes every excuse at once like that.

3. Dave Aranda, Baylor: 59 players left in one offseason

Dave Aranda spent his July at Big 12 media days explaining the concept of finishing.

There is a start, he said, and a middle, and a finish, and Baylor had been working on the finish all offseason. He said the Bears had to close the deal. It is a fine coaching thought, and it lands strangely when you check what happened the last time this program reached December.

59 players closed a deal. All of them with other schools.

That’s not a roster refresh, and this is where the numbers everybody else uses fall apart. Message-board sentiment reads Baylor as the calmest fan base in this group, well behind the noise at Wisconsin and Maryland. Quiet is not the same as content. Look at what left the building rather than what got posted.

  • The class they saved him for left too. 4-star defensive lineman Jamarion Carlton went to Texas, and 4-star cornerback Jamarion Vincent went to Michigan. The recruiting haul Baylor cited as its reason to keep Aranda is suiting up elsewhere this fall.
  • The man who would have made the call was already gone. Athletic director Mack Rhoades resigned in November, and university president Linda Livingstone announced that Aranda was returning, with the team sitting at 5-5.
  • The record has not moved in 4 years. Aranda is 36-37 at Baylor and 22-28 since the 2021 conference title, with 1 winning season in that stretch and a 1-5 mark against TCU.
  • He handed off the defense. Aranda gave the unit to Joe Klanderman and moved into a front-office role. A defensive coordinator answered the hot seat by doing less defensive coordinating.

An anonymous Big 12 coach told Athlon this summer that Aranda knows football and is a little weird. Peers don’t say that about coaches who won 10 games. New athletic director Doug McNamee now runs a program he didn’t build for a coach he didn’t pick, and there is no more precarious arrangement in the sport.

4. Michael Locksley, Maryland: 71 percent of the roster back and 8 straight losses to explain

Michael Locksley has the angriest fan base on this board, and only the fourth spot, and the reason is that Maryland just handed him everything he has been asking for.

71 percent of production returns, second most in the country behind Notre Dame. 14 projected starters are back. Malik Washington returns at quarterback after throwing for 2,963 yards as a true freshman. Every alibi from last season, the youth and the churn and the roster that had never played a down together, reported to camp this month with a year of experience and nowhere left to point.

The 2025 season is a strange document. Maryland led in 11 of its 12 games. Maryland then lost the last 8 in a row. A team that cannot hold a lead 8 consecutive times has stopped being unlucky and started being coached that way.

Athletic director Jim Smith wrote his letter, backed an eighth season, and promised more money for the roster. The buyout is 13 million dollars, which in this crowd is a rounding error. Public support plus a cheap exit is the definition of a short rope, and 37-49 with no winning conference record in 8 attempts is how the rope got short.

5. Lance Leipold, Kansas: back-to-back 5-7 seasons after the rebuild that made him

Nothing happened at Kansas last fall, which is precisely why Lance Leipold is on this list.

No statement. No letter. No president stepping to a microphone to explain the football coach. Sentiment in Lawrence still runs positive, the only place in this group where that is true, because Leipold took a program that won 21 games in 11 years and got it to 9 wins and consecutive bowls without padding the schedule to do it. That buys a man something, and it does not buy him forever.

Then 5-7. Then 5-7 again. He is 27-35 at Kansas, and the arrow has pointed the same direction for 2 straight seasons.

Back-to-back losing years after the rebuild that made your name is where pressure begins. Fifth on this board is the polite way of saying that the grace period now has an expiration date.

Where our numbers and our judgment disagree

The workbook that runs this board would order the top 5 differently, and hiding that would make the entire exercise a fraud.

On the numbers alone, it reads Locksley first at 93.2, Norvell second at 84.5, Leipold third at 84.2, Fickell fourth at 77.9, Aranda sixth at 76.1. The published board moves Norvell up 1, Fickell up 2, Aranda up 3, Locksley down 3, Leipold down 2.

Every one of those moves comes from the same blind spot. The model counts what a fan base says and cannot count what an institution does, and institutions are the better tell. Maryland is loud, cheap to unwind, and just committed more money to the coach. Baylor is silent and just watched 59 players walk. Loud and cheap wins a column in sentiment and loses a season.

Check the call in November. That is what the Prior column is for.

What to watch Saturday

Week Zero is 1 game, and anybody selling it as a referendum is selling something.

It does hand you one thing. Norvell hosts a New Mexico State program with 7 wins in 2 seasons, and there is no version of a competitive fourth quarter in Tallahassee that reads as progress. Everybody else waits. The board barely moves next week and then moves hard in October, when the window feeding these rankings finally fills with 2026 football.

Until then, this is the baseline, and baselines are only useful if someone writes them down before the season rather than after.

The bottom line

None of these 5 men is finished, and this has never been a list of who loses a job.

It is a list of who has the least room left. Four of them work for schools that already priced the alternative, chose the cheaper year, and then dressed the arithmetic up as faith. Faith had nothing to do with it. Receipts are reconciled, and December is when the accounting is done. When a university publishes a letter about its football coach, save it. Check the date in December.

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North Carolina Needs $29 Million To Fire Bill Belichick. He Needs $1 Million To Walk Away From Them.

Mark Haines on August 4, 2026

John Preyer, you sent the offer sheet.

You were running the North Carolina Board of Trustees in December 2024 when ESPN says you put a contract in front of Bill Belichick’s agent without bothering to ask Bubba Cunningham, the athletic director whose entire job that was. Then you called an emergency meeting, closed the doors, and handed a 72-year-old man 5 years and $50 million. The first 3 guaranteed.

You did remember to run the cost analysis, though. On the professors.

A lawsuit says your board studied the 30-year cost of granting a faculty member tenure and never ran a single number on the football contract. You wanted to know what a tenured chemist would run you in 2054. You did not want to know what Bill Belichick would run you in 2027.

It runs $29 million. You found out in 11 months.

He can leave for $1 million

Here is the door you built for him, and it does not lock.

Belichick can end this himself for $1 million, payable within 180 days. That number dropped from $10 million in June of 2025, before he had coached one college snap. You owe him $29 million to make him go. He owes you a rounding error to walk. Thirty to one, and the cheap door is his.

A guarantee protects a coach from losing football games. Nobody in Chapel Hill is losing football games anymore. They are answering questions from lawyers.

31 NFL teams read the same file you did

Eight head coaching jobs came open in the NFL in 2024, and he got 1 serious interview.

Atlanta talked to him twice and hired Raheem Morris. Everybody else passed without picking up the phone. They were not confused about whether he could coach. They said out loud, on the record, that he would rebuild the command structure around himself, and The Athletic reported that clubs which had just hired somebody else felt relief about it.

You gave him personnel authority in writing anyway, and let him hire his own general manager.

He hired Michael Lombardi, who had not worked in college football since 1984, when he was recruiting coordinator at UNLV. Lombardi announced that North Carolina was the NFL’s 33rd team. The 33rd team went 4-8, beat nobody with a winning record, lost to all 3 in-state rivals and sent 0 players to the draft off a 41-man roster overhaul.

The season, with the padding removed

They beat Charlotte, an FCS team from Richmond, a 3-9 Syracuse, and a 4-8 Stanford.

Take Charlotte and Richmond out, and what is left is 2-8 against Power 4 opposition at minus 11.5 points a game. Adjust for schedule strength, and the year grades 100th of 136 nationally, the second-worst Carolina season since 2000, and 10.53 points below the 6-year average of the coach he replaced. Two computer systems looked at the schedule and called it easier than average.

Mack Brown got let go for going 6-7. This was worse by every measure anyone keeps.

Then the 33rd team called HR

Lombardi went on paid administrative leave on July 27, 3 days before the first practice.

The university says its Office of University Counsel is investigating. The Athletic says the leave came out of a human resources complaint and that the College Sports Commission has come around asking about the program. Somebody asked Belichick about that Thursday morning and got this: “Yeah, next question. We can’t talk about it.”

The greatest defensive mind in football history just called a coverage on his own general manager.

The handbook caps this kind of leave at 30 days, which means the whole thing resolves before the opener against TCU in Dublin on August 29. Twenty-one days before that game, Belichick goes into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton.

Enjoy Ohio, coach. The lawyers will still be here when you get back.

Read the full story

The newsletter version has the coronation, the girlfriend, the donor letter, what Bobby Petrino’s last 2 stops did to the head coaches who hired him, and The Market Read on the win total.

[LINK: Full Story Here]

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Dabo Swinney Is the Safest 7-6 Coach in America

Mark Haines on July 14, 2026

Dabo Swinney is not getting fired, and that is the whole problem. In 2025, he coached the most talented roster of his eighteen years at Clemson to a 7-6 record and the lowest team rating of his tenure. A buyout of over fifty million dollars means nothing on the field can force him to change. This is what a hot seat looks like when the pressure is real and the consequences are missing.

Key takeaways

  • Clemson sent nine players to the 2026 NFL Draft and still finished 7-6, its worst full season under Swinney since 2010.
  • The 2025 team graded out at a 6.42 SRS, the lowest opponent-adjusted rating of Swinney’s eighteen years.
  • Over the last five years, against Kirby Smart and Ryan Day, Clemson trails on 20 of 22 measured stats, and does it on a softer schedule.
  • Swinney’s buyout sits near fifty-seven million dollars in 2026, which leaves real pressure without real risk.
  • The CHS read is a structural decline, not a one-season blip.

Nine draft picks, seven wins

The 2025 Tigers were the most talented team Swinney has ever failed with. Clemson put nine players into the 2026 NFL Draft, tying the most of his career, with five gone in the first three rounds. The only other Swinney team to hit nine picks played for the national title. This one watched the Playoff from home for the fourth time in five years.

Now put the talent next to the rating. By SRS, the opponent-adjusted number that separates beating Georgia from beating Furman, Clemson graded out at 6.42 in 2025. That is the lowest mark of his eighteen years, under the 6-7 team from 2010 and under the group he inherited in 2008. The most NFL talent of his career produced the worst football of his career, and only one of those facts is about the players.

Clemson’s opponent-adjusted rating by season under Dabo Swinney, 2008 to 2025, fell to a tenure low of 6.42.

The chart is the tell. The peak was the 15-0 team in 2018, and every season since has stepped downhill into the 2025 floor.

The peer test that Clemson keeps losing

Swinney likes to talk about money and how the bluebloods print theirs. Kirby Smart and Ryan Day took the same brand and the same five-star pipeline and answered differently, winning national titles while Clemson slid.

Over the last five years, 2021 through 2025, Clemson has trailed the Smart and Day average in 20 of 22 measured stats. It loses in winning percentage, SRS, scoring, and points allowed. It owns zero final top-ten finishes in that window, while each of the other two has five. The two rows it wins are takeaways and turnover margin, the numbers that look nice and keep nobody employed.

Peer matrix: Swinney’s Clemson versus Smart’s Georgia and Day’s Ohio State, 2021 to 2025, shaded on Clemson’s column.

Read the strength-of-schedule row, because it turns a gap into an indictment. Clemson played the softest schedule of the three yet still scored fewer points and allowed more points. An easy slate is supposed to flatter your numbers, and Clemson’s came out worse anyway.

Death Valley stopped being a fortress

The strangest part of the 7-6 is where the losses happened. Clemson went 4-1 on the road in 2025 and 3-4 at home, losing every game but the bowl inside a stadium where it had gone 73-9 in the Playoff era. LSU, Syracuse, SMU, and Duke all walked into Death Valley and walked out with a win.

Clemson’s 2025 results by final margin, showing every loss came at home or on neutral turf.

The close games got away, too. Clemson went 1-3 in one-score games, losing three of them by a combined eleven points. Good teams win the games this team lost, and that is a coaching grade, not a talent one.

The cure Clemson bought is a memory

Swinney saw the offense break and reached backward for the fix. He fired offensive coordinator Garrett Riley, the air-raid hire he brought from TCU, after a 2025 unit that finished 116th on third down and 109th in rushing. His replacement is Chad Morris, who ran the Clemson offense from 2011 to 2014 and has not called plays for a good one in nearly a decade.

The roster underneath is thin where it matters. Cade Klubnik is gone to the NFL, and the job goes to redshirt junior Christopher Vizzina or a freshman. Swinney broke his own rule by signing a program-record 10 transfers this cycle and still refused to spend one on a quarterback. Nine draft picks left the building, and Clemson enters 2026 in the bottom third of the country in returning offensive production.

The Market Read

The number that frames the season is 7.5, the win total the books hung on Clemson, with the over juiced to -135. That is the schedule talking. The market can see the soft home dates and is pricing a team that clears the tune-ups and stalls against the top of the league. Clemson sits around +8000 to win the national title and is nowhere near the ACC conversation that now belongs to Miami.

The edge is the live-dog window in the games that matter, at LSU and home against Miami, where the public still hears the word Clemson and pays for the logo. Fade the brand until a Swinney offense wins a game it is supposed to lose. Re-verify these numbers before acting on them, since win totals and futures move.

The verdict

This is a Structural Trend, not a blip. Five straight declining years by the opponent-adjusted number, on a softer schedule, against two peers who took the same materials and lapped him. The fair counter is that the one-score luck regresses and the roster is loaded, and both can be true while the verdict holds, because every flattering number describes something that happened to Swinney rather than something he did.

On the CHS thermometer, which measures pressure to win now and never predicts a firing, the reading is up and climbing. The buyout guarantees Swinney time, and time has never once forced a comfortable man to change.

Dabo Swinney hot seat FAQ

Is Dabo Swinney on the hot seat?

Yes, in the way that matters to Clemson. The 2025 team posted the worst rating of his tenure, extending a five-year slide. The CHS thermometer measures pressure to win now, and that pressure is rising, even while his job stays safe.

Is Dabo Swinney getting fired?

There is no sign of it, and the math rules it out. Swinney is signed through 2031, and his buyout is near $57 million in 2026. CHS does not predict firings. We measure pressure, and the point of this profile is that the pressure and the consequence have come apart.

What is Dabo Swinney’s buyout?

Roughly $57 million in 2026, down from about $60 million a year earlier, with a clause that rises by half again if he leaves for his alma mater, Alabama. Verify the current figure before publishing, since buyouts decline over time.

Who is Clemson’s offensive coordinator in 2026?

Chad Morris, in his second stint. He ran the Clemson offense from 2011 to 2014 and returns to replace Garrett Riley, who was fired after three seasons.

Want the full breakdown, with the complete peer matrix and every number behind the verdict? Read the full Diagnosis and subscribe to Coaches Hot Seat for the weekly Hot Seat Index.

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Florida State Graded Its Own Coach as Failing, in Writing, and Kept Him

Mark Haines on June 30, 2026

Mike Norvell would like to apologize again, and he has had the practice.

After Florida ran through his team 40-21 in November, the fourth losing season in his six years, he stepped to the podium and said he had not coached well enough and his team had not played well enough. He called it infuriating. A year earlier, off a 2-10 season, he promised an immediate, fast fix and took full responsibility.

The fix showed up at 5-7.

Florida State hired a genius and got half of one

Norvell arrived with the reputation he built piling up points at Memphis, and it was half right.

He can draw up a Saturday. It is the other six days, the leading and the steadying of a team when the building shakes, that he cannot do. That is how a man who knows the X’s and O’s cold has not won a road game since November of 2023.

The reputation got him the job, and the other six days are the job he skips.

The plus-eleven is a magic trick

Here is the number his defenders want you to hold: plus eleven.

Florida State outscored its 2025 schedule by eleven points a game and finished 5-7, and one of those numbers is lying to you. Watch where the eleven goes:

  • The whole margin is two games. Strip a 77-3 win over an FCS team and a 66-10 win over a MAC team, and plus-eleven falls to plus-0.2 against everyone else.
  • Every close game was a loss. Florida State went 0-4 in one-score games.
  • The road stayed winless. Zero for five away from home, a skid that now runs to ten straight games away from Doak.

Beat the helpless, lose every coin flip, and the spreadsheet stops being a defense and turns into the indictment.

The roster was not the problem

The 2025 team did not quit, which is the whole case against its coach.

A Gus Malzahn offense led the ACC in total and rushing yards and hung 30-plus on four league teams. The talent came back and the scheme worked, and the team still could not win a game in doubt in the fourth quarter or anywhere outside its own zip code. When a roster has the talent and the scheme and still folds the moment a game tightens or the bus crosses a state line, the missing piece was never the talent.

It is the part of the job a coordinator never had to do.

So Norvell fixed the wrong thing

He took back the play-calling, the one job that was working.

“I’ve been really good at calling plays throughout my coaching career,” he said, and you can wait a long time for the part about the fourth quarter or the road. It never comes. The team’s flaw was finishing, and his answer was to hand himself the one task the season never flagged.

That is a coordinator treating the head-coach job like a position he can coach his way out of.

Why the checkbook keeps him

None of this got him fired, and the reason has eight figures and a comma.

Firing Norvell after 2025 cost about 53 million, the bill from the extension Florida State handed him in 2024 when Alabama came calling for a Saban replacement. So President Richard McCullough, athletic director Michael Alford, and board chair Peter Collins kept him and put it in writing that the three of them agreed “changes are needed for our program to improve.” Read that for what it is: a school grading its own coach as failing, in a press release, and admitting in the same breath that it cannot afford to act on the grade.

The seat never cooled, because the buyout runs hotter than it does.

The verdict

The fair counter is real, and it still loses.

The offense travels, and one-score records are close to a coin flip, so the record could climb back without Norvell coaching a down better. Both can be true, and the call holds. On the thermometer, this is Structural, not a blip, because until Florida State wins a game it is supposed to lose, the flattering numbers stay hollow, and the genius label is marketing for a man doing half the job. The buyout even falls from about 53 million to roughly 46 million after this season, which drops the price of moving on at the exact moment the verdict comes due.

No seat in the country runs hotter than the one a program has already graded and chosen, for now, to keep.

The full Diagnosis is for subscribers

You are reading the abbreviated version of our Diagnosis: Norvell breakdown.

The complete breakdown puts Norvell, row by row, against Jimbo Fisher and Mario Cristobal in the comparison matrix, then runs the 2026 schedule through the stress test designed to expose the road and close games. It also carries The Market Read on where the win total and the futures still misprice a team that cannot finish.

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Tavita Pritchard Helped Jayden Daniels Win Rookie Of The Year. Now He Has To Rebuild A Stanford Program That Went 6–18 Under Troy Taylor. That’s A Very Different Job.

Mark Haines on February 12, 2026

Stanford just made the most Stanford hire in modern college football.

Tavita Pritchard is a Cardinal lifer:

  • Former Stanford QB
  • Long-time assistant
  • Offensive coordinator under David Shaw
  • Most recently the quarterbacks coach in Washington who helped Jayden Daniels win Offensive Rookie of the Year and reach the NFC Championship Game

Everyone in Palo Alto loves this hire. Andrew Luck hand-picked him. The institution exhaled. The press conference was warm and fuzzy.

Here’s the problem.

Fit doesn’t win football games. And Stanford just went 6–18 under Troy Taylor and 4–7 under Frank Reich. Pritchard isn’t walking into a program that needs a hug. He’s walking into a rebuild.

So the real question isn’t whether Pritchard belongs at Stanford. He obviously does.

The question is whether belonging there is enough to fix what’s broken.

Stanford Didn’t Hire A Coach. They Hired A Culture Reset.

This is a culture-and-alignment play, not a splash hire.

Troy Taylor’s exit was ugly. Back-to-back 3–9 seasons. Workplace culture issues that triggered internal investigations. Then a one-year Frank Reich band-aid that went 4–7. By the time Stanford started this search, the program wasn’t just losing football games. It was losing trust.

Luck’s GM model is built around one idea: long-term alignment with Stanford’s identity. That means the head coach needs to understand:

  • How admissions actually works
  • What the academic calendar does to your recruiting calendar
  • The kind of kid Stanford can and can’t get
  • How far the portal and NIL ceiling really stretches in Palo Alto

Pritchard checks every one of those boxes. A “safe outsider” was never going to be safer politically than a plugged-in alum Luck can personally vouch for.

If your lens is “did they hire someone who can navigate Stanford’s politics, academics, and GM structure,” this is an A+ answer.

His QB Development Resume Is The Strongest Card In His Hand

Pritchard’s track record with quarterbacks is legitimately deep.

He spent years in Stanford’s QB room, then went to Washington for three seasons and worked alongside Kliff Kingsbury to co-build a top-5 offense around Jayden Daniels. Kingsbury handled the call sheet and macro design. Pritchard ran the QB room, shaped what actually made it into the game plan based on what his guys saw on film, and built what Kingsbury called the “tightest and most unified” quarterback room he’d ever seen.

That collaboration powered an NFC Championship Game run.

Here’s why that matters for Stanford specifically. The kind of high-GPA four-star quarterback Stanford targets isn’t choosing between Stanford and Alabama. He’s choosing between Stanford and Northwestern, or Stanford and Duke. When the head coach can say “I just developed an Offensive Rookie of the Year and reached the NFC title game,” that pitch lands differently than another coordinator’s promises.

The identity he’s selling is coherent too:

  • Pro-style, QB-centric offense
  • Physical run game
  • Modernized version of the Harbaugh/Shaw template he grew up in

In an ACC that doesn’t defend power football particularly well outside the top tier, that identity has a lane.

The upside case is straightforward. QB recruiting ticks up, the offense stabilizes around a clear identity, and Stanford gets back to 7–9-win competency while leveraging the expanded CFP as a ceiling play once every few years.

The Resume Has A Hole In It

Let me be clear about the risk here.

Tavita Pritchard has never been a head coach at any level. His only major OC tenure was the back half of the David Shaw era, which ended with the offense trending down and the program sliding into irrelevance. That’s not all on him. But if you’re running a traditional coaching evaluation, the “has run his own program successfully” box is empty.

Here’s what makes the risk compound:

  • He’s inheriting a roster that went 6–18 under Taylor and 4–7 under Reich. This is a full rebuild in a new conference with uncertain resources.
  • The GM-driven structure cuts both ways. Luck can solve some problems, but Pritchard operates inside a corporate hierarchy most first-time HCs never face. If the Luck–Pritchard–AD alignment wobbles, the head coach’s leverage is limited.
  • Early staff reports emphasize Stanford familiarity and NFL seasoning more than recruiting killers. That’s consistent with Luck’s model but increases the risk that the staff can’t recruit above the job’s resource baseline.
  • Stanford’s NIL and credit-transfer constraints are real. The optimistic read is selective portal hits at key positions. The pessimistic read is the talent ceiling is capped no matter who’s coaching.

If you’re grading strictly by traditional hiring heuristics — HC track record, recent college success, recruiting proof of concept — this comes out as a B–/C+ swing, not a slam dunk.

Quinn, Kingsbury, and Mariota All Say The Same Thing

The endorsements from Washington aren’t the usual farewell pleasantries.

Dan Quinn said Pritchard will be “a fantastic head coach” and that he’d be “especially effective at Stanford.” That’s specific. Most coaches leaving for a new job get a generic send-off. Quinn went out of his way to connect Pritchard’s strengths to the specific demands of this particular job.

Kliff Kingsbury went further. “If I had a son playing college football, I’d want him to play for Tavita Pritchard.” That’s not something you say about a colleague you liked. That’s something you say about someone you trust with development.

Marcus Mariota credited Pritchard directly for playing the best football of his career, calling his weekly process and preparation “elite.”

Here’s why this matters for the evaluation. Quinn, Kingsbury, and Mariota all emphasize the same traits:

  • Smart and collaborative
  • Players gravitate to him
  • Competitive without being ego-driven
  • Builds tight, unified rooms

That profile maps almost perfectly onto what Stanford’s GM model is designed to find. Luck wanted a culture carrier, a servant-leader type, someone who thrives inside collaboration rather than demanding full autonomy.

Pritchard is exactly that coach.

How He Grades Out Across The CHS Five Pillars

Here’s how he grades out across our standard evaluation framework.

The Job: B

Elite brand, ACC access, Bay Area talent base. But bruised roster, uncertain NIL muscle, and a GM structure that reduces traditional HC autonomy. B+ ceiling, C+ current condition.

Track Record: C+

Strong QB development resume. Zero evidence as a turnaround architect or program CEO. His only college OC sample is “stagnant offense on a fading roster.”

Recruiting / Roster: B–

The NFL QB pitch gives him a real edge with Stanford’s target recruit. Structural talent limits everywhere else. He’s not walking into a ready-made top-25 two-deep.

Scheme / Staff: B–

Clear identity with a lane in the ACC. Some evidence it can stagnate if he replays 2018–22 instead of evolving. Staff is familiarity-heavy, not recruiting-heavy.

Fit / Runway: A

Stanford lifer. Luck-endorsed. Post-Taylor stability hire. The GM model probably guarantees him more patience than Taylor got, especially if culture and recruiting effort grade out well before the win curve spikes.

CHS Blended Grade: B / B–

An elite-fit, QB-centric swing with more institutional sense than raw resume juice, and a wider-than-normal performance band.

The Ceiling Is Harbaugh-Lite. The Floor Is Comfortable Mediocrity.

Here’s where the rubber meets the road.

On a five-year horizon, the model projects something like this:

  • Median outcome: Solid bowl-caliber Stanford. 6–8 wins by Year 3, culture rebuilt, QB recruiting stabilized.
  • Upside tail: Harbaugh-lite revival. The NFL QB pipeline, Stanford’s brand, and ACC positioning push the program back into the top-25 conversation and occasional CFP contention.
  • Downside tail: A gentle, politically protected 5–7 slog. The roster never catches up, the NIL gap proves structural, and Stanford settles into comfortable ACC mediocrity without anyone getting fired over it.

The Luck/GM structure gives Pritchard a longer leash than Taylor got. The institution wants this to work, and they’ve built the infrastructure around that bet.

But by Year 3, if wins aren’t trending toward 7+, the “perfect fit” narrative won’t save him.

It’ll just make the eventual conversation more awkward.

The PR Says Stanford Found Its Guy. The Data Says Something Different.

The PR around this hire will say Stanford found its guy.

The data says Stanford found a high-upside bet that makes more institutional sense than on-field sense. At least for now. Pritchard is an elite culture hire with a real identity and legitimate QB development upside. But the gap between what Stanford needs him to be — a program rebuilder and CEO — and what he’s proven he can do — coach quarterbacks brilliantly inside someone else’s structure — is exactly where the risk lives.

Time will tell which version of this story gets written.

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Cal Hired a First-Time Head Coach With Zero HC Experience, an Elite Recruiting Resume, and a Trail of Controversy. Here’s Why It Might Work.

Mark Haines on February 6, 2026

Cal just made the most important football hire in the program’s modern history.

On December 4, 2025, the Bears named Oregon defensive coordinator Tosh Lupoi as their 35th head football coach. Five-year deal. First-time head coach. A former Cal defensive lineman returning to an alma mater that hasn’t finished a season ranked in the AP poll since 2006.

The hire came less than two weeks after Justin Wilcox was fired following a sloppy 31–10 Big Game loss to Stanford. A loss that punctuated nine seasons of well-meaning mediocrity. Wilcox went 48–55 overall. 26–47 in conference. Zero winning conference records. Ever.

GM Ron Rivera (hired in March 2025 to overhaul the program) looked at that ceiling and decided it was no longer acceptable.

So: is Lupoi the right guy to blow through it?

The Short Answer

This is a high-upside, moderate-risk hire that makes a lot of sense for where Cal is right now.

Lupoi checks nearly every box a program in Cal’s position desperately needs:

  • Elite recruiting ability: Arguably the best recruiter on the West Coast
  • Deep institutional connection: Cal alum, Bay Area native, Tedford coaching tree
  • Championship-level résumé: Saban at Alabama, Lanning at Oregon
  • Immediate results: 32-man portal class, star QB retained, NFL alumni rallying

He also comes with legitimate concerns. No head coaching experience at any level. Some character questions from his past. And a mixed track record the one time he ran a defense solo at Alabama.

Let’s break it all down.

What Makes This Hire Promising

Recruiting Is the Calling Card

This is where Lupoi separates from every other candidate Cal could have hired.

He was named Rivals.com National Recruiter of the Year in 2010 while at Cal. He’s landed elite talent everywhere he’s been. And his recruiting footprint includes names that span programs, conferences, and decades:

  • At Cal: Keenan Allen, Cameron Jordan, Tyson Alualu (two first-round NFL Draft picks)
  • At Washington: Shaq Thompson (first-round pick)
  • At Alabama: Najee Harris, Jaylen Waddle, Trevon Diggs
  • At Oregon: Helped assemble rosters that reached back-to-back College Football Playoffs

For a Cal program that struggled to attract top talent even in the Pac-12, and now must compete for resources in the ACC, this skill set is arguably more important than any X’s-and-O’s credential on the market.

And the early returns are already proving the point.

Lupoi assembled a 32-man transfer portal class that ranks 13th nationally according to 247Sports.

First among all ACC teams. He beat out programs like LSU, Indiana, Georgia, and Ole Miss for key commitments. Here are some of the headliners:

  • Adam Mohammed (RB, Washington): Top-5 portal running back nationally
  • Chase Hendricks (WR, Ohio): Top-100 transfer
  • Ian Strong (WR, Rutgers): Top-50 portal player per On3
  • Kingston Lopa (S, Oregon): 6’5, 210-pound former four-star who followed Lupoi from Eugene
  • Solomon Williams (DE, Texas A&M): Chose Cal over multiple SEC offers

Jared Goff has been publicly boosting Lupoi’s recruiting efforts. Cameron Jordan and DeSean Jackson visited Berkeley. Multiple Cal NFL alumni showed up at Memorial Stadium during Super Bowl week to show their support.

That kind of immediate portal activity from a first-time head coach is rare. That kind of alumni engagement is rarer.

A Résumé Built in Championship Environments

Lupoi didn’t learn his craft at mid-major programs hoping to get noticed.

He learned it from the best coaches in college football. And then proved he belonged in the NFL, too. Here’s the career arc:

  • Alabama (2014–2018): Five years under Nick Saban. Rose from analyst to co-DC to sole defensive coordinator. Part of two national championship teams (2015, 2017). Alabama led the nation in scoring defense in 2016 (13.0 ppg) and 2017 (11.9 ppg).
  • NFL (2019–2021): Three years coaching defensive line for the Cleveland Browns, Atlanta Falcons, and Jacksonville Jaguars.
  • Oregon (2022–2025): Four seasons as Dan Lanning’s defensive coordinator. Top-25 defense in each of his last three seasons. Top-3 nationally in total defense in 2025. Two-time Broyles Award finalist.

He even stayed to coach Oregon through their 2025 College Football Playoff run, flying back and forth between Eugene and Berkeley to recruit for Cal between playoff games.

That’s a coordinator who has proven he can build and sustain elite defenses at the highest levels of the sport.

The Cal Connection Matters More Than Usual

Most coaching hires come with a press conference quote about “love for the program.”

Lupoi doesn’t need the script. He played defensive line at Cal from 2000 to 2005. He attended De La Salle High School in the Bay Area, one of the most storied prep programs in the country. He began his coaching career in Berkeley under Jeff Tedford, becoming the youngest full-time coach in Cal football history at age 26.

He was part of Tedford’s 2004 team that went 10–2 with Aaron Rodgers at quarterback and reached No. 4 in the nation. That’s not a talking point. That’s a lived experience.

Rivera specifically emphasized that any coaching candidate had to genuinely want the Cal job. Multiple former high-profile players advocated publicly (and privately) for Lupoi to get the position. And within 48 hours of being named head coach, Lupoi flew to Hawaii to personally recruit star freshman QB Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele.

He secured his return for 2026.

Sagapolutele Changes the Equation

Retaining Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele was Lupoi’s first major test as head coach.

He passed it immediately. The freshman quarterback became the first player in FBS history to throw for at least 200 yards in each of his first 12 games. He finished with 3,117 yards, 17 touchdowns, and 9 interceptions. And Cal has a pipeline of sending quarterbacks to the NFL as first-round picks. Aaron Rodgers and Jared Goff both walked through Berkeley on their way to the pros.

Having a franchise quarterback already on the roster gives Lupoi a runway that most first-time head coaches never get.

Legitimate Concerns

Zero Head Coaching Experience

This is the elephant in the room.

Lupoi has never been a head coach at any level. Not in college. Not in high school. Not anywhere. He’ll need to manage an entire program. And the jump from coordinator to CEO is enormous:

  • Offense and special teams: not just defense
  • Staff hiring and retention: Building a full coaching operation from scratch
  • NIL strategy and budget allocation: The new lifeblood of college football
  • Media obligations, academic compliance, donor relations: The CEO stuff that coordinators never touch

The leap from coordinator to head coach is historically about a coin flip in terms of outcomes. For every Dan Lanning, there’s a Todd Grantham. For every Kirby Smart, there’s a Jeremy Pruitt.

The CEO skills required to run a program are fundamentally different from the position-specific expertise of a coordinator.

Character Questions From the Past

Lupoi’s career history includes a few red flags.

None of them are disqualifying on their own. But taken together, they’re worth acknowledging:

  • Fake injury scandal (2010): Suspended one game after admitting he told a player to fake an injury during a game against Oregon to slow Chip Kelly’s no-huddle offense. He was one of the few coaches who actually owned up to a tactic that was widespread at the time.
  • Controversial departure (2012): Left Cal for Washington and took several highly ranked recruits with him, including five-star defensive player Shaq Thompson. The move created lasting bad blood among some in the Cal community.
  • Recruiting investigation: Investigated for alleged recruiting violations at Washington. He was later acquitted, but the investigation contributed to a period of unemployment before Saban hired him at Alabama.

These incidents are a decade old. But Cal fans remember them.

The 2018 Alabama Question

Here’s the concern that’s harder to dismiss.

Lupoi’s overall time at Alabama was successful. Two national championships. Elite defensive units. A pipeline of first-round draft picks under his position coaching. But the one year he ran the defense solo as the full defensive coordinator (2018) was widely seen as a step back from the elite standards Saban’s program demands.

He moved to the NFL the following year rather than staying on staff. Some reporting suggests he was pushed out.

The counter-argument is Oregon.

His four-year run as Lanning’s DC produced consistently elite defenses and two Broyles Award finalist nominations. Top-3 nationally in total defense in his final season. Top-25 units in each of his last three years. The question is whether his best work requires an elite head coach above him, or whether the Oregon tenure proves he’s matured past the 2018 stumble.

Four years of sustained excellence is a strong rebuttal. But it doesn’t completely erase the question.

Early Program-Building Signals

What Lupoi has done in his first two months tells us a lot about his approach.

  • Young, aggressive coaching staff. OC Jordan Somerville (29) came from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where he helped develop Baker Mayfield. DC Michael Hutchings (30) came from the Minnesota Vikings. Both are first-time coordinators. Lupoi is betting on upside and energy over experience.
  • Oregon pipeline. Four staffers followed Lupoi from Eugene, including analysts who worked with Bo Nix and Dillon Gabriel. He’s transplanting the systems and culture he helped build at Oregon.
  • Increased investment. Lupoi secured a commitment from Cal’s administration to raise the coaching salary pool to the upper tier of the ACC. He stated publicly he would not have taken the job otherwise. Cal is fully funded for revenue-sharing with players in 2026.
  • Relentless pace. His wife told reporters he hasn’t had 48 consecutive hours off since August. He juggled Oregon’s playoff run and Cal’s portal recruiting simultaneously, flying to Berkeley for portal visits between playoff games.

That’s the energy of someone who understands the urgency of the moment.

Coaches Hot Seat Hire Scorecard

FactorAssessment
Recruiting AbilityElite. Rivals National Recruiter of the Year, proven across four programs
Schematic ChopsStrong coordinator résumé. Oregon defense ranked top-3 nationally in final season
Program ConnectionDeep. Cal alum, De La Salle product, Bay Area native, Tedford coaching tree
HC ExperienceNone. First-time head coach at any level
Staff BuildingYoung and aggressive. NFL-level OC and DC, Oregon pipeline staffers
Character/BaggageSome red flags (fake injury scandal, controversial departure, recruiting investigation)
Early Roster MovesExcellent. 32-man portal class ranked 13th nationally; retained star QB
Institutional SupportStrong. Rivera GM structure, increased salary pool, fully funded revenue-sharing
CeilingHigh. If recruiting translates, Cal can compete for upper-ACC standing
FloorCoordinator who can’t manage the full scope of a head coaching job

Wilcox vs. Lupoi: Side-by-Side

DimensionJustin Wilcox (2017–2025)Tosh Lupoi (Incoming)
Record48–55 overall, 26–47 in conference0–0 as HC; elite coordinator track
Peak Season8–5 in 2019; no winning seasons afterOregon defense: top-3 nationally in 2025
Bowls / Profile5 eligible, 4 appearances, 1 winNo HC bowls; profile built as recruiter/DC
RecruitingSolid but not game-changing; lost key players to portal annuallyRivals Recruiter of the Year; 32-man portal class ranked 13th nationally
TrajectoryPlateaued at 6 wins; Big Game loss triggered firingHired to reset ceiling; ACC era demands higher talent baseline
Institutional FitDefensive identity; stabilized culture but couldn’t break throughCal alum; explicitly wanted the job; energy and culture reset
Risk ProfileLow variance: clear floor, limited ceilingHigh variance: elite upside, unproven as CEO

The Verdict

Wilcox proved that doing the old Cal job well is no longer enough.

He stabilized the program after the Sonny Dykes era. He restored defensive credibility. He won five of his last seven Big Games. But he never produced a sustained step-change. Nine seasons. Zero winning conference records. And a program that was actively losing its best talent to the portal every single offseason.

The world changed around him. Conference realignment. NIL. The transfer portal. Wilcox couldn’t change with it.

Lupoi is Cal’s bet that an alum with elite recruiting chops can redefine what the job even is.

The Bears are willingly accepting more risk in exchange for a shot at materially raising their talent and relevance level in the ACC. Here’s what the support structure looks like:

  • Rivera GM structure: Institutional support a first-time HC rarely gets
  • Increased salary pool: Upper-tier ACC resources for coaches
  • Fully funded revenue-sharing: Competitive NIL positioning
  • Franchise quarterback: Sagapolutele gives the offense a cornerstone
  • 32-man portal class: Immediate roster upgrade, ranked 13th nationally

This hire makes sense given Cal’s specific constraints. The Bears aren’t a destination that can poach a proven Power 4 head coach. Lupoi represents the best realistic combination of ceiling and willingness to be in Berkeley.

The biggest risk is the coordinator-to-CEO leap. But the infrastructure around him gives him a better runway than most first-time head coaches ever get.

COACHES HOT SEAT HIRE GRADE: B+ High-upside, moderate-risk hire with A-potential if the recruiting translates and he manages the transition to CEO-level leadership.

What to Watch in Year One

Five things that will tell us whether this hire is working.

  • Portal class integration: Can 32 new transfers gel with holdovers by September? The roster turnover is massive.
  • Offensive identity: Somerville is a first-time OC. What does this offense look like built around Sagapolutele?
  • Sagapolutele’s leap: He showed flashes as a freshman but also threw 9 picks and was sacked 29 times. Year two needs to be different.
  • Defensive installation: Lupoi is a defensive mind, but he brought a 30-year-old first-time DC. Can the defense be competitive immediately?
  • Culture and energy: The vibe around the program has already shifted. Can Lupoi sustain it once September arrives and the games count?

Check back at midseason. We’ll revisit the grade.

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James Franklin Is 4-21 Against Top-10 Teams. Here’s Why Virginia Tech Hired Him Anyway, And Why It Might Actually Be The Right Call

Mark Haines on December 5, 2025

Is James Franklin a Good Hire at Virginia Tech?

The Verdict

James Franklin is a high-floor, polarizingly safe hire for Virginia Tech.

He dramatically raises the talent and competency baseline in Blacksburg. His recruiting prowess will immediately transform VT’s roster trajectory. And his track record of building programs (Vanderbilt, Penn State) removes the developmental gamble that tanked the Pry era.

But his historical ceiling in big games makes it unlikely he turns VT into a true national title contender.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Franklin’s career record speaks for itself—and it stacks up favorably against Virginia Tech’s coaching legacy.

Franklin vs Virginia Tech Coaching Legends

Franklin’s .687 career win percentage actually exceeds Frank Beamer’s legendary .667 mark at Virginia Tech. His bowl record (4-2) significantly outpaces Beamer’s 16-19 postseason ledger.

The Elephant in the Room

Franklin wins games. But can he win the right games?

At Penn State, Franklin went 4-21 against AP Top-10 opponents. That’s the number that haunted him in Happy Valley—and the number that will follow him to Blacksburg. When games mattered most, when a breakthrough win would have changed the program’s trajectory, Franklin came up short.

Franklin vs. Elite Coaches (Career Records)

The gap is stark. Saban won 81% of his games against ranked opponents. Meyer won 84%. Franklin? He’s .500 against ranked teams—and significantly worse against Top-10 competition specifically.

The Recruiting Rocket

This is where Franklin immediately changes everything.

In roughly two weeks on the job, Franklin dragged Virginia Tech’s 2026 class from around No. 120-125 nationally into the low-20s. He flipped 10+ former Penn State commits, pulling heavily from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and the Mid-Atlantic. The current class includes at least six ESPN Top 300 prospects.

This isn’t incremental improvement. This is a complete geographic and talent-level reorientation.

  • Before Franklin: VT classes hovered in the 30s-50s nationally with only one top-25 finish in the last decade.
  • After Franklin: Tracking toward VT’s best class since the early 2010s—with no full staff and a three-week runway
  • Projected steady-state: Classes settling in the 15-25 range annually instead of the 30-50 band

Franklin has explicitly said VT will “always” prioritize offensive and defensive line recruiting. Given VT just produced a top-25 class with almost no runway, expect Hokies classes to feature more blue-chip linemen than they’ve signed in years.

The Virginia Tech Context

Virginia Tech made this move after an 0-3 start in 2025, including a blowout loss to Old Dominion and a defensive collapse under a defensive-minded coach.

Let’s be clear about where the Hokies have been since Beamer left:

  • Only one double-digit win season since 2011 (Fuente’s first year, 2016)
  • Brent Pry went 16-24 and never finished ranked
  • The program has drifted mainly into the ACC middle

Franklin’s win rate, ranked finishes, and recruiting baselines are all significantly above what VT has produced since 2011. The expected value jump from Pry to Franklin is massive—even if the ceiling remains debated.

The ACC Factor

Here’s the key insight that makes this hire make sense:

The ACC path is significantly easier than the Big Ten gauntlet Franklin just left.

In the Big Ten, Franklin had to navigate Ohio State, Michigan, Oregon, and Washington every year. His historical ceiling there translated to “playoff fringe but not elite.” But in the ACC? That same performance profile projects to frequent 9-10-win seasons, regular conference title contention, and occasional playoff appearances in the expanded field.

For a program that hasn’t lived in that neighborhood for a decade, that represents a clear upgrade.

The Bottom Line

Virginia Tech’s realistic near-term needs are:

  1. Consistent 8-10 win seasons
  2. Regular ACC contention and major bowl relevance
  3. A recruiting/portal footprint that looks like peak Beamer-era VT, modernized

Franklin’s history suggests he is very likely to deliver that tier and stabilize the brand—even if he falls short of making VT a playoff mainstay.

  • High probability of getting VT “back.”
  • Low probability of a true national-title breakthrough.
  • Virtually no mystery about what you’re buying.

VT is effectively trading the uncertainty (and downside) of another developmental hire for a highly predictable product: strong floor, defined ceiling, and an immediate recruiting jolt that reestablishes the Hokies as a serious operation in the region.

Is that a “good hire”?

For what Virginia Tech needs right now? Yes. Absolutely.

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