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Coaches Hot Seat Rankings – Week 10

Mark Haines on November 3, 2026

Two offices opened up last week, and Greg Schiano got the corner one.

Sam Houston fired Phil Longo on Wednesday, and Florida State fired Mike Norvell on Sunday, the day after Clemson won 36-24 in Tallahassee. Last week, they were No. 3 and No. 1. Schiano lost to Michigan on Saturday, and around here, that’s how you get promoted.

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1. Greg Schiano, Rutgers (2-6)

Last week: No. 2 | Scorching

Rutgers had Michigan beat at halftime, and that’s the last time anybody in Piscataway smiled.

The Scarlet Knights led 13-7 at the break with a backup quarterback, AJ Surace, who finished 3 of 12. Michigan converted 12 of 16 third downs, which isn’t a defense so much as a suggestion. Tommy Carr ran it in from 9 yards with 4:19 left, Michigan won 28-21, and Rutgers is 2-6 and 1-4 in the Big Ten.

Schiano said he’s “very disappointed in the result, but not disappointed in the people,” which is lovely, and the people are 2-6.

2. Sonny Dykes, TCU (4-4)

Last week: No. 8 | Hot

Sonny Dykes beat Kansas and moved up six spots, so imagine what a loss would have done.

TCU trailed 13-0 at halftime in Fort Worth and punted seven times on its first eight possessions. Jaden Craig ran 17 yards for the go-ahead touchdown with 1:09 left, and the Horned Frogs escaped 22-16. Dykes revealed the secret: “We did it because we didn’t turn the ball over.”

Holding onto the football is now the entire philosophy at TCU, and it’s good for 4-4.

3. Tony Elliott, Virginia (4-5)

Last week: No. 10 | Hot

Virginia ran the ball 19 times at Wake Forest and gained 16 yards, and that was the good news.

Wake Forest led 20-0 at halftime and won 51-7 in Winston-Salem. That’s three straight losses, and the Cavaliers are 4-5 and 2-4 in the ACC. Elliott said his team “didn’t make as many of the competitive plays as we needed to.”

By my count, they made two: the touchdown and the extra point.

4. Deion Sanders, Colorado (3-5)

Last week: No. 5 | Hot

Deion Sanders snapped a five-game losing streak, and he should send Kansas State’s kicker a fruit basket.

Luis Rodriguez missed from 49 and 43 yards in regulation, and Colorado won 27-24 in overtime at Folsom Field on Isaac Wilson’s 11-yard touchdown pass to Charlie Williams on third-and-9. The Buffaloes ran for 222 yards. Sanders said Wilson “didn’t have to play hero ball,” which is easy when the other team’s kicker is playing for you.

Colorado is 3-5, and in Boulder that now passes for a turnaround.

5. Brent Venables, Oklahoma (4-4)

Last week: No. 15 | Hot

South Carolina scored 42 points in Norman, so Brent Venables fired his offensive coordinator.

Two days after the 42-25 home loss, Ben Arbuckle became the second offensive coordinator Venables has fired in the middle of a season, after Seth Littrell in 2024. Tight ends coach Jason Witten takes over the play calling. The Sooners rank next to last in the SEC in yards per game and touchdowns.

“We need a change,” Venables said, and he got one: a 10-spot jump, the biggest in the Top 10. Oklahoma is 4-4, and it plays at No. 25 Florida on Saturday.

6. Dabo Swinney, Clemson (5-3)

Last week: No. 6 | Hot

Dabo Swinney went into Tallahassee, won by 12, and then lectured Florida State’s fans on manners.

Clemson won 36-24, with Tait Reynolds running 79 yards for a touchdown and Nolan Hauser making all five field goals. Take away Reynolds’ run, and the Tigers averaged 1.9 yards per carry, so let’s not get carried away. Afterward, he scolded the fans behind the banner calling for Norvell’s firing: “Whoever did that, man, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

Florida State fired Norvell the next day, so somebody in the building agreed with the banner. Clemson is 5-3, and Swinney stays at No. 6.

7. Lincoln Riley, USC (7-2)

Last week: No. 4 | Hot

Lincoln Riley beat the No. 2 team in the country, and then he read the fans out of the celebration.

USC beat Ohio State 30-18 on Halloween night, and the fans stormed the field. Riley read a prepared statement afterward, and the win, he said, was “for all the staff members, the players, the leaders, admin, all the people within the walls.”

Then he walked away with one word: “Adios.”

The people who stormed his field live outside those walls, and he said goodbye to them in Spanish. He drops three spots to No. 7.

8. Joe Moorhead, Akron (1-7)

Last week: No. 9 | Warm

Joe Moorhead spent Saturday on a bye, and two firings did his climbing for him.

Akron is 1-7 and 0-4 in the MAC, and its last game ended with the Wagon Wheel staying in Kent after a 35-20 loss. Ohio is 6-2, and it comes to InfoCision Stadium on Tuesday night. That’s not what anybody would call a get-well game.

One win in eight tries, in year five, is a number that doesn’t need my help.

9. Lance Leipold, Kansas (3-5)

Last week: No. 18 | Warm

Lance Leipold had TCU down 13-0 at halftime and spent the second half giving it back.

Kansas took a 16-14 lead on a Martin Connington field goal, then let Jaden Craig run 17 yards for the winning touchdown with 1:09 left, and TCU won 22-16. Dylan Edwards carried 20 times for 42 yards, which works out to 2.1 a pop. The Jayhawks are 3-5 and 1-4 in the Big 12.

Leipold said Kansas can “play with a lot of people,” and playing with them was never the problem; beating TCU in the last 69 seconds was.

10. Bill O’Brien, Boston College (4-4)

Last week: No. 11 | Warm

Boston College’s offense went to Durham and never showed up, so the special teams scored the only two points.

Duke won 47-2, and Carter Davis got the Eagles on the scoreboard by returning an errant Duke extra point 100 yards. Nate Sheppard ran for five touchdowns, a Duke record, one week after beating Virginia with a halfback pass, so apparently he does everything. BC committed 15 penalties for 132 yards and is 4-4 and 2-3 in the ACC.

O’Brien summed it up in three words, “We got trounced,” and for once, a coach undersold it.

Bubbling Under

Bill Belichick finally found something he’d never done: score 35 and lose.

His teams were 103-0 when they put up 35 or more since he became a head coach in 1991, and No. 1 Miami beat North Carolina 38-35 in Chapel Hill on a late Malachi Toney touchdown. The Tar Heels are 4-4, and Belichick moves up one spot to No. 11. Brent Key climbs five spots to No. 12 after Pitt ran for 281 yards and won 34-11, and Georgia Tech is 2-6.

Washington at Nebraska was one game with two very different endings. Jedd Fisch won 17-10 in Lincoln and fell seven spots to No. 14. Matt Rhule lost it, said “I’m responsible for it,” and jumped 24 spots to No. 15.

Luke Fickell climbed 13 spots to No. 16 after the trip to Iowa City. He said Wisconsin was “completely manhandled for 60 minutes,” and Iowa has now outscored the Badgers 148-26 during five straight wins in the series.

Full Week 10 Coaches Hot Seat Rankings: coacheshotseat.com/#rank

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Florida State Fires Mike Norvell 12 Hours After Losing to Clemson, Eats a $50 Million Buyout

Mark Haines on November 1, 2026

Norvell won the ACC three years ago. Since then, he’s gone 10-22, and Florida State decided it couldn’t wait any longer.

Florida State fired Mike Norvell on Sunday.

Roughly 12 hours earlier, Clemson walked into Doak Campbell Stadium and won 36-24. That dropped the Seminoles to 3-5. Defensive coordinator Tony White and safeties coach Evan Cooper are out, too, and Rick Stockstill takes over as interim head coach.

Nobody in Tallahassee should be surprised.

The banner flew first.

Before kickoff Saturday, a plane circled the stadium pulling a “Fire Mike Norvell” banner.

Dabo Swinney defended him afterward. That’s a tough spot for a coach, when the guy who just beat you is the one sticking up for you. By Sunday afternoon, it didn’t matter.

The fans got there first. The school just made it official.

Remember 2023?

Florida State does, and that’s the problem.

Norvell went 13-1 that season, ran the table in the regular season, and won the ACC. The Seminoles won 19 straight games in that stretch, and Florida State rewarded him with a new contract. That contract is why he’s still getting paid.

Since the start of 2024, Norvell is 10-22.

The bill comes due.

Norvell’s buyout is 85% of what’s left on his deal, roughly $50 million.

That’s more than Maryland, NC State, and Baylor owe Mike Locksley, Dave Doeren, and Dave Aranda combined. Florida State fired its athletic director in September, so the Seminoles are paying for a coaching search without a permanent AD to run it. Somebody in the president’s office better be good at interviews.

Norvell finishes 41-39 in Tallahassee.

The resume, in short.

Here’s what Florida State got for the money:

  • An undefeated regular season and an ACC title in 2023
  • A loss to an FCS team, Jacksonville State, in 2021
  • A 2-10 season in 2024
  • A 3-5 start in 2026, with a plane circling overhead

One great year.

Six other ones.

What’s next?

Florida State’s job is now the fourth Power Four opening of the season, joining Maryland, NC State, and Baylor.

It’s a big job with a big budget and a fan base that just watched its school pay $50 million to start over. The next coach won’t get a 2023 to buy him time. He’ll get two years, maybe three, and a banner company on speed dial.

Norvell made it to November.

He didn’t make it past the first day.

Week 10 Coaches Hot Seat Rankings Drop Tuesday.

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Week 9 Coaches Hot Seat Rankings: Mike Norvell Takes No. 1 Without Playing a Down

Mark Haines on October 27, 2026

Mike Norvell’s Florida State team didn’t play on Saturday, and he’s sitting on the No. 1 hottest seat in the country.

In five days, Maryland fired Michael Locksley, NC State fired Dave Doeren, and Baylor fired Dave Aranda. All three were in last week’s Top 12. Norvell sat at home and watched the line in front of him get shorter.

Here’s the Top 10, and how each coach got there.

1. Mike Norvell, Florida State (3-4) | Last week: No. 4

Florida State had a bye, and Norvell climbed three spots anyway. His fan sentiment sits at minus-92, the lowest of any coach still working. Clemson comes to Tallahassee on Halloween night, so it’s No. 1 against No. 6.

2. Greg Schiano, Rutgers (2-5) | Last week: No. 2

Rutgers trailed No. 24 Northwestern 28-6 at halftime and lost 42-14. Last Friday, I said Schiano was next in line for No. 1, and he did everything he could to get there. Norvell beat him to it from his living room.

3. Phil Longo, Sam Houston (1-6) | Last week: No. 14

Two Wednesday night losses in eight days: 16-3 to Western Kentucky, then 30-24 to New Mexico State. Against the Aggies, the Bearkats ran for 11 yards. Longo is 3-16 at Sam Houston, and the man who fired him at Wisconsin dropped 21 spots this week.

4. Lincoln Riley, USC (6-2) | Last week: No. 11

Riley had two weeks to get ready for Wisconsin. No. 16 USC lost 24-7, ran for minus-17 yards, and scored the fewest points of any team Riley has ever coached. His review: “Didn’t coach good enough.” No argument here.

5. Deion Sanders, Colorado (2-5) | Last week: No. 9

Colorado led Oklahoma State 24-23 at halftime and lost 57-24. Isaac Wilson fumbled on the first play of the second half, and it got worse from there. Coach Prime keeps telling us the record doesn’t tell the story, and 57 points tells it just fine.

6. Dabo Swinney, Clemson (4-3) | Last week: No. 35

This was the biggest jump of the week, up 29 spots. Down 10-3 to Virginia Tech, Swinney said at halftime, “That’s 100% coaching. Pitiful.” Clemson lost 20-16 to James Franklin, whom Penn State fired a year ago this month.

7. Jedd Fisch, Washington (4-3) | Last week: No. 3

He had a bye week and dropped four spots, because the coaches around him did all the climbing. That’s the nicest thing that’s happened to him in October. He’s at Nebraska on Halloween.

8. Sonny Dykes, TCU (3-4) | Last week: No. 6

A week after beating Baylor, TCU lost 24-20 to West Virginia on homecoming. Jaden Craig turned it over three times, the last one a fumble with 34 seconds left. Nobody in Fort Worth is celebrating the two-spot drop.

9. Joe Moorhead, Akron (1-7) | Last week: No. 15

Akron committed 15 penalties for 165 yards and lost to Kent State 35-20. The Golden Flashes keep the Wagon Wheel for the second straight year. This is Moorhead’s fifth season.

10. Tony Elliott, Virginia (4-4) | Last week: No. 27

Virginia lost 19-16 to Duke on a halfback pass with 1:14 left. Before halftime, Elliott kicked a field goal because he didn’t want to do “anything too risky.” Duke didn’t share the concern.

Bubbling Under

Bill O’Brien scored 49 points at Georgia Tech and slipped to No. 11. Bill Belichick jumped 19 spots to No. 12 after North Carolina lost in overtime to Syracuse as an 8.5-point favorite. Shane Beamer beat Tennessee at the gun and fell six spots to No. 13.

Then there’s Luke Fickell, who beat No. 16 USC and dropped 21 spots to No. 29.

Friday’s Diagnosis: Michigan Bought the Wrong Résumé (For subscribers only)

Kyle Whittingham beat Michigan three times while he was at Utah.

That’s how Michigan got to know him, and it’s a big part of why Michigan hired him. What Michigan didn’t look at was everything else on the schedule. In 21 seasons, Whittingham went 7-15 against AP Top 10 teams, and at Utah he saw about one a year.

In the Big Ten, he gets them in bunches.

On Friday, subscribers get the full Diagnosis:

  • The number Michigan missed. His record against teams that are in the Big Ten now, and what happens to it when those teams are ranked.
  • The four-year slide. What his record against ranked teams looked like on his way out of Salt Lake City.
  • The comparison. Whittingham next to Kalen DeBoer and Steve Sarkisian, two coaches who changed jobs and had to beat better teams.
  • The verdict. Is Whittingham underperforming at Michigan, or did Michigan get exactly what it paid for?

Michigan’s administration bought the macro résumé and never checked the micro-schematic fit. Friday, we check it for them.

The Diagnosis goes to subscribers only, and it won’t be posted here. Every coaching change looks obvious in December. We show you why it’s obvious in September.

Subscribe before Friday morning:

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What We Learned: Week 7

Mark Haines on October 19, 2026

Saturday was the day college football’s royalty found out the rest of us get to play, too.

The No. 1, No. 2, No. 5, No. 6, No. 7, No. 13, No. 16 and No. 18 teams in the AP poll all lost, five of the top eight on the same day for the first time since 1989. The national recaps covered every one of them. Almost none of them bothered with Berkeley, where Cal lost 41-7 at home after benching the quarterback its head coach flew to Hawai’i to keep.

Somebody has to cover the dumpster fire, so pull up a chair. We brought marshmallows.

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1. Cal benched the quarterback it flew to Hawai’i to keep and still won’t say who starts Saturday.

Cal held the ball for 12:14 of the first quarter, which sounds terrific until you see what Wake Forest did with its 2:46.

It scored 14 points and gained 163 yards. The Deacons scored touchdowns on their first four possessions, needing all of 22 plays to cover 286 yards, and led 34-0 at the half, Cal’s biggest first-half hole since a 41-3 mess at Oregon in 2013. Wake Forest finished with 509 yards, 349 of them on 15 big plays, which is a lot of big plays against a team whose head coach made his name coaching defense.

Cal won time of possession, and that’s the only thing it won.

The plan was set on Monday

Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele (JKS) was upgraded to probable Friday night and off the injury list by Saturday.

Jackson Brousseau started anyway and said afterward both quarterbacks were told on Monday. Lupoi said Brousseau earned it with 321 yards against Virginia Tech, which made sense right up until Brousseau averaged 4.7 yards per completion in the first half. You can gain 4.7 yards falling forward.

Lupoi had all week to change his mind and five drives to admit he should have.

Did JKS just get Alex Smith’d?

One of Tosh Lupoi’s first moves as head coach was a late-night flight to Hawai’i to talk JKS into staying.

It worked. JKS threw 18 touchdowns and just nine interceptions as a freshman, made the Davey O’Brien watch list, and Ron Rivera went out and raised the money to keep him. This year, against FBS teams, he has five TDs, five picks and a 50.2 QB rating that ranks 84th, so nobody’s calling him perfect.

The Daily Cal compared it to the 2012 San Francisco 49ers, when Alex Smith got hurt, Colin Kaepernick took over, and Smith never got his job back. The difference is Kaepernick kept winning. JKS didn’t get in until 41-0, went 15 of 18, and led Cal’s only touchdown drive, in his first real snaps all season with Pat McCann calling plays.

So, who starts at SMU? Lupoi says he’s “going to assess,” which is coach for “please stop asking me that.”

The fourth-down call he’d make again

Down 7-0, Lupoi went for it on fourth-and-1 from his own 34.

The pass was broken up, and Wake scored 11 seconds later. Before the half, Cal got to the Wake 4 and came away with nothing on fourth down again. Afterward, Lupoi said he loved the first call and got exactly what he wanted.

He got exactly what he wanted, and it was 14-0, Wake Forest. I’d hate to see what he didn’t want.

Three offensive coaches, no answer

The most experienced offensive mind on Cal’s staff isn’t calling plays.

Nick Rolovich is the associate head coach and quarterbacks coach, a former head coach at Hawai’i and Washington State who ran big-time offenses as a coordinator at Hawai’i and Nevada. He developed JKS as a true freshman and went 1-0 as interim head coach last year, knocking off No. 21 SMU. Lupoi kept him, then handed the offense to Jordan Somerville, a 30-year-old whose only previous coordinator job, by his own account, was in 12-U football.

At halftime during the UNLV game, Lupoi took the play sheet away from Somerville and gave it to McCann, a former Fresno State OC, not to the former two-time head coach sitting one chair over. McCann’s Virginia Tech plan worked once. Wake Forest owns a film projector.

Cal keeps changing who’s in charge of the offense, and the offense keeps getting worse.

Who’s running this?

Rivera fired Justin Wilcox last November, hired Lupoi, and supervises him by contract, reporting straight to the chancellor.

In August, Rivera was talking 11 or 12 wins and the playoff. Cal raised a record $88.5 million in donations from July 2025 through June 2026. Two weeks ago, Rivera had to sit in on Lupoi’s weekly press conference to help explain why the offensive coordinator lost his play sheet.

A head coach shouldn’t need his GM at his own press conference explaining how the head coach is running the team. Lupoi did, in Week 5.

What the fans are saying

Cal fans have suffered through a lot, but they still have ears.

Some of the 33,792 booed at halftime, and Lupoi said he didn’t hear it. The most-liked comment under Write for California’s recap told Chancellor Rich Lyons to fire both Rivera and Lupoi. Others dug up Rivera’s run as Washington’s GM and compared this team to Tom Holmoe’s, which in Berkeley counts as fighting words.

Cal fans now want two people fired, and one of them is the guy who does the firing.

The CHS read

Lupoi said afterward his staff got outcoached and didn’t put the players in position to succeed.

Good for him, because that’s also the whole indictment. Seven games in, he’s walked back his OC hire, his starting quarterback, and his own fourth-down math. Rivera hired him and supervises him, so a 3-4 team headed into three straight road games, starting at No. 24 SMU, now sits on both their desks.

Year 1 is supposed to buy patience. Cal is spending it like donor money.

“You know it! (What?) You tell the story! (What?) You tell the whole damn world! This is Bear Territory!”

2. Georgia’s aura has an expiration date.

Auburn 27, No. 1 Georgia 24, on a walk-off field goal in Athens, and no, that’s not a typo.

Gunner Stockton threw two interceptions and lost a fumble, which is a lot of generosity from a No. 1 team at home. Tied 24-24 with 58 seconds left, Auburn drove 40 yards, with a Georgia penalty pitching in, and Alex McPherson hit a 34-yarder to end it. Georgia had won 53 straight against unranked teams, and Auburn became the first unranked team to beat a No. 1 on the road since 2007.

Alex Golesh won’t be paying for his own dinner on the Plains for a while.

3. BYU beat Notre Dame with a quarterback who had a score to settle.

No. 8 BYU 28, No. 2 Notre Dame 24, and it was the best game of the day, unless you’re from South Bend.

This one was personal

When Notre Dame offered Bear Bachmeier in July 2023, he got the news at his grandmother’s house in Lemoore and called it special, because his late grandfather was a die-hard Irish fan.

That September, Notre Dame took a commitment from another quarterback in his class. Bachmeier went to Stanford, then BYU, and on Saturday night he had a hand in all four Cougar touchdowns: two runs, a catch on a double-pass trick play, and the go-ahead throw on third-and-goal from the 6 with 1:47 left.

Afterward, Bachmeier said Notre Dame disrespected him and his family coming out of high school. He wouldn’t say how. He did say BYU is tired of being disrespected. Notre Dame recruiters may want to sit this week out.

And a personal shout-out from us to Walker Lyons, who caught that go-ahead throw. That was a big-time catch on the biggest throw of the night, and we loved seeing it.

The game Notre Dame gave away

The Irish lost defensive lineman Boubacar Traore to targeting on BYU’s first series, and then things got weird.

With nine seconds left before halftime at the BYU 5, CJ Carr tried to spike the ball, never fully held onto it, and replay ruled it a fumble. Marcus Freeman said he’d never seen anything like it at Notre Dame. Neither had anyone else.

Points left at the 5 are the ones you remember when you lose by 4.

Sitake almost gave it back

Kalani Sitake called a fake punt in the second half that went nowhere and handed Notre Dame the ball at the BYU 24.

To his credit, Sitake owned it. His defense bailed him out by holding the Irish to field goals on short fields, and Freeman admitted his team had to score touchdowns there and didn’t.

The coach who made the worst call of the night is the one doing interviews on a stormed field.

The ending nobody will forget

Notre Dame converted a fourth-and-2, then a fourth-and-5 with four seconds left, to reach the BYU 8.

Carr’s last pass was deflected in the end zone, there was contact but no flag, and the fans were on the field before anyone checked the clock. On Sunday, the Big 12 admitted a second should have remained and Notre Dame deserved one more play. Sitake said postgame it didn’t matter because it was fourth down. It was first down.

The conference promises a complete review of its end-of-game process, which Notre Dame fans can frame and hang next to the loss.

Somebody better make Kalani happy

This is the part BYU’s administration should read twice.

Last winter, Penn State came after Sitake, and BYU had to scramble to keep him with a long-term deal and what his wife called a “love bomb” from Cougar fans. By summer, he was publicly pushing for more resources, and when reporters asked about NIL, recruiting budgets and facilities, he said his agent would handle all that. In late August, BYU pulled football out from under athletic director Brian Santiago and had Sitake report straight to a university vice president.

Sitake has options, and Saturday night he added the best line on his résumé.

Somebody in Provo better make him happy, because after beating Notre Dame, the next school that calls won’t take no for an answer.

The CHS read

BYU was a double-digit underdog and won its first game over Notre Dame since 2004.

The Cougars jumped to No. 3 in the Coaches Poll, and the Irish fell to No. 8. Freeman isn’t on anybody’s hot seat, but this one exposed a red-zone problem and some first-half discipline issues, and he said as much himself.

Sitake just made the best case of his career that BYU belongs in the playoff conversation, fake punt and all.

4. Sarkisian’s seat is heating up, and he still won’t give up the headset.

Florida 27, No. 6 Texas 24, in Austin, where the Longhorns are now experts at losing leads.

Texas blew a 14-point lead for Arch Manning’s first home loss as a starter, and Florida collected its second top-10 win of the year. A week earlier, the Longhorns blew a 17-7 halftime lead to Oklahoma and lost on a walk-off field goal. That’s two straight losses to teams Texas was supposed to beat, and now Steve Sarkisian won’t rule out benching Manning.

Everything’s on the table, except the headset

After the Oklahoma loss, Sarkisian was asked whether he’d considered handing off playcalling.

“Not a chance,” he said. He’s been telling people for two seasons that calling plays is why he got hired. So, the quarterback with the most famous last name in football might sit, but the guy calling his plays isn’t going anywhere.

A coach who’ll bench his star before he’ll bench himself is a coach who feels the heat.

5. Alabama isn’t Alabama right now.

No. 14 Tennessee 26, No. 7 Alabama 10, in Knoxville, and the cigars were lit in the other locker room.

The Vols pushed Bama around all afternoon behind DeSean Bishop’s 159 yards and two touchdowns, and Keelon Russell threw two interceptions. It’s Alabama’s first back-to-back regular-season losses in nearly two decades, a week after losing at home to Georgia. The last time it happened, Nick Saban was still unpacking boxes in Tuscaloosa.

Kalen DeBoer’s honeymoon ended a while ago. Two straight losses just made it official.

6. Mike Norvell’s road problem is now a résumé problem.

No. 3 Miami 43, Florida State 35, in double overtime, which is Mike Norvell’s version of a moral victory.

FSU tied it with a 75-yard Duce Robinson touchdown late in regulation, then watched a second-overtime Hail Mary get wiped out by a holding call before Miami ended it with an interception. The Seminoles have now lost 14 straight games away from Tallahassee and are 0-13 since 2017 in true road games against ranked teams.

At some point, “close” stops being a compliment, and Norvell is well past that point.

7. Indiana is mortal, and Ohio State paid for proving it.

No. 5 Ohio State 19, No. 4 Indiana 15, in Bloomington, and the Hoosiers finally remembered what losing feels like.

The Buckeyes snapped the defending champs’ 22-game winning streak, Indiana’s first loss since 2024. They also lost quarterback Julian Sayin along the way, and his health is now the only thing anyone in Columbus wants to talk about.

Ryan Day finally beat the team that’s been beating everybody. It may have cost him his quarterback.

8. Penn State’s freefall has a new chapter.

Michigan beat Penn State in Ann Arbor, in a game billed as a Big Ten showdown that turned out to be two teams trying to stop the bleeding.

Matt Campbell’s Nittany Lions came in 3-3 on a three-game skid, and Kyle Whittingham’s Wolverines were 0-2 in the Big Ten. Whittingham yanked Bryce Underwood after his second first-half interception, and freshman Tommy Carr came off the bench to spark the win. A late Rocco Becht fumble set up Carr’s first career touchdown, and Penn State is now 3-4.

Whittingham found a quarterback. Campbell lost another week he didn’t have to spare.

9. The SEC is officially a coin flip.

Alabama, Georgia and Texas lost on the same day for the first time since 1996, which is around when some of these fan bases last panicked this much.

There are no unbeaten teams left in the SEC. Ole Miss held No. 13 Missouri to three points, LSU shut out Mississippi State, and nobody can tell you with a straight face who the best team in the league is.

Parity is great for TV ratings and terrible for job security.

The bottom line: everybody’s coach can’t be No. 1

Every fan base that got its heart broken Saturday wants its coach at the top of the hot seat list, preferably by Monday.

This week, my inbox had votes for Matt Rhule, Kirby Smart, Tosh Lupoi, Steve Sarkisian, Lane Kiffin, and Kalen DeBoer, all for No. 1. Kirby Smart, people. They can’t all be No. 1, and one loss doesn’t put anybody there. It takes seasons of pressure to get to No. 1, and a few angry emails after one bad Saturday won’t do it.

For the record, it’s also the first week all season nobody texted me that Lincoln Riley needs to be No. 1. Enjoy it, Lincoln.

The new Coaches Hot Seat Rankings land Tuesday. Keep the emails coming; the best ones end up in Behind the Numbers, and the angriest ones end up on my refrigerator.

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Week 5 Coaches Hot Seat Rankings

Mark Haines on September 29, 2026

Saturday took down 8 ranked teams, and 5 of them lost in front of their own fans.

The top of the sport got shorter

Florida went first, and it didn’t bother being polite about it.

  • Florida 52, No. 4 Ole Miss 28. Jon Sumrall has spent 10 months calling Florida a sleeping giant, and I kept waiting for somebody to set an alarm. The Gators ran for 302 yards and jumped from No. 21 to No. 8 in Sunday’s poll. They’re 4-0 for the first time since 2019.
  • No. 17 Iowa 20, No. 18 Michigan 19. Iowa went 91 yards in 11 plays and won it on a Hank Brown touchdown pass with 2 seconds left. Michigan led 10-7 at the half and had won 47 straight games in that spot. It’s now 47 out of 48, and Michigan will tell you that’s still pretty good.
  • Wake Forest 30, No. 16 Louisville 27. A week after beating SMU, Louisville lost at home as a two-score favorite.
  • Mississippi State 31, No. 19 Missouri 24. Missouri was 3-0 when it got to Starkville and left with the same number of wins.
  • No. 10 LSU 35, No. 23 Texas A&M 6. A&M has lost 2 straight and scored 6 points in the second one. Mike Elko still has his contract extension, and TexAgs still has its message board.

Penn State and USC also lost at home, and both get their own treatment further down.

The No. 1 team can’t throw it

Texas beat Tennessee 20-17 in Knoxville, and it’s No. 1 in the country with an offense that ranks 111th in yards per play.

Arch Manning got sacked 6 times and was flagged twice for illegal forward passes. Afterward he said he didn’t play very well, but his team played great, and he got the first part right. Colin Simmons tied the school record with 5 sacks and celebrated one by pretending to urinate on the field. Steve Sarkisian looked into it and blamed Twitter.

The voters kept Texas at No. 1, so apparently yards are optional.

The poll let one 4-0 team in

Nobody ranked UCLA in August, and on Sunday the voters finally noticed the Bruins at No. 23.

It took a 54-3 win in College Park to get their attention. Bob Chesney is 4 games into the job, and his team scores 44.8 a game, 7th in the country. Pitt, Duke, Nebraska and UMass are 4-0 and still waiting in the parking lot, and UMass has a win over Rutgers to prove it wasn’t a typo. James Franklin got run off in State College last fall, and his Virginia Tech team is 4-0 and unranked with road wins at Maryland and Boston College. Both of those coaches are on our board, and Franklin didn’t help either one.

Franklin has become the guy who drops by to make other people’s seats warmer.

Georgia played somebody

Georgia came into the weekend carrying the softest schedule in America, and I was starting to wonder whether the Bulldogs would ever leave the house.

Then they finally played somebody and beat Oklahoma 41-13. Their defense allows 3.5 yards a play, the best in the country. Washington went the other way. Voters gave the Huskies 107 points in the previous poll, and Minnesota came to Seattle and beat them 27-24.

That’s the country, and now for the 10 coaches who spent Monday explaining themselves.

1. Michael Locksley, Maryland (2-2). Maryland lost 54-3 at home to UCLA, a team nobody bothered to rank in August, and the Baltimore Sun reported the customers chanting for Locksley’s job while the game was still going on. 247Sports and the Sun had both reported calls for a change before kickoff, so the scoreboard mostly served as supporting evidence. Afterward Locksley said he still has a lot of confidence in himself and his staff to fix it. That makes one of him. Next up is a trip to Nebraska, which is 4-0 and presumably looking forward to it.

2. Mike Norvell, Florida State (2-2). Florida State found an FCS team on the schedule and beat Central Arkansas 34-7, which is the kind of opponent you book when a win is the whole idea. The calls to fire Norvell kept coming anyway, per Yardbarker. That seems ungrateful. The man is 0-5 in one-score games since the start of 2025, and the Bears were kind enough to make sure this wasn’t one.

3. Shane Beamer, South Carolina (2-2). South Carolina lost 49-18 at Alabama, its seventh straight SEC loss going back to last season, and Yahoo Sports reported the critics had moved past the score to whether Beamer has control of his team. Dylan Stewart helped them make the case. The star pass-rusher punched Alabama tight end Josh Ford, then argued with his own coaches when they tried to get him off the field. On Sunday Beamer suspended him indefinitely and said, “There’s a standard of how we do things in our program.” One Gamecocks fan wrote that Beamer “grew a spine,” per Pro Football Network, which counts as a rave from a fan base that was chanting “Fire Beamer” after the Mississippi State loss a week earlier. It’s the right call, and a coach only has to make it once things have already gotten away from him.

4. Greg Schiano, Rutgers (1-3). Rutgers beat Howard 58-7 on Friday night for its first win of the season, and I’d like to be the first to congratulate the Scarlet Knights on going undefeated against the FCS. They are 0-3 against everybody else. The crowd was thin, and NJ.com was nice enough to blame the bad weather and the Friday kickoff. The 58 points would mean more if UMass, which beat Rutgers, had been the one giving them up.

5. Luke Fickell, Wisconsin (3-1). Luke Fickell finally won one that counts, and nobody saw it coming, possibly including Fickell. Wisconsin trailed Penn State 17-0 in State College and won 24-20 on a 72-yard touchdown pass from Colton Joseph to Jacob Harris with 1:13 left. It was the Badgers’ first road win over a ranked team since 2021 and their first win in State College since 2003, so it only took 23 years. That’s 3 straight since the 41-13 loss to Notre Dame. Nobody has to take this one on faith.

6. Dave Aranda, Baylor (3-1). Baylor beat Colorado 23-13 at home, and for once the head coach got the credit for the decisions. Baylor On SI praised him for trusting a 54-yard field goal and for using his punter to win field position. I can’t remember the last time anybody raved about Baylor’s punting plan. The only loss is 17-16 to Auburn. The best team Baylor has beaten is Colorado, and Colorado is 2-2.

7. Lincoln Riley, USC (4-1). Lincoln Riley jumped 13 spots on the board this week, and losing 41-27 at home to No. 20 Oregon was the least of it. Dante Moore was sliding at the end of a scramble in the second quarter when Desman Stephens slammed his head into the turf. Moore left in a neck brace and an ambulance, bound for Los Angeles General, with what sources told CBS Sports is a concussion. Stephens smiled and celebrated while Moore was being treated, which he admitted in his own written apology Sunday, and after his targeting ejection he spent the rest of the game back on the USC sideline. Asked about the celebration, Riley said, “I did not see it. No.” Asked why Stephens was still on the sideline, he said it was because “he’s on our football team.” The equipment manager is on the football team too. By Sunday the same conduct was “unacceptable” in a Riley statement, and the price was 1 game, Saturday against Washington. Dan Lanning called it a disgusting play and said you’d never see that from his players or his coaches. He also said it wasn’t necessarily an indictment of Riley, because he couldn’t speak to what he didn’t see. Shane Beamer didn’t see his own player’s punch in Tuscaloosa either. When he saw the video after the game, he told reporters Saturday night he was embarrassed, and on Sunday he suspended Dylan Stewart indefinitely, the best pass-rusher on his roster, with his future in the program still undecided. Stewart punched a tight end and has no return date. Stephens sent a quarterback to the hospital while smiling about it, and he misses 1 game. Both coaches missed it live, and only one of them called it unacceptable the night it happened.

8. Dave Doeren, NC State (2-2). A week after losing at Vanderbilt on a play designed to run out the clock, NC State beat App State 41-31, and in Raleigh that counts as progress. The Wolfpack led Vanderbilt with 6 seconds left, and the play meant to kill the clock ended with a fumble returned for a touchdown, per USA TODAY. The defense still gave up 31 to a Sun Belt team on Saturday, and the same USA TODAY story counts 8 Power Four wins for NC State since the start of 2024.

9. Phil Longo, Sam Houston (1-3). Phil Longo finally got a normal offseason. He went into 2026 with most of his staff back and a roster put together early enough to coach, per Yahoo Sports, after a year spent rebuilding and playing home games somewhere other than home. All that bought him on Saturday was a 49-14 loss at No. 11 Texas Tech, and he’s 1-3. Imagine the chaos version.

10. Joe Moorhead, Akron (1-3). UNLV came to Akron and won 38-10. Moorhead has gotten credit for taking Akron from 2-win seasons to 4 wins in 2024 and 5 in 2025, its best finish since 2017. That tells you how the rest of the decade went. After the Minnesota loss he blamed turnovers, drops, personal fouls and special-teams mistakes on inconsistent practice. UNLV scored 38.

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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.

On the Radar is exclusively available to newsletter subscribers. Join us here [LINK]

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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