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Maryland Fires Mike Locksley After 13 Straight Power 4 Losses, and It’s Paying $9.94 Million to Do It

Mark Haines on October 21, 2026

Eight years, one ceiling, and a 54-3 home loss to UCLA. Here’s why it ended, what it costs, who’s next, and who the Terps can’t afford to lose.

Maryland fired Mike Locksley on Wednesday.

It took eight seasons and a 54-3 home loss to UCLA to get here. Locksley leaves at 38-49 overall and 16-47 in Big Ten play. He lost his last 13 games against Power 4 opponents, which is the kind of streak that writes the press release for you.

The surprise is that he got an eighth season.

Here are the 4 things that matter now:

  • Why it ended
  • What it costs
  • Who’s next
  • Who has to stay

1. Why it ended: the same season, every season

Locksley could recruit.

Maryland produced five NFL draft picks in 2023 and six more in 2025. He kept Zion Elee, ESPN’s No. 2 overall recruit and a Baltimore kid, home in College Park. He grew up in D.C. and filled the roster with players most Maryland coaches only see on film.

He just couldn’t turn them into Big Ten wins.

Every year followed the same script. Maryland won its nonconference games in September, then the Big Ten schedule started. After back-to-back eight-win seasons in 2022 and 2023, Maryland has lost 20 of its last 22 conference games: 1-8 in 2024, 1-8 in 2025, and 0-4 this year.

Two years of that is a pattern, and patterns get coaches fired.

How do you survive 87 games at .437?

A UCLA fan on Reddit asked the question everybody else was thinking.

How does a coach last eight seasons while losing more than he wins? Part of the answer is where Locksley started: he took over after Maryland fired DJ Durkin in 2018, and the program needed a rebuild before it could worry about wins. Then came three straight winning seasons and three bowl wins from 2021 to 2023, and that bought him years.

The rest of the answer is recruiting.

Another commenter put it bluntly: Locksley got a long leash because he could land talent, even when he couldn’t win with it. Every time a blue-chip DMV kid signed, Maryland had a reason to believe next year would be different. His 2025 class alone had seven SC Next 300 prospects.

Eventually the losses come due, and on Wednesday they did.

2026 was the last chance, and everybody knew it

Last November, Maryland had the chance to move on and passed.

Athletic director Jim Smith brought Locksley back and promised more money for the roster. The Terps returned quarterback Malik Washington after a record-setting freshman season and kept veterans like linebacker Daniel Wingate. They opened 2-0 against Hampton and UConn, which is a sentence that should never make a Big Ten fan feel safe.

Then James Franklin brought Virginia Tech to College Park, picked up where he left off at Penn State, and Maryland hasn’t won since.

The losses kept coming: UCLA, Nebraska, Ohio State, and Rutgers.

The UCLA game ended 54-3, at home, a score usually reserved for September teams that get paid to show up. Earlier this week, Locksley acknowledged the frustration and said, “It won’t get fixed here at the podium.” He was right.

It got fixed in the AD’s office on Wednesday.

2. What it costs: $9.94 million for a coach who isn’t coaching

Maryland owes Locksley $9.94 million, about 65% of his remaining compensation.

Here’s the breakdown:

  • Lump sum: $4.97 million, due within 60 days
  • The rest: equal installments through 2028
  • Offset or mitigation: none

No mitigation means that if Locksley takes a coordinator job next year, Maryland still pays every dollar. The contract runs through 2028 because his 2022 extension added a year automatically every time he won seven games, and he did it in 2022 and 2023. The reward for those eight-win seasons turned out to be paying for the years that followed.

One more number: the buyout would have dropped to $8.9 million after this season.

Maryland just spent roughly $1 million for a head start on the search. Smith decided waiting until December would cost more than that. He’s probably right.

3. Who’s next: 5 names to know

This is Smith’s first major coaching search at Maryland, and his background is pro sports business, including time with the Atlanta Braves.

He has two jobs. He has to find a coach who can win in the Big Ten, and then give that coach the money to keep doing it. Maryland has never posted a winning record in Big Ten play and has finished with one or two league wins six times since joining in 2014.

Here’s who should be on his list:

  • Jake Dickert, Wake Forest: He’s won at Washington State and Wake Forest, two jobs that come with built-in disadvantages. Wake is 6-1 and ranked No. 17. The question is whether he sees Maryland as a step up or a step sideways.
  • Charles Huff, Memphis: He’s from Denton, Maryland, interned with the Terps in 2009, and worked under Franklin and Nick Saban. He’s 44-27 at Marshall, Southern Miss, and Memphis, with a league title at Marshall in 2024. The question is whether a fourth job in four years looks like ambition or a moving company.
  • Lance Taylor, Western Michigan: He won the MAC in 2025 and is 15-6 since the start of last season. He’s an offensive coach with deep NFL experience whose 2025 team still had the nation’s No. 9 scoring defense.
  • Dan Mullen, UNLV: He’s 117-68 in FBS with three 10-win seasons in the SEC and a strong quarterback track record. The 4-3 start at UNLV doesn’t help. Neither does the way Florida ended, especially on the recruiting trail.
  • Brian Hartline, South Florida: He’s 39, 5-2 in his first season as a head coach, and built the best receiver pipeline in the country at Ohio State. Smith and senior deputy AD Diana Sabau both spent time in Columbus. One season of head coaching is thin, but nobody would question his recruiting.

The name the internet wants: Brian Kelly

Reddit has already hired Brian Kelly, at least in spirit.

Within minutes, the jokes were up: Kelly studying how to eat a crab, Kelly watching The Wire for accent lessons, Kelly practicing Baltimore vowels in the mirror. This is the man who showed up in Baton Rouge and found a Southern accent somewhere between the airport and the podium. Nobody’s betting he couldn’t find a Baltimore one by signing day.

The funny part is that he’s available.

LSU fired Kelly midway through the 2025 season after a 5-3 start, and agreed to pay his full $54 million buyout as long as he made good-faith efforts to find work in coaching or media. He’s spending this season as a CBS Sports analyst and co-hosting a weekly SiriusXM show. He’s 64, and he’s said he hasn’t closed any doors on coaching, adding that his next job wouldn’t necessarily have to be with a national title contender.

Maryland is not a national title contender, so that box is checked.

At least one Maryland fan on Reddit said he’d take Kelly in a heartbeat if the school could afford him, arguing that a coach who could take the Terps bowling every year would be a massive upgrade. Kelly holds a 297-109-2 career record and won 113 games at Notre Dame. Maryland has won more than seven games three times since 2010.

The catch is motivation.

Kelly already has $54 million coming from LSU, and his buyout is built so that new earnings offset what LSU owes him. Money alone won’t move him, and neither will Maryland’s Big Ten history. He’d have to want the job, and Maryland would have to convince him it wants to win as badly as he does.

That’s the same problem Jim Smith has with every name on this list.

4. Who has to stay: the first recruiting class is already on campus

The new coach’s most important signing class is the one wearing Maryland jerseys right now.

Tampering season is coming, and a lot of these players grew up in Maryland. They’ll have to decide if they want to buy in to another staff and another rebuild. If they leave, the next coach starts over.

Here’s who matters most:

  • QB Malik Washington: He set the school freshman record with 2,963 passing yards last year. This season he has 1,615 yards and nine touchdowns, but also six interceptions, three of them returned for scores.
  • Edge Zion Elee: He’s the highest-rated recruit in program history and leads the team with 4.5 tackles for loss, despite playing only about 25 to 30 snaps a game. He also has 3.5 sacks and three forced fumbles.
  • Edge Sidney Stewart: He was a Freshman All-American last season with seven sacks, and he stayed when he could have left.
  • LB Daniel Wingate: He leads the team with 45 tackles, returned an interception 52 yards for a score against Ohio State, and has an extra year of eligibility if he wants it.
  • WR Chris Durr Jr.: The Wyoming transfer has 52 catches, tied with Ohio State’s Jeremiah Smith for the Big Ten lead.
  • Edge Zahir Mathis: He had six sacks as a freshman before a season-ending injury in fall camp.

The 2027 class matters too: receiver Myles McAfee, safety Kenaz Sullivan, and defensive end Dallas Pauldo are all committed, and all of them will be getting phone calls this week.

The bottom line

Maryland has gone 2-20 in the Big Ten since 2024, and on Wednesday it finally acted on it.

Locksley proved you can recruit the DMV. He never proved you can win the Big Ten with it, and neither has anyone else at Maryland. Now Smith has to find a coach who believes it’s possible and convince the people writing checks to believe it too.

Otherwise, the Terps just paid $9.94 million to start the same season over.

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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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Coaches Hot Seat Rankings – Week 7

Mark Haines on October 12, 2026

We’re halfway through the 2026 season, and Oct. 17 is going to settle something.

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What a great week. Five of the Top 10 coaches didn’t play, which is the safest thing some of them have done all season.

The other five should have tried it.

Shane Beamer and Lincoln Riley won on the road, and both dropped. Mike Locksley, Jedd Fisch, and Mike Norvell lost, and none of them moved down.

Those three gave up 130 points among them. Last week’s top three also gave up 130.

I checked it twice. I’m no math major, but I can add.

1. Mike Locksley, Maryland (2-4)
Last week: No. 1

Maryland has played three Big Ten games.

UCLA 54, Maryland 3. Nebraska 48, Maryland 23. Ohio State 45, Maryland 16.

That’s 147-42, and the closest the Terrapins have come is 25 points. Nobody expected Maryland to win in Columbus, but at some point you’d like to see the other team break a sweat.

Last week the athletic director said he and Locksley are “aligned.” I’m sure they are. So is a car with three flat tires.

He stays No. 1. At this rate they ought to retire the spot.

2. Greg Schiano, Rutgers (1-4)
Last week: No. 2

Greg Schiano had the week off, and Rutgers didn’t lose. Best weekend they’ve had in a month.

The last time anyone saw the Scarlet Knights, Indiana was scoring 47 on them on homecoming. They’re 1-4 and 0-2 in the Big Ten, and a bye only gives Piscataway an extra week to look at it.

Next up is a trip to Maryland on Oct. 17, No. 2 at No. 1. Someone has to win that game. I’ve watched both teams, and I’m not sure either one knows that.

3. Jedd Fisch, Washington (3-3)
Last week: No. 6

Last week Jedd Fisch jumped 90 spots. This week he moved up three more, so at least he’s consistent.

No. 20 Iowa came to Husky Stadium Friday night and won 41-24. Washington has lost two straight and is 0-3 in the Big Ten. Fisch is 2-7 against ranked teams at Washington and 35-36 as a head coach.

Year three was supposed to be the arrival. Has anyone checked the flight status?

Only two coaches rank above him now, and they’ve won three games between them. That’s the neighborhood.

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

Last week Norvell beat Virginia by 31 and stayed at No. 4. This week Louisville beat him 44-20, and he stayed at No. 4.

Win big, stay put. Get blown out, stay put. If he ties somebody, I’m calling a meeting.

The athletic director who gave him the extension was fired in September. The man who made the bet has left the table, and Norvell is still sitting there with the chips.

Nobody in Tallahassee is grading the scoreboard anymore.

5. Sonny Dykes, TCU (2-3)
Last week: No. 5

TCU had a bye, and Sonny Dykes spent it sitting by the phone.

Two Saturdays ago, 247Sports’ Scoot McGee reported Dykes could be fired as soon as that night. He wasn’t. Seven days of nothing followed, which is either good news or the longest week of his life.

This is the same Sonny Dykes who coached in the national championship game after the 2022 season, and TCU extended him in April. Now it’s 2-3, 0-2 in the Big 12, and headed to Baylor on Oct. 17.

He’s 3-1 in his last four against Dave Aranda. The bad news is that’s the good news.

6. Shane Beamer, South Carolina (3-3)
Last week: No. 3

Shane Beamer went into The Swamp and won by 19. I’d like to say I saw it coming. I’d also like a raise.

South Carolina beat No. 16 Florida 38-19, ending an eight-game SEC losing streak nobody in Columbia will miss. And that 35-34 overtime loss to Kentucky that got him booed off his own field? Kentucky beat No. 10 LSU on Saturday and is now ranked 15th, so Beamer gets to say he lost by a point to a ranked team, as long as nobody asks when it got ranked.

He drops three spots, the biggest fall in the Top 10, and he’s still 1-3 in the SEC. One road win doesn’t end last week’s buyout talk.

But it’s the first week this season South Carolina fans had to argue for him instead of against him.

7. Dave Aranda, Baylor (4-1)
Last week: No. 8

Dave Aranda moved up a spot this week, and he did it from the couch.

Baylor had a bye and is still 4-1 and 2-0 in the Big 12. He climbs because Beamer fell past him on the way down. TCU comes to Waco on Oct. 17, and Aranda has lost that game three of the last four times.

Baylor fans have heard “turning the corner” before. They’d like to see the corner.

8. Luke Fickell, Wisconsin (4-1)
Last week: No. 9

Luke Fickell moved up a spot without playing, because Lincoln Riley won at Penn State and fell right past him.

Wisconsin is 4-1 and 2-0 in the Big Ten, and everyone in Madison feels better. Fickell is still 21-22 there.

That number didn’t take the week off.

9. Lincoln Riley, USC (6-1)
Last week: No. 7

Lincoln Riley won at Penn State, 31-23, and dropped two spots. You’re welcome, Coach.

USC is 6-1, 3-1 in the Big Ten, and ranked 19th. A week ago his own student section was chanting “Fire Lincoln” during a win over Washington. During a win.

I’d hate to hear what they chant during a loss. Then again, they’re college students in Los Angeles, so they might not have noticed the score.

Winning on the road in the Big Ten cooled things off by two spots. Nobody’s forgotten the chant.

10. Deion Sanders, Colorado (2-3)
Last week: No. 10

No game for Colorado this week, so for once nobody left the playbook at the hotel bar. That’s progress.

The Buffaloes are 2-3 and 0-2 in the Big 12. Texas Tech, the team that beat them 29-7, is still unbeaten and ranked 10th, so if Coach Prime wants to say he lost to a Top 10 team, go ahead.

A bye week is the quietest a Deion Sanders team ever gets, and I’m sure he hated every minute of it.

Bubbling Under

Dave Doeren and Phil Longo hold at Nos. 11 and 12, and both lost by at least 24, so nobody can say they’re not earning it. NC State lost 38-14 at home to Wake Forest, now ranked 21st, and Sam Houston lost 35-3 at Liberty to fall to 1-4.

Joe Moorhead moves up one to No. 13 after Akron lost 25-23 at home to Eastern Michigan and fell to 1-5. Somewhere in Ypsilanti they’re still celebrating.

Ryan Silverfield moves up two after Arkansas lost 24-17 at home to then-No. 15 Tennessee. Last week it was 34-7 at Texas A&M, so it’s progress, the way a smaller dent is progress. The paper bags were aimed at the athletic director last week, and every loss moves a little more of that toward the sideline.

Matt Campbell moves up two to No. 15. Penn State moved on from a coach who won games to hire one who’d win the big ones, and Campbell is 0-3 in the Big Ten: Wisconsin, Northwestern, USC. Riley drops two for beating him, and Campbell climbs two for losing.

I didn’t design the system. I just keep the books.

Meanwhile, in Texas

Steve Sarkisian jumped 34 spots, from No. 91 to No. 57, after Oklahoma beat No. 1 Texas 27-24. No. 57 is a long way from the Top 10. Then again, ask Jedd Fisch how long that trip takes.

Mike Elko moves up five to No. 45. After Missouri beat Texas A&M 27-6, somebody asked him about fans losing faith, and he said, “Billy’s cesspool can go be Billy’s cesspool.” Billy is Billy Liucci, co-owner of TexAgs, and the cesspool is the people who buy the tickets.

The Aggies started the season ranked eighth. They’re 3-3, and they’ve scored six points in each of their last two SEC losses.

Sark lost a football game. Elko lost a football game and then picked a fight with the people paying for it.

Circle Oct. 17

Rutgers at Maryland, Schiano at Locksley. TCU at Baylor, No. 5 at No. 7.

One of the top two coaches is going to lose that day. The other one gets to find out whether a win still buys a quiet week.

I now leave you with one suggestion: Don’t bet on it.

See where all 138 coaches rank: https://coacheshotseat.com/#rank

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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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The Clock In The Stadium Said Michigan Lost. The Big Ten Has A Different Clock, And You Are Not Allowed To See It

Mark Haines on September 7, 2026

The clock you watched isn’t the real clock

Everybody in that stadium looked at the same number: zero.

Bryce Underwood threw a Hail Mary out the back of the end zone. The scoreboard hit triple zeros. Western Michigan’s sideline emptied onto the field, because that’s what teams do when the clock says the game is over and they are ahead. Lance Taylor said he looked up and it was past zeros before anybody touched the ball. Then a replay official reached into a drawer somewhere and produced one more second; Underwood hit JJ Buchanan for 47 yards, and Michigan won 13-12.

So which clock was right, and why does the answer require a press release?

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The Big Ten’s explanation eats itself

Read the conference statement slowly, because it argues against the conference.

The Big Ten says it used a direct shot of the game clock in the stadium, side by side with the play, to rule that Broncos safety Micah Davis touched the ball with one second left. Fine. Except NBC’s rules analyst, Terry McAulay, a man who refereed three Super Bowls, went on the air and said his producer had confirmed the network’s inset clock was the stadium clock. That is the clock you saw. That clock read zero with the ball still hanging in the air, and McAulay said flatly that it wasn’t close.

Both of those things can’t be true, and the conference is the one asking you to believe both.

Introducing the clock nobody knew existed

The fallback explanation is worse than no explanation.

The story now is that the Hawk-Eye replay system had a different sync, which means there is a version of Saturday night’s clock that lives in a replay center and disagrees with the version bolted to the stadium. The conference notes that 85 minutes before kickoff, every broadcast camera in the replay system, including the one pointed at the game clock, gets synced with a strobe. Wonderful. Nobody asked how it gets synced. They asked why the one clock that the players, the coaches, the officials on the field, the 110,000 in the seats, and the audience at home all use is the backup copy. McAulay, live on the air, said the Big Ten was going to have to explain how anyone got to one second on that play.

Twenty-four hours later, the Big Ten still hasn’t.

Now go check the rest of college football

If the visible clock is advisory, the problem doesn’t stop in Ann Arbor.

  • Every game that has ever ended with zeros on the board and a ball in the air is now a second short
  • Every coach who has ever managed the last 10 seconds of a half did it off a display the conference now treats as approximate
  • Every quarterback who has spiked the ball with one tick showing was working from a number that might have been someone else’s number
  • Every fan who has watched a clock run out and assumed the game was over was, it turns out, guessing

Basketball figured this out with a red light around the backboard, and college football has decided the light is a suggestion.

Then Michigan stormed its own field

And here is where a bad night became embarrassing.

Michigan is ranked. Michigan was favored by four touchdowns. Michigan is the flagship of the state, and Western Michigan is a directional school 130 miles up the road with a $1.5 million payday and nothing to lose. During the celebration, you could hear chants of “fire Kyle” in the background, which is a hell of a soundtrack for a win. Then the students came over the wall to celebrate surviving a MAC team by one point on a second that the visible clock says never existed.

A ranked blue blood rushing the field after that is the single most humiliating image of Week 1.

What this does to the seat

Nobody gets fired for winning, and nobody gets a pass on how.

Kyle Whittingham called it one for the history books, which is true in a way he didn’t intend, and then he did the honest thing at the podium and listed what his team failed to do:

  • Stop the run
  • Run the ball
  • Win the turnover margin
  • Get enough first downs

Western Michigan kicked four field goals, took the ball away three times, and ran a 20-play drive that ate 13 minutes and 40 seconds off a clock that belongs to somebody else. Michigan trailed for 60 minutes. Whittingham has a long enough record that Saturday counts, and what it says is that his run defense couldn’t get a MAC offense off the grass, and his quarterback put the ball on the ground at his own 31 with 1:50 to go. If that is still true in October, nobody will remember the Hail Mary.

Michigan is 1-0, and the only clock anyone in that stadium could see says otherwise.

Weekly Coaches Hot Seat rankings will be available Wednesday.

They’re still playing. SMU at Florida State closes Week 1 tonight, with SMU a slight favorite by win probability and a huge favorite in the eyes of most who follow college football. Look for Norvel to keep that hot seat hot. Subscribe to have the rankings delivered straight to your inbox each week.

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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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The Real Reason Luke Fickell Is on the Hot Seat at Wisconsin (It’s Not the Air Raid)

Mark Haines on July 10, 2026

Yes, Luke Fickell is on the hot seat, and it is one of the hottest in college football.

The reason is not the one most fans reach for. Wisconsin spent two years blaming the Air Raid, then fired the coordinator who ran it and watched the offense get worse, scoring 12.8 points a game in 2025. The pressure is real, and the story underneath it is more interesting than the boos suggest.

This is a pressure read, not a firing prediction. Below are the five questions that decide whether Fickell’s 2026 cools the seat or lights it, with the tell to watch for each one so you can judge the season as it happens.

Question 1: Can the offense clear the mid-20s, or is 12.8 the real Wisconsin?

Start with the number that ended the scheme debate.

In 2025, the reborn run-first offense scored 12.8 points a game, 135th out of 136 teams in the country and dead last in the Power Four. That happened after Wisconsin buried the Air Raid, which means the scheme was never the whole problem. The old system, which averaged in the low 20s, had more life in it than the throwback version brought in to save the day.

The tell to watch: look for the offense to camp in the mid-20s a game. Anything near 12 means the disease is still active, and a unit score of 24 or more is the first honest sign that the patient is up and walking.

Question 2: Does Colton Joseph survive to November?

The single biggest variable is not the scheme or the schedule; it is health.

Fickell has brought in a veteran transfer quarterback every year, and three straight have lost their seasons to injury: Tanner Mordecai’s hand in 2023, Tyler Van Dyke’s ACL in 2024, and Billy Edwards Jr.’s knee in 2025. New starter Colton Joseph is a dynamic dual-threat from Old Dominion, which is exciting and also the catch, because a runner behind a rebuilt line is an injury risk. The last three Wisconsin starters went down the same way.

The tell to watch: count how many games the Week 1 quarterback finishes. Joseph, standing on the field for the Minnesota finale, would break the pattern that has defined the entire tenure, and it matters more than any single stat line.

Question 3: Can Wisconsin make a bowl on the easiest schedule in the Big Ten?

The 2026 schedule takes away every excuse.

CBS Sports rated Wisconsin’s slate the easiest in the Big Ten, with no Ohio State, Oregon, Michigan, or Indiana. Last year’s opponents went a combined 110-53, with the eventual national champion among them. This year’s group went 69-79. With a draw this soft, six wins is the floor of competence rather than an achievement.

The tell to watch: treat bowl eligibility as the baseline, not the prize. A third straight bowl miss on a schedule this forgiving would be the loudest result of the season and a sign the problem runs deeper than luck.

Question 4: Is it bad luck or bad coaching?

This is the fairest question in the whole debate, and it deserves a real answer.

The quarterback injuries are a genuine misfortune, and no coach draws up a torn ACL. But building every season on a one-year rental with no functional backup is a roster decision, and Fickell made that call three straight times. When the school kept him, athletic director Chris McIntosh pointed at money, and there is a sliver of truth there, since Wisconsin has lagged in NIL. Paul Chryst won 67 games on less, though, and Fickell reached a College Football Playoff at Cincinnati on a fraction of a Big Ten budget.

The tell to watch: separate the wound from the plan. Injuries are luck, but depth behind the starter and finishing close games are coaching, so watch whether Wisconsin has a real answer the first time something goes wrong.

Question 5: What cools the seat, and what only looks like progress?

Not every win means the same thing this fall.

A nine-win season built on a soft schedule can still hide the same flaw, just as two non-conference blowouts can flatter a point differential. The results that move the needle are the ones that test the real problem. Wisconsin closed 2025 by upsetting ranked Washington and ranked Illinois, proof that the pulse is there when the quarterback is upright.

The results that change the read:

  • A healthy quarterback in December. If Joseph finishes the year, the biggest variable will finally break Wisconsin’s way.
  • An offense in the mid-20s. Scoring, not scheme talk, is the proof the fix took.
  • A road win over a team with a pulse. Padding the record at home proves nothing the schedule did not already promise.

The bottom line on Luke Fickell’s hot seat

This is a Structural Trend, and it is the hottest honest seat on the board.

The scheme war is over, and the offense lost anyway, which points the finger at the quarterback room rather than the playbook. The best-case scenario is real because the injuries were rotten luck, and a healthy Joseph on the softest schedule in the league could spark a genuine bounce. The buyout of about 25 million dollars buys Fickell the patience his record could not earn, so 2026 is the year the excuses finally run out.

Ask these five questions as the season unfolds, and you will know whether Wisconsin is climbing or just enjoying a soft landing.

Score it yourself

Want to run this same diagnosis on your team’s coach?

The Coach Evaluation Scorecard is our free, seven-category tool for scoring any coaching situation out of 35, so you can tell a hot seat from a cold take before the season starts. Grab it here.

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