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Coaches Hot Seat Rankings – Week 14

Mark Haines on November 26, 2024

Coaches Hot Seat Rankings—Week 14. Our full rankings are delayed due to technical difficulties. Our team is working on a solution, and we will release them as soon as possible.

In the meantime, the Top 20 appears on our site.

The coaching carousel has started spinning earlier than expected this year, with two notable moves reshaping the landscape just days before rivalry weekend. On Tuesday morning, North Carolina shocked the college football world by parting ways with Hall of Fame coach Mack Brown, ending his second stint in Chapel Hill after six seasons. The decision came just 24 hours after Brown had publicly stated his intention to return in 2025, marking an awkward end for the 73-year-old who led the Tar Heels to six straight bowl appearances during his return tenure.

While Brown prepares for his final game against NC State this Saturday, Rice made its move by hiring Davidson head coach Scott Abell to lead their program. Abell, who built Davidson into an FCS powerhouse with his innovative triple-option offense, faces the challenge of translating his success to the FBS level.

These early moves could be harbingers of a relatively quiet coaching carousel, as many programs appear hesitant to make changes amid uncertainty surrounding player revenue sharing and a thin candidate pool. However, that hasn’t stopped the temperature from rising for several coaches fighting to save their jobs.

In this week’s Hot Seat Rankings, we examine the mounting pressure at FIU, where Mike MacIntyre’s tenure has devolved into chaos amid allegations of misconduct and thrown furniture. We’ll also analyze Neal Brown’s expensive mediocrity at West Virginia, Kenni Burns’ historically bad run at Kent State, and the declining returns at Appalachian State under Shawn Clark.

Week 14 – Coaches Hot Seat Top 4

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Week 12 Hot Seat Rankings Reveal The New Math of Firing Coaches: When Balance Sheets Trump Box Scores

Mark Haines on November 12, 2024

Graphic by Tony Altimore @TJAltimore on X

When Money Changes Everything: College Football’s New Math

If you want to understand what’s happening in college football right now, forget about the polls, the playoff rankings, and even the win-loss records. Instead, study Tony Altimore’s (@TJAltimore on X) financial visualization of athletic department debt. This document looks less like a sports analysis and more like a hedge fund’s risk assessment of distressed assets. What Altimore has captured, in clean lines and horrifying clarity, is the moment when college football’s financial chickens have come home to roost.

The numbers are staggering enough to make a Wall Street quant nervous. Major athletic departments have the kind of revenue shortfalls that would make a leveraged buyout specialist think twice, all while trying to maintain the facade that their business model isn’t fundamentally broken. Our Hot Seat Rankings arrive in this financial maelstrom, a list that increasingly reads like a collection of toxic assets nobody knows how to value.

Consider the range of buyouts in play: Marshall could rid itself of Charles Huff for the price of a mid-level administrator’s salary ($125,917), while Baylor would need to liquidate the equivalent of a small endowment ($20-25 million) to move on from Dave Aranda. In any rational market, these numbers represent the cost of doing business. But in 2024’s college football economy, where athletic departments are juggling NIL collectives, revenue sharing, the House Settlement, facility arms races, and operational deficits that would make a venture capitalist blanch, even UMass’s relatively modest $800,000 obligation to Don Brown looks less like a buyout and more like a luxury they might not be able to afford.

We’re witnessing the emergence of a new market inefficiency: coaches who become unsackable not through their success but through the financial implications of their failure. In a world where half our Hot Seat candidates owe their job security to their buyout clauses rather than their win percentages, we’ve entered a realm where being too expensive to fire has become its own kind of competitive advantage.

Welcome to college football’s new normal, where balance sheets matter more than playbooks, and the most important numbers aren’t on the scoreboard but in the fine print of contracts that increasingly look like they were designed by derivatives traders rather than athletic directors.

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Dilfer Moves to the Top of the Hot Seat Rankings. Neal Brown moves to #9.

Mark Haines on October 22, 2024

The college football season is in full swing, and with it comes the inevitable scrutiny of coaches on the hot seat. This week, we’re closely monitoring two coaches: Trent Dilfer at UAB and Neal Brown at West Virginia. Dilfer’s Blazers are off to a dismal 1-6 start, and there’s growing discontent among fans and boosters alike. Brown, meanwhile, is facing pressure to turn things around at West Virginia, where he has yet to achieve a winning record in Big 12 play. We’re also watching Mark Stoops at Kentucky, who is facing a make-or-break season with the Wildcats.

Trent Dilfer: UAB Football and the Abyss

Let’s talk about UAB football. It’s a dumpster fire. It’s a train wreck. It’s a slow, agonizing descent into the abyss. And at the helm, steering this program into oblivion, is Trent Dilfer.

Remember those halcyon days under Bill Clark? Six straight winning seasons. Two conference championships. Three straight division titles. A brand new stadium. That’s the UAB many of these players signed up for. Instead, they got Dilfer.  

Now, the boosters are whispering. They say AD Mark Ingram and the Alabama Board of Trustees are trying to kill this program. Again. And honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me with Dilfer at the helm.

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