Blog Article
Week 0 – 2026 Coaches Hot Seat Rankings
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.
