Blog Article
Week 2 Coaches Hot Seat Rankings
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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