This is not a home run. It’s a lateral move with a defensive coat of paint. Coastal Carolina just replaced Tim Beck with Missouri State’s Ryan Beard, a 36-year-old defensive-minded coach who led his program to a 7-6 season in his second year at the FBS level. The move signals a clear philosophical shift: out …

Reader Sean Mullen sent me this message last week: “Congratulations Mark on being completely wrong about Ricky Rahne at Old Dominion. Are you gonna do the right thing now and follow up and state publicly you were wrong?” Fair enough. In August, I predicted Rahne would be fired by November. Instead, ODU went 10-3, beat …

Iowa State moved fast. Matt Campbell took the Penn State job, and within days, the Cyclones had their guy. Jimmy Rogers, fresh off a 6-6 debut season at Washington State, now inherits a program that made the Big 12 Championship Game and became a legitimate conference contender under Campbell. The question everyone in Ames is …

Penn State didn’t hire Matt Campbell. They settled for him. After 54 days of chaos (Pat Kraft whiffing on Matt Rhule, Mike Elko, Kalen DeBoer, and watching Kalani Sitake use Happy Valley as leverage for a BYU extension), the Nittany Lions landed on a coach who was never Plan A. The search that began with …

Auburn just bet $42 million on an unproven offensive coordinator turned three-year Group of Five head coach. The Tigers fired Hugh Freeze after five straight losing seasons. They handed the keys to Alex Golesh, a 39-year-old who went 23-15 at South Florida, has never coached a Power Four game as a head coach, and is …

UCLA made a strong coaching hire inside a broken institutional structure. Bob Chesney brings an elite program-building résumé to Westwood. He’s 131-51 overall (.720) across four levels of college football. He rebuilt every program he touched. And at James Madison, he went 21-5 in two years, won the Sun Belt, earned the program’s first bowl …

Our friends at the Targeting Winners podcast are in on the Capital One Bowl Mania challenge this year, and they’ve invited Coaches Hot Seat readers to join the group. The setup: three contest modes (Standard, Spread, and Confidence). Go perfect in any of them and you could walk away with up to $1 million. Miss …

The Bottom Line Jon Sumrall is a clear upgrade in process and upside over Billy Napier. But whether he’s a true results upgrade in the SEC will hinge almost entirely on staff hires and whether he can translate his Group of Five discipline-and-physicality pitch into a cleaner, more explosive product than Napier ever managed in Gainesville. On résumé …

Is This a Good Hire? The Short Answer: No. Tulane just went from one of the best Group of Five coaching situations in America to hiring a coach who was fired mid-season after going 14-30 at Southern Miss. Let that sink in. The Numbers Tell the Story Will Hall’s FBS head coaching record is brutal: …

Ryan Silverfield is a high-floor stabilizer hire for Arkansas. He’ll almost certainly get the Razorbacks back to bowl eligibility and competent, week-in/week-out SEC football. His Memphis track record – 50-25, bowl games every year, back-to-back double-digit-win seasons – shows he knows how to build and maintain a program. But nothing in his profile screams “SEC …

Is James Franklin a Good Hire at Virginia Tech? The Verdict James Franklin is a high-floor, polarizingly safe hire for Virginia Tech. He dramatically raises the talent and competency baseline in Blacksburg. His recruiting prowess will immediately transform VT’s roster trajectory. And his track record of building programs (Vanderbilt, Penn State) removes the developmental gamble …

The carousel never stops spinning. We’re tracking 21 coaching changes this cycle — 13 with new coaches already named, 8 still waiting on their guy. What follows are our preliminary grades across three categories: Hire Quality, Process, and Fan/Media Sentiment. These aren’t final verdicts. They’re initial reactions. First impressions. The kind of grades that will …

Martin Jarmond fired DeShaun Foster after 15 games, but the real problem sits one floor above the football offices. UCLA’s athletic director created the perfect storm that destroyed Foster’s tenure before it began. The hasty hiring process, inadequate resources, and administrative dysfunction all trace back to one person: the man who pulled the trigger on …

The 2024 season was a nightmare for the Oregon State football team. After enduring conference realignment chaos, coaching departures, and quarterback carousel disasters that led to a disappointing 5-7 record, the Beavers enter 2025 with something they haven’t had in years: hope. The program has made aggressive moves during the offseason to address its most …

New Washington State Football Coach Jimmy Rogers has inherited one hell of a mess. The new Washington State head coach took over a program that lost 46 players to the transfer portal, watched its former coach flee to Wake Forest, and now sits as one of just two teams in what used to be the …

Welcome back to the Coaches Hot Seat, where we dissect the volatile world of college football coaching and track those whose seats are getting too toasty for comfort. Today, we’re tackling our readers’ fiery feedback and passionate perspectives. Because let’s face it, college football fandom is a crucible of emotions, and sometimes those emotions boil …

Think you know college football? Think again. Coaches Hot Seat spends a little time listening to the Targeting Winners Podcast every Friday afternoon during the season. We take our picks and look for the storylines, the upsets, the wins, and the losses to bring you the inside scoop on where the seats are getting hot. We’re not …

Few venues can match the storied legacy of Louisiana State University’s Tiger Stadium in the annals of college football history. For nearly a century, this hallowed ground has been the stage for some of the sport’s most electrifying moments, a colosseum of the South that has witnessed the rise and fall of football dynasties. A …

Week 5 Coaches Hot Seat rankings will be posted on Tuesday morning – stay tuned! The Auburn Abyss: Hugh Freeze’s Nightmare Continues Auburn, a once-proud program, now resembles a sinking ship, rudderless and taking on water fast. Hugh Freeze, the captain brought in to right the vessel, seems to be steering it straight into an …

Preview of Six Marquee Matchups & Full Viewer Guide Week 4 in college football isn’t just another Saturday on the calendar. It’s a crucible, a proving ground where pretenders are unmasked, and contenders emerge bloodied but unbowed. Picture this: Twenty-two young men, their futures hanging in the balance, lined up on a field about to …

There’s a reason we all tune in, why we obsess over every play, every decision made from the sidelines. College football isn’t just a game; it’s a microcosm of American culture. It’s where the values of grit, glory, and, occasionally, utter chaos are laid bare on the gridiron. And Week 2 of this season? It …

We’ve got a real head-scratcher on our hands, courtesy of Comcast Xfinity and their handling of the Big Ten Network’s new additions. John Canzano over at the Bald Faced Truth Newsletter has been digging into this, and it’s not pretty.The Bottom Line: Comcast is blacking out Big Ten Network games featuring Oregon, Washington, UCLA, and …

Buckle up, folks. College football is teetering on the edge of a seismic shift, one that could change the game as much as NIL deals and the transfer portal. We’re talking about unlimited coaches. That’s right. The days of strictly capped…