Blog Article
Week 5 Coaches Hot Seat Rankings
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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