When former Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley fired Ron Zook on Oct. 25, 2004 — smack in the middle of the season — the timing seemed shocking.
Following another disappointing loss in the post-Steve Spurrier era, the Gators were hovering above .500 at 4-3 and No. 10 Georgia was looming. When Foley made the decision, he said, “Whatever must happen ultimately, must happen immediately.”
That quote has since been repeated and attributed to Foley throughout the state of Florida whenever a disgruntled fan base wants a coach out. While it likely originates with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Foley might have unknowingly encouraged a trend. Midseason firings have slowly ramped up over the years, reaching a point now where they’re not only common, but they’re also happening even earlier.
With the firing of Auburn’s Bryan Harsin on the final day of October, six Power 5 head coaches have lost their jobs already this season. Harsin joins Scott Frost (Nebraska); Karl Dorrell (Colorado); Geoff Collins (Georgia Tech); Herm Edwards (Arizona State); and Paul Chryst (Wisconsin).
According to ESPN Stats & Information, there have been 36 Power 5 midseason coaching changes (any time before the conclusion of the regular season, not including bowl games) during the College Football Playoff era. Fourteen of those have occurred since the start of the 2021 season.
Each school’s situation was unique, but together they lead to the question: Why now?
Athletic directors across the country have differing opinions on why in-season coaching changes have become more prevalent but agree that one factor is the early signing date and changes to the recruiting calendar. They also say some administrators want to get ahead of the coaching search, and some of it is simply pressure to win and unrealistic expectations. Regardless of the reasons, the hefty buyouts such as $15.5 million for Harsin don’t seem to be much of a deterrent, and some caution that if the trend doesn’t change, the dead money and other problems associated with it will only get worse.
“You think schools are impatient now and firing coaches a month into the season?” one Power 5 coach said. “Wait until some of these donor-based collectives and boosters doling out all this cash to get prospects see those prospects not getting onto the field immediately or take a while to develop — and the team is struggling — they’re the ones who are going to be making the decisions on whether the coach stays or goes.”
Reporters Kyle Bonagura, Heather Dinich, Chris Low, Adam Rittenberg and Tom VanHaaren break down the trend and what it means moving forward.
The calendar
The firing line has moved up in the college football season and some schools have acted quickly. Last year, Georgia Southern, UConn and Texas Tech took advantage of their early openings and the availability of coaches to name replacements before mid-November. But for the most part, the hiring cycle has held firm.
“Nobody’s hiring a coach right now,” a Power 5 athletic director said. “The last week of November, the first week of December, that’s the sweet spot.”
Early December has long been the most active period for coaching movement, both firing and hirings. But two other December dates now loom large for athletic directors: the early signing period for recruiting, which this year begins Dec. 21, and the opening of the transfer portal Dec. 5.
The portal accelerated coaching changes before specific transfer windows were introduced. Now schools have a potential deadline to ensure new coaches are in place.
Veteran coaching agent Bryan Harlan said the early signing date and transfer portal “changed everything” with the timing of coaching hires.
“You can’t miss a cycle of players,” said Harlan, whose firm, recently acquired by Excel Sports Management, represents Minnesota’s P.J. Fleck, Miami’s Mario Cristobal, Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson and others. “By the time you wait, the typical end of the year, it’s just too late. People are trying to get ahead of the game and the reason is the fact that the amount of players and prospects that need to be evaluated is a lot greater because of the movement.”
So, what exactly are athletic directors doing for weeks — and, in some cases, months — before smiling beside their next coach at an introductory news conference? There’s plenty of work to be done, they say, both in the candidate market and on their own campuses.
An athletic director who recently made an early coaching change said he used the lead time to engage the university president, trustees, faculty leaders, boosters and more. He explained the coaching marketplace, the salary range and also solicited their input.
“When a coach is selected, everyone has a piece of the solution and can say, ‘I was a part of that,’ rather than the AD making a decision to say, ‘It’s my hire,'” the AD said.
A slower, more inclusive approach is designed to appease not only those around the program but the coaches trying to lead it. Next to “culture,” the biggest buzzword around college football is “alignment,” meaning a shared commitment to winning from the campus to the athletic department to the boosters/collectives.
Additional search time allows administrators to have substantial conversations with the candidates and those around them to explain the plan.
“If the coach is worth his salt, he’s going to ask the question if everyone is on the same page,” a Power 5 AD said. “Regardless of the financial pain, the ability to bring everybody together — and that doesn’t happen in one, two weeks at the end of the season — that gives ADs time to unite everybody.”
In January 2019, Northern Illinois athletic director Sean Frazier oversaw an accelerated search when coach Rod Carey left for Temple. A week later, Frazier hired NFL assistant Thomas Hammock, who last season guided NIU to a MAC title.
Frazier is happy with the outcome but understands why ADs make changes early.
“It’s to get in front of the process, the media, the alums, the frenzy that wants change,” Frazier said. “It’s that whole issue of skating to where the puck is going to be because they know if they rush this thing, if they mess it up, they’re going to be out of a job. If this hire was going to define your AD-ship, wouldn’t you like to have a little bit more time?”
Others push back on that notion. They cite many examples of schools that made strong hires without early firings.
“You can evaluate and not decide to fire someone,” a coaching agent said. “You can conduct due diligence of who’s in the market and take a wait-and-see [approach] and let the bottom fall out until it’s time to let someone go. The great ADs are great relationship-brokers, and if you can’t talk to the agents and get a sense of who might be of interest, you’ve got some problems. You don’t need the white smoke pluming out of the athletic department building saying: ‘We’re open for business.'”
But several athletic directors told ESPN that conducting a search while a coach is in place carries risk, especially because of the recruiting/transfer demands and a more pressurized media environment.
“People think, ‘Maybe they’re not going to make the change, maybe it’s too expensive,'” Frazier said. “You want to erase all of that doubt by making the change early enough so you can fold your process into 100 percent trying to get the right candidate, at the right time, to attack it head on.” — Rittenberg
The finances
According to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, data for the 2022 fiscal year is projected to show buyouts for FBS football coaches at public schools have tripled since the first year of the College Football Playoff.
In the past season and a half, 13 Power 5 head football coaches were fired with buyouts totaling more than $140 million, according to the database. ESPN found last year that public universities in FBS conferences paid more than $530 million to fired football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball coaches from January 2010 through January 2021.
“They’re going to owe money whether they do it now, or do it at the end of the year, right?” Florida AD Scott Stricklin said. “The recruiting calendar is an issue. In pro sports, head coaches have worked the last year of their contract all the time. We can’t do that because you can’t let a coach get [his deal] under three or four years because of recruiting. That leads to a bunch of buyouts. That’s just the cost of doing business, I guess.”
It’s a cost that has soared along with lucrative television contracts, which are only growing fatter in the soon-to-be 16-team SEC and Big Ten. There’s also roughly $450 million in gross revenue sitting on the table if the CFP’s management committee can figure out how to expand the playoff to 12 teams as soon as 2024.
Knight Commission chair Len Elmore said dead money could be better utilized on specific goals such as closing the opportunity gap, mental health for student-athletes, safer playing environments and racial equity.
“That money could really do some wonderful, positive things in college sports, yet it’s been wasted by too many hiring mistakes,” he said. “The CFP has done some wonderful things, but since 2015, buyouts for college football coaches alone have tripled. And so it seems to be that agents and ADs have upped the ante because there’s more money available. It’s like they’re playing with Monopoly money. They’re forgetting about the context in which this money should be looked at and spent.”
Last year, the Knight Commission proposed a solution that involves conferences instituting new financial frameworks that could implement penalties on schools and teams for excessive coaching buyouts and compensation.
Elmore said the NCAA can’t create a coaching salary cap because of antitrust laws, but the conferences can institute a financial framework akin to a luxury tax in pro sports. “There are ways to bring the spending under control, but it doesn’t seem like anybody necessarily has an appetite, because they’ve got their contracts out of whack,” he said. “They don’t understand what a not-for-profit is, or they don’t care.”
One industry source said wealthy boosters have been helping fund coaches’ buyouts through athletic department donations for decades. Athletic directors will often reach out to their most disgruntled donors to see if they are willing to pitch in to make a change.
Another Power 5 athletic director said buyouts require commitment from trustees, the university president, faculty, committees and boosters.
“In order to attract a great head coach, it is critical to have alignment and a consistent vision among those key constituents, because that’s what the coach [candidate] will ask about.” — Dinich
The expectations
In the NFL, Nick Saban grew immune to the league’s culture of firing coaches a few games into the season. He saw it as a head coach and assistant.
“When I was in the NFL, you could feel it happening, the media and the fans would start killing a guy when things didn’t go well early in the season, and that would drive public opinion,” Saban said. “Ownership would think that the only way to change the barometer, even that early in the season, was to make a coaching change.
“That was the NFL. I never thought I’d see it get that way in college football at all. But it’s here, and I don’t think it’s changing any time soon.”
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence either that early-season firings have come as college football has adopted rules that blur the distinction between it and the professional game.
With that changing landscape — name, image and likeness (NIL) opportunities for the players, the easing of transfer rules, conference realignment and everything geared toward the College Football Playoff — the pressure has never been greater to get the right coach in place.
Saban’s six national championships at Alabama give him immunity in a way no other college coach enjoys. They have also set an unrealistic precedent of what should be possible.
“How many programs out there are truly ready-made to have immediate success and never have dips? There aren’t many,” one Power 5 head coach said. “And now with all the NIL money out there and schools seeing that there are no rules out there being enforced in terms of buying high school players, there’s more scrambling than ever before to move on from this [coach] and bring another one in.
“What a lot of these ADs and donors forget is that it’s still a developmental sport, at least for most of us. It takes time to bring a player in, develop that player and develop the kind of culture within your program that it takes to win consistently.”
Lincoln Riley’s success at USC this year challenges that theory. While immediate transfer eligibility can crater a team, it can also lead to quicker turnarounds than have been possible in the past. USC wasn’t devoid of talent when Riley arrived, but the jump from 4-8 in 2021 to 7-1 this year likely wouldn’t have been possible if players still had to sit out a season before transferring.
Take the case of receiver Jordan Addison. After he won the Biletnikoff Award as a sophomore, it’s hard to come up with a plausible scenario in which he would have transferred to USC had he been required to sit out a season. The same applies for quarterback Caleb Williams.
That dynamic has essentially created a new blueprint for success: Hire a coach who can attract already-proven top college talent and a speedy turnaround is possible. NIL opportunities factor heavily into that equation, too, which is why this route will apply only to programs with a certain level of resources.
Those types aren’t the only schools getting in on the act.
Colorado has been mostly irrelevant for two decades. It didn’t move on from Karl Dorrell with the playoff in mind; it did so knowing that, at minimum, a competitive product is a necessity to remain relevant. In prior eras, relevancy had short-term ramifications, but with conference realignment always looming, lower-tier Power 5 programs have to position themselves so they don’t get left behind if and when power conference consolidation comes. — Low and Bonagura
The aftermath
Athletic directors are looking to the future after firing a coach and strategizing about who they’ll hire next. But the players and assistants still on staff have to pick up the pieces and finish out the season.
In some situations, a coach getting fired midseason can come as a surprise, but that type of decision happening only a few weeks in is something that doesn’t usually sneak up on the players.
“We talked probably weeks before Coach actually got fired, because I’ve never experienced my coach getting fired,” said an FBS player whose coach was fired this season. “I was like, by the way we were performing, it’s bound to happen, it would be foolish not to.”
While the firing seemed inevitable, that didn’t mean it wasn’t emotional for the player. The coach who spent time recruiting most of the players on the team and the coach they built a relationship with was fired and they knew it was partially their fault because of the on-field product.
“I can’t speak for all my teammates,” the player said. “But I think the majority of guys were pretty angry at themselves for getting the coaches’ jobs taken.”
That anger turned to a realization that they still have a lot of football left to play. If they wallowed in their anger, it wouldn’t do anyone any good. So they came together and made the decision to use those emotions on the field.
“The practice [after he was fired] had more energy than any practice for a long time,” the player said. “It was great and we were like, we already got our coach fired so what else can we lose?”
Several teams saw a bump in the aftermath of a coaching change. Georgia Tech defeated Pitt and Duke in its first two games under interim Brent Key. Colorado beat Cal to get its only win of the season. And Wisconsin is coming off its best win of the season, over Purdue.
But those highs are often temporary, as players and coaches start looking ahead to what’s next.
The NCAA’s Division I Council implemented a rule allowing players on teams that have fired their coaches midseason an immediate 30-day window to enter the transfer portal. They don’t transfer during that period but the portal entry allows opposing coaches to communicate with any players who wish to transfer at the end of the season.
Despite multiple coaches being fired, only three players from those Power 5 teams entered the portal. There could be a number of reasons for that, but the anonymous player told ESPN that the firing brought the team closer together and the players agreed to finish what they started.
“It was disappointing, but as a team we’re just trying to focus on coming back and we hate that we got our coach’s job taken,” the player said. “I know the ramifications of someone getting fired, that the family has to move, so when it happens it sucks. I think the team is taking that personally and trying to get the end of the season back on track and finish it out for each other.” — VanHaaren