Eight Power 4 jobs are open right now. Seven are up for grabs because of in-season firings, and one will be because Stanford is doing the Frank Reich thing for a year. More are coming, perhaps some or all of these five among them: Auburn, Kentucky, Florida State, Michigan State and Wisconsin.
Since this is all so much fun — agents schooling schools on these contracts, schools quickly giving up on coaches and paying enormous sums for them to go away, then hitting up the donors for even more to help pay off the last coach and give the new coach a better shot at winning — let’s just go with the baker’s dozen and match 13 jobs with 13 ideal new coaches.
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As The Athletic’s Seth Emerson pointed out in the wake of LSU’s firing of Brian Kelly, the splash hires — such as Scott Woodward luring Kelly from Notre Dame after previously saddling Texas A&M with Jimbo Fisher — aren’t working so well lately. Of the top-10 teams in the current AP poll, six coaches got their jobs without head coaching experience. Curt Cignetti came to Indiana from James Madison. Mike Elko came to Texas A&M from Duke. Kalen DeBoer made a big jump to Alabama from Washington.
And then there’s the splash guy of this cycle, Lane Kiffin, who was fired as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders and USC before he was 40. He has Ole Miss sprinting toward the College Football Playoff and will attract several of these programs.
So here we are with 13 openings. We’ve got different buckets when it comes to potential matches. First, to be clear, the absence of “slam-dunk” candidates for these jobs does not mean there’s a shortage of good candidates. Given the trends, it might actually (and accidentally) result in more successful hires.
Sitting Power 4 head coaches who m
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