Happy Thanksgiving. May your stomachs be full as you work the remotes and your Twitter refresh button this weekend.
1. What to watch for this coming week
Wisconsin may have tipped its hand as the second FBS school to hire a full-time head coach for 2023 when it posted its job opening just hours after the Badgers’ 15-14 win Saturday at Nebraska.
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The job must be posted for seven days, a timeline that makes sense with Wisconsin’s regular season ending this Saturday against Minnesota. And with interim head coach Jim Leonhard improving to 4-2 this past weekend, all signs point to the interim label being removed and the former Badgers great getting the job full time.
The 40-year-old Leonhard is expected to meet with school officials in the next few days, a source with knowledge of the situation told The Athletic, with both sides eager to know where everyone stands and have a plan in place by the end of this week.
At this point, it would be a surprise if Leonhard isn’t ultimately named the full-time head coach, and soon. But this whole situation has been shocking to begin with, starting with Paul Chryst getting fired five games into the season.
Charlotte moved first among the in-season openings, hiring Michigan associate head coach Biff Poggi last week.
After those two programs, who’s next?
One would think it will be Nebraska, considering the Cornhuskers were the first to make a move in-season, firing Scott Frost on Sept. 11. Athletic director Trev Alberts has had plenty of time to formulate a plan, talk to several candidates and run background on several others.
As colleague Mitch Sherman wrote this past weekend, the 10-week-long information void has created plenty of speculation, some of it more substantial than others. Matt Rhule, Lance Leipold and Jeff Monken have all been debriefed by Nebraska to varying degrees, but the longer this drags on, as Sherman wrote Saturday, “the likelihood that Albert makes a hire that catches us off guard rates just as high” as a move that is expected.
That’s more clarity than can be said for Arizona State, a job that opened just one week after Nebraska’s did. The Sun Devils’ search appears to lack direction and information.
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AD Ray Anderson did little to calm the public’s nerves when he said during the news conference announcing Herm Edwards’ firing that he wasn’t sure how involved he would be in making the next coaching hire. Speculation about Anderson’s future has run rampant, but ASU president Michael Crow has stated publicly that Anderson’s job is safe.
Anderson has made some calls on candidates, multiple people with knowledge of the situation told The Athletic, but there is belief in the industry that Chris Howard, who was hired this year as ASU’s executive VP and COO, will have the biggest say in the coaching decision. And that would make sense: Howard is a Rhodes Scholar and Bronze Star recipient who won the Campbell Trophy as a running back at Air Force. He is, in a word, overqualified.
Elsewhere, Lane Kiffin-to-Auburn isn’t a done deal, but the Ole Miss coach is widely believed to be the Tigers’ primary target. Kiffin has done little to quell speculation, although nothing is expected to happen before Ole Miss completes its regular season Thursday night against rival Mississippi State.
One job that has yet to come open but likely will is West Virginia, where Neal Brown fell to 4-7 on Saturday with a home loss to Kansas State. Brown is 21-25 in four seasons in Morgantown entering this weekend’s finale against heavily favored Oklahoma State.
No decision has been made yet on Brown’s future, as school brass is still at least a week away from hiring an AD. The new AD, whomever it ends up being, is expected to be given a chance to make an independent decision on Brown, although last Monday’s parting of ways with AD Shane Lyons does not bode well for Brown’s future.
Lyons landed at his previous employer, Alabama, just seven days after being let go from the Mountaineers. He will be the Crimson Tide’s executive deputy AD and COO.
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2. The numbers behind silly season
As the final full weekend of regular-season games nears, so, too, does Black Sunday — the first full day of the offseason for programs that won’t go bowling, and the first day of the rest of some coaches’ lives.
This year’s coaching carousel figures to be a little quieter than last year’s, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a surprise or two.
So let’s break down the numbers, so as to create a reasonable expectation of what’s coming next week.
14. The number of schools that made head-coaching changes last year before their regular seasons were over.
8*. The number of schools that have made head-coaching changes this year before their regular seasons were over. (A ninth, UAB, technically opened this summer when Bill Clark stepped down because of back issues, with Bryant Vincent being named the interim just for the 2022 season.)
4. The number of schools last season that made a head-coaching hire before the 2021 season was over (Georgia Southern, Texas Tech, UConn, UMass).
1. The number of schools this season that have made a head-coaching hire before their season is over (Charlotte).
7. The number of schools last season that fired their coach after their season ended (Louisiana Tech, New Mexico State, Duke, Temple, Colorado State, Miami, Hawaii).
2. The number of those firings that came more than a week after the regular season ended. (Miami slow-played the Manny Diaz dismissal as part of its recruitment of Mario Cristobal, and Todd Graham resigned in January after a Senate hearing that was called amid player frustration.)
14. The number of schools that made a head-coaching hire by conference championship weekend.
7. The number of head coaches who voluntarily switched schools last season.
3. The number of assistant coaches who were promoted to head coach at the same school last season.
3. Handing out hardware
We spend so much time focusing on job security this time every year that it’s easy to overlook how many great coaching jobs have been done this season.
With that, let’s hand out some unofficial hardware among the first-year coaches.
First-year coach of the year (head coaching experience): Sonny Dykes, TCU. This is a no-brainer, even if the Horned Frogs coach darn near cost his team a shot at a perfect regular season and College Football Playoff berth with a reckless decision to call a run play (that went for 3 yards) before racing the field goal unit onto the field for a game-winning kick at Baylor. But that’s an alternate history that TCU won’t have to ponder. And the job Dykes has done, from assembling his staff to getting the most out of this roster, has been absolutely phenomenal. TCU was +15000 in the preseason to win it all, and +1000 to win the Big 12, which were the fifth-best odds in the conference. Now the Horned Frogs are one of the few teams still alive in the national title hunt, and they will be favored to win the Big 12 next weekend against whomever they end up facing in Arlington, Texas. Honorable mention: Kalen DeBoer, Washington
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First-year coach of the year (no head coaching experience): Dan Lanning, Oregon. Tough call here between Lanning and Duke’s Mike Elko, but the way Lanning has gotten the Ducks to bounce back from a 49-3 shellacking in his debut against Georgia has been impressive. Like Dykes, he was responsible for a horrific late-game decision, one that ended up backfiring: going for it late on fourth down two weeks ago against Washington with a backup quarterback, a call that led to the Huskies ending the Ducks’ Playoff hopes. But Oregon is still very much in position to make its fourth straight Pac-12 title game, and the way that Lanning’s staff — particularly rising star OC Kenny Dillingham — has reinvented Auburn transfer Bo Nix has been nothing short of spectacular. Honorable mention: Elko
Surprise success story of the year: Jim Mora Jr., UConn. The hiring of Mora was widely criticized — as if there were ever a realistic UConn football hire that could generate applause — but the 61-year-old has worked a minor miracle in Storrs so far. The Huskies closed the regular season at 6-6, pulling off huge late-season upsets over Boston College and Liberty. They finished 5-2 after a 1-4 start. Who knows what the long-term future holds for this independent program, but UConn deserves plenty of credit for getting bowl-eligible in Year 1 of the Mora regime, especially after posting four wins, total, across its last three football-playing seasons (2018, ‘19 and ‘21).
The “Let’s Try To Do What He Did in Year 1” Award: Lincoln Riley, USC. Being a coach in the age of the transfer portal, immediate eligibility and NIL can be taxing. As Riley has shown, however, it can also make for quick success stories. It is hard to contextualize just how different the Trojans football program looks in less than one year’s time under Riley, who has them ranked 5th in the AP poll, in the Pac-12 title game and with the Heisman Trophy front-runner right now in Caleb Williams. If USC beats Notre Dame and whomever it plays in the Pac-12 title game the following week (likely Oregon), it is all but assured of a Playoff berth. Surely, boosters and ADs will point to Riley’s quick fix this season as signs that success can be had quickly in this era. And surely, those same decision-makers will overlook the fact that Riley is coaching at a blue blood located in beautiful L.A.
The “Fit is Overrated” Award: Brian Kelly, LSU. The only surprising thing about Kelly having success in Baton Rouge is just how quickly he has turned the Tigers around. Kelly has won big everywhere he’s been. And while his departure from Notre Dame will probably only be justified by eventually winning it all with the Tigers, well, who would’ve guessed that he’d have a chance to do just that in his debut campaign? The Northeast native who made his coaching chops in the Midwest drew lots of eyeballs for his sudden accent and dancing upon arriving to the Bayou, but if his Tigers beat Texas A&M this week and somehow upset No. 1 Georgia in the following week’s SEC title game, LSU will likely be in the Playoff. Go figure: He departed a Notre Dame program that got left out of the CFP with one loss last year, and he could potentially make it at LSU with two losses this year.
The “Best New Coach You’re Not Paying Attention To” Award: Jon Sumrall, Troy. Sumrall came over from Kentucky, where he was co-DC, and wasted no time turning around a Trojans program that had not had a winning season since 2018. Troy is 9-2 overall and 6-1 in Sun Belt play entering Saturday’s game at Arkansas State, and a win will clinch the West Division title. That one Sun Belt loss, by the way? It came on a Hail Mary at Appalachian State back in Week 3. Troy has won eight consecutive games since.
4. Odds and ends
Tulane responded to its first conference loss in dominant fashion Thursday night, running all over SMU en route to a 59-24 win that keeps the Green Wave squarely in the hunt for a New Year’s Six bowl bid with a trip to Cincinnati looming on Friday.
One of the biggest reasons for Tulane’s turnaround from 2-10 to 9-2 speaks to the outside-the-box thinking of coach Willie Fritz. In search of a new offensive coordinator when Chip Long left for Georgia Tech after one season, Fritz turned to the Division II ranks and hired Jim Svoboda, who had gone 86-43 the past 11 years as the head coach at Central Missouri.
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Svoboda is a 62-year-old Hawaii native whose 40-year coaching career has largely come at the NAIA, Division III, Division II and FCS levels. (A three-year stint as UCLA’s OC from 2004-06 was his only previous FBS experience.)
Fritz hired six new coaches before this season. The only other Power 5 coaching experience among those six comes from special teams coordinator Robby Discher (quality control at Georgia, GA at Oklahoma State) and offensive line coach Eman Naghavi (off-field role at Texas). The staff has been coy on who actually calls the plays and is responsible for this offensive renaissance, although the lone holdover on offense, tight ends coach Slade Nagle, certainly plays one of the biggest roles in that operation, too.
The Green Wave rushed for 310 yards last week against the Mustangs, and they now sit third in the American Athletic Conference in rushing offense (189.73 yards per game) while ranking 25th nationally in scoring offense (35.1 points per game).
And while we’re on the subject of unconventional hires, a shout-out to Mike Furrey and the staff at Division II Limestone University (South Carolina). Limestone hired Furrey, the former Chicago Bears receivers coach, after going 0-9 in 2021. The Saints had gone 4-30 from 2018-21 under the previous regime — which, ironically, followed a 9-12 two-year run with Furrey himself in charge.
Now he is back, and he took Limestone all the way to the NCAA Division II playoffs, where it fell Saturday to West Florida, 45-19. The Saints finished Furrey’s debut season 8-4 overall and 7-2 in South Atlantic Conference play.
Furrey had four former NFL players on his first staff this season: Jericho Cotchery (receivers), Jordan Todman (running backs/strength), Nate Garner (offensive line) and Anthony Hargrove (defensive line). Furrey bounced around the NFL for the better part of a decade, most notably as a receiver with the Lions.
(Top photo of Jim Leonhard: John Fisher / Getty Images)
