Forde-Yard Dash: The Coaching Carousel Is Taking a Big November Toll

It’s not likely a coincidence that several coaching targets’ current teams stumbled this month. Can anything be done about it?

Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football, where LSU began and ended the regular season with mighty flops:

MORE DASH: Final CFP Questions | Auburn Gonna Auburn | Title Game Picks

Second Quarter

The Coaching Carousel’s Corrosive Effect on November

On Friday, Cincinnati (11) lost to Tulane, 27–24. It was the Bearcats’ first home loss in five years, and it cost them a chance to play in a fourth consecutive American Athletic Conference championship game. On Saturday, word started to percolate that coach Luke Fickell was talking to Wisconsin about becoming the next coach of the Badgers. On Sunday afternoon, Fickell was telling his Cincinnati team goodbye.

This didn’t all just bubble up after Cincinnati lost to Tulane. Subsequent reporting revealed that Fickell and Wisconsin had mutual interest for a couple of weeks prior to Sunday. The Athletic’s Justin Williams reported that Fickell’s wife, Amy, took a visit to Madison to scout it out.

Thus the question for Cincinnati athletic director John Cunningham on Sunday night was logical: Did Fickell’s consideration of the Wisconsin job have an adverse effect on the Bearcats’ performance in a crucial game Friday? “Absolutely not,” Cunningham said. “No one’s more focused on his team than coach Fickell.”

This has, in the past, been true—Fickell has cost himself jobs by refusing to even discuss them during the season. But it’s fair to wonder whether his change in approach during this spin of the coaching carousel played a part in Cincinnati losing its ironclad grip on the American. (It’s also fair to point out that losing to this Green Weave team is no disgrace, and that Fickell and his staff did good work going 9–3 with a massively rebuilt team.)

Cincinnati is one of several programs that saw their coaches engage in searches for other jobs and simultaneously fall flat at the end of the regular season. The list as it stands today:

Kiffin’s name was connected to Auburn before he told Ole Miss he was staying :: Matt Bush/USA TODAY Sports

Mississippi (12): Lane Kiffin becomes the hot name at Auburn, and the speculation was legitimate. Meanwhile, the Rebels lose their last three games. While being beaten by Alabama on Nov. 12th was expected, the utter flop the following week at Arkansas was not—Ole Miss trailed 42–6 in the fourth quarter on the way to a 42–27 loss.

What followed was classic Kiffin theater. A shoddily reported and ultimately erroneous TV story out of Mississippi said that Kiffin was going to resign at Ole Miss on Friday after the Thanksgiving Egg Bowl game against Mississippi State and would be the next coach at Auburn. Rather than ignoring it or issuing a brief refutation, Kiffin fired off a series of tweets Monday night over a span of two hours assailing the report and the reporter.

Given the short turnaround from the debacle in Arkansas, it was fair to wonder whether Kiffin was doing all he could to cram in preparation for the rivalry game against the Bulldogs. Come Thanksgiving night, Mississippi State upset Mississippi in Oxford, 24–22. Kiffin is staying at Ole Miss, but there were a lot of unhappy Rebels fans after the way the season ended and whether the coach was fully invested in it.

Liberty (13): Next man up on the Auburn search list was (and is) Flames coach Hugh Freeze. As Kiffin’s interest in the job cooled, Freeze’s burned hotter than ever. He’d agreed to a contract extension through 2030 in late October, but that was so last month. This month, he was in pursuit of a return to the Southeastern Conference.

Saturday, a Liberty team favored by 24 points lost 49–14 at home to 4–6 New Mexico State. The Flames ended the regular season on a three-game losing streak after starting 8–1.

Coastal Carolina (14): Coach Jamey Chadwell stayed in Myrtle Beach with the up-and-coming Chanticleers after going 11–1 in 2020 and 11–2 in ’21. But after rolling to a 9–1 start this year and clinching the Sun Belt East Division title, Chadwell’s name began to circulate last week as a candidate at Georgia Tech and South Florida.

With that as a backdrop, Coastal was obliterated Saturday by James Madison, 47–7. The Chanticleers were without star quarterback Grayson McCall, but the margin of defeat still was a shock—far greater than the 15-point spread Las Vegas put on the game. The defeat ended Coastal’s hopes of hosting the Sun Belt championship game, which instead will be played Saturday at Troy.

Coaches can talk all they want—and they will—about their laser focus on the season at hand and their team. There is considerable contrary evidence that, when the coaching carousel starts spinning and they want on board, that focus can waver—with a major effect on how the school currently paying them finishes the season.

Last year at Oklahoma (15), Lincoln Riley lost to Oklahoma State one day and was gone to USC the next. At Oregon (16), Mario Cristobal was being blown out in the Pac-12 title game by Utah on a Friday night, then signing with Miami on Monday. At SMU (17), Sonny Dykes was reported to be the next coach at TCU before his last game with the Mustangs, which was a 34–31 upset loss to Tulsa—SMU lost four of its last five.

Coaching movement used to be a bowl killer. Now it’s been accelerated into a November killer. The list of culprits remains the same:

• Athletic directors (18) who fire early—which is another form of giving up on a season, and increasingly common—also want to hire early. They aren’t terribly concerned about the impact on the school they’re raiding. And agents (19) who are only worried about getting their clients paid and in place—and their clients need to lie before, during and after the process about how much their eyes are wandering while supposedly committed to their team’s season. Well, that’s just part of the dance, right?

Solution: Adopt an NFL-styled policy pertaining to when interviews are allowed of potential head coaches. The NFL tweaked its rules last offseason in a couple of ways: prohibiting interviewing a head-coaching candidate employed by another team until the third day after the conclusion of that team’s final regular-season game; and prohibiting in-person interviews with candidates who are employed by other teams until after all wild-card games have ended. Before the end of the wild-card round, in-person interviews may occur only with candidates employed by the team hiring a head coach or candidates not currently employed by the NFL.

Could college football’s decentralized, cannibalistic conference leadership agree to such a principle? Perhaps not. But there is an answer to the oft-cited reason for coaches bailing on their teams as soon as possible. See below.

• The December signing period, which begins Dec. 21 this year and is now augmented by the opening of the transfer portal Dec. 5. The standard rationale is that new coaches have to get started on roster management and recruiting at the next job.

Solution: abolish the December signing period (20) and move back the early February signing period as well. Put it in March or April. The recruiting calendar doesn’t need to be condensed as tightly as it is on top of the playing season—especially with an expanded College Football Playoff that likely will stretch into the second half of January.

The portal issue is harder to fix. But if the NCAA would like to get back into the business of enforcing its own bylaws and limiting athletes to a maximum of one transfer without a year sitting out—no waivers, don’t ask—that would help slow the flow into the portal.

Schools are paying increasingly large sums for coaches per season. It would be nice if those coaches saw fit to complete the season—even just the regular season—with full commitment before mentally checking out and moving on to the next job.

MORE DASH: Final CFP Questions | Auburn Gonna Auburn | Title Game Picks