The latest crisis in college football—there’s one every week, because crises are oddly good for business—is one of scarcity. With more money in the hands of boosters whose identity revolves around spending it and fewer rules binding those glad hands, every weekend is now dominated not by who wins or loses but by who’s getting fired as a result. All those hirings and firings cost money, but that’s not the scarcity in question. That scarcity is the diminishing number of coaches on the hot seat; they’re getting fired so quickly that they barely have time to warm their buns.
And so this morning we say hello to Brian Kelly, whose résumé is currently being updated. Kelly was fired on Sunday as the head coach at LSU over losing three SEC games in the last four weeks and wanting to fire different staff members than athletic director Scott Woodward. One thing led to another, as all things eventually do, and because Kelly couldn’t fire Woodward but Woodward could fire Kelly—well, you know how that dances. This is the sort of thing that happens when a $53 million buyout of the coach’s contract is considered “doable,” and when the people with that money really, really want to do it.
More to the point than the money involved, though, is the erosion—no, “detonation” is really the right word here—of one of the sport’s greatest traditions, which is the aforementioned hot seat. There had always been a time and place for discussions of all the people who maybe or definitely were going to be fired for failing to win the only championship the big boys hand out; generally speaking, in previous seasons, that time on the calendar was sort of now-ish. Today, however, because football programs cannot handle their finances even as they balloon to stratospheric levels, the sport is burning through that hot list at peak speed, not just debating making these expensive moves but mashing the “immolate” button over and over again. It’s now to the point where all the coaches likely to be fired in December were already fired in October, and the ones who’ll get croaked in December won’t get nearly the buzz because directional schools will be the only ones left.
And unlike most years, these firings have come with plenty of media lead time; donors with the power to foment regime change tend to like the sound of their own voice even if it is pitched at a confidential whisper into the voicemail of their media member of choice. The college punditocracy has been more predictive about firings than normal, because the boosters 1) are inveterate gossips and 2) less worried about who is too expensive to be fired; they’ve always loved to talk about this stuff, but an increasing amount of that talk has translated into action. In other words, the hot seat as we knew it is now really more of a gurney, and anyone who was on it probably isn’t any more because the tagging and bagging has already happened. The only game left on those previously endangered coaches’ schedules is the buyout negotiation.
Kelly had always been a ridiculously bad fit for LSU, which is easier to say now than ever. Baton Rouge is a weird place for college athletics to do business, and not just because the people who have a direct say in how things are run there include the governor of the state. This particular bunch of boosters care too much and too wildly, and the coaches who survive and advance there are the ones who win a lot and handle the weirdness with more aplomb than Kelly could ever be bothered to. We should have known that the first time he addressed the students and unleashed a luxurious fake southern accent that would have offended Foghorn Leghorn if he wasn’t fictional.
Woodward, for his part, likes to take big swings on big names because he believes in the value of winning the press conference and knows that he can do so with the hyperdriven deployment of other people’s money. Kelly wasn’t even the biggest or most expensive name that Woodward had corralled in his time. That would be Jimbo Fisher, who nailed down a $70 million buyout two years after Woodward left Texas A&M for LSU. Fisher was fired in 2023 for going 6-4, but that came at a more dignified time—the week before Thanksgiving when coaches are supposed to be fired. Woodward’s big swing on Kelly was four years old by the time LSU gave it up, and the roster payroll (yep, that’s also a thing now) had tripled to $18 million over the spring and summer. The people that put that money up expected a national championship; the press release kneecapping Kelly referred not to expectations but to “demands,” which speaks to the depth of their resentment.
Thus, when the Bayou Bengals—it remains a cool name, despite four years of being associated with a flinty old Rottweiler like Brian Kelly—were manhandled by Texas A&M on Saturday and eliminated from any further consideration for the college football playoff, Woodward and Kelly gathered to determine how best to harness the panic that comes with a crowd of 80,000 chanting “Fire Kelly!” To nobody’s surprise, it quickly descended into an argument that Kelly was either too pigheaded or dim to realize he couldn’t win, $53 million or no $53 million. His buyout, if it stands at the current value, will make Kelly the current national champion at money paid for not working. Maybe he can hang a banner in his den.
Here is where the hot seat discussion comes into play. There are seemingly no more candidates, a shocking shortage of endangered head coaches. This follows the most profligate bloodletting in the sport’s recent history, with 61 coaching changes in the past two years (out of 136 FBS jobs). There has been an average of one firing per week since September 14, when UCLA’s DeShaun Foster and Virginia Tech’s Brent Pry went down—September 23 (Oklahoma State), September 28 (Arkansas), October 12 (UAB, Oregon State, and Penn State), October 19 (Colorado State and Florida), and now October 26 (LSU).
This leaves Wisconsin (Luke Fickell), Michigan State (Jonathan Smith), Middle Tennessee (Derek Mason), Auburn (Hugh Freeze), and Kentucky (Mark Stoops) as the leaders for in-season firings at big-money schools, with seven or eight others at your more mom-and-pop programs. This list does not include Florida State’s Mike Norvell, who has gotten assurances he will finish out the year, and North Carolina, where Bill Belichick’s seat got too hot too early and has now cooled due not to improved performance, though they are losing by smaller margins later in games, but a lack of continued interest. It’s a lesson for those who do these seating assignments to give the discontent time and room to breathe.
But it does mean we can easily cover the one-per-week nut that will take us to bowl season. The names (or dollar amounts) won’t get much bigger than Kelly or James Franklin; Franklin is already being mentioned for, among others, the LSU gig, because the folks who monitor the hot seat are finding that the ceaseless demand for operating the bellows has led to relatively underdeveloped lists of potential candidates.
So let’s say we may still have another 20 or 30 firings before the national championship. Artlessness imitates life too, you know, but this much is certain—when the firings come this quickly, the remaining names will generate less buzz. Akron? Northern Illinois? Wyoming? Hey, we don’t pick ’em, we just list ’em.
Belichick is probably the one potential candidate that could make fans jerk back in their seats, but he has survived the initial whirlwind; the folks who hired him are showing remarkable obstinacy in the face of 2-5, or perhaps they’ve just started thinking about basketball season. Norvell has been on the hot seat too long and is now charred evenly on all sides. His departure is not so much a prediction as it is a guarantee in motion.
These mass purges run cyclically, or used to, and so we expect the market to cool once the athletic directors, school presidents, donors, politicians, and other well-heeled members of the weasel family figure out that even this level of money is finite. But while nobody understands the way our dumb new world works, the college game is doing the one bit of counter-programming against the NFL that the pros could never match. Call it strategic reduction-in-force, as Trumpian a methodology as exists anywhere, but also just a reflection of basic media dynamics. What do you think led the news in New Orleans Sunday, Brian Kelly caked in shame, or the Saints, well, caked in shame? If it bleeds, it leads; if there’s an eight-figure buyout attached, all the better.
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