With Brian Kelly’s firing from LSU, college football’s coaching carousel is about to spin out of control

The coaching carousel of apocalyptic dreams is coming for college football, and the next six weeks are going to be a feeding frenzy unlike anything this business has ever experienced.

If Penn State’s decision to fire James Franklin two weeks ago was a Roman candle exploding across the sky, LSU reportedly making its move on Brian Kelly on Sunday night was like a cannonball shot into a swimming pool.

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Everyone in the vicinity is about to get soaked.

College football needs a timeout — or perhaps a straightjacket. With five weeks to go in the regular season, we will find out what happens when you put an expanded playoff in the cocktail shaker alongside a sea change in how rosters are constructed, practically erasing the gap between the traditional powers and the underclass.

What gets poured into the glass at a place like LSU?

A stiff drink of panic, impatience and desperation from administrators who will do practically anything to calm the masses and save their own hides. Who cares if it might cost $50 million?

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In the famous words of former Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley, what must be done eventually should be done immediately. Never has college football taken it more literally.

And thus, the coaching carousel is open for business with arguably three of the top-10 or 15 jobs in the country — LSU, Penn State and Florida — now officially on the market along with Virginia Tech, UCLA, Arkansas, Oklahoma State and Stanford. Over the next several weeks, it’s possible some combination of Florida State, Auburn, Colorado, Michigan State, Wisconsin, Kentucky and NC State will join them.

If that comes to fruition, even partially, it will be the most breathtakingly disruptive series of coaching moves we’ve seen, impacting programs we’re not even thinking about right now. Remember that every time a monster program like Florida or LSU hires a head coach — unless they’re pulling someone from the NFL — the ripples are felt two or three rungs down the ladder.

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And to the ones we know are already bracing for impact? Good luck to them.

That applies specifically to No. 7 Ole Miss, who will try to make the College Football Playoff while speculation swirls around head coach Lane Kiffin not just for the Florida job, but LSU too.

Which one does he want? Where is it easier to win a national championship? That’s going to be the conversation every day around Ole Miss until Kiffin either takes one of those jobs or pulls himself out of the mix — all while the team he’s coaching right now has a shot to win the whole thing.

How distracted will Kiffin be coming down the stretch? And what happens if Ole Miss is playing well into January? Will schools wait him out and risk losing other candidates, or will they demand an answer?

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You can apply the same questions to Eli Drinkwitz at Missouri, Brent Key at Georgia Tech, Clark Lea at Vanderbilt, Jeff Brohm at Louisville and even perhaps Dan Lanning at Oregon, though any move away from the grip of Nike founder Phil Knight would be complicated and costly.

How will it play out at those schools as they fight for playoff bids? It’s anyone’s guess because nothing of this magnitude has ever happened before in an era when so many teams remain in the postseason mix at this stage of the season. Ironically, the closest we’ve ever come to this kind of situation was Nov. 29, 2021, when Kelly bolted Notre Dame for a massive 10-year contract while the Irish were still theoretically alive for the fourth playoff spot.

It was an unsavory move, but LSU wasn’t waiting for him, giving Kelly a short window to take the job he felt would deliver a long-awaited national title.

Now, a mere four years later, Notre Dame is positioned better to win a championship under Marcus Freeman than Kelly ever imagined. And he’s out of a job after failing to get LSU anywhere close to the title mix in his four years despite having a Heisman Trophy winner/No. 2 overall draft pick in Jayden Daniels and another likely NFL quarterback in Garrett Nussmeier.

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The other seismic coaching move that happened concurrent with Kelly-to-LSU was Lincoln Riley going from Oklahoma to Southern Cal. That hasn’t worked out too great, either.

Meanwhile, low-key hires like Mike Elko at Texas A&M and Curt Cignetti at Indiana have proven transformative.

All of which is to say that these schools are merely spinning an expensive roulette wheel. In most cases, they don’t even know what their real candidate pool is going to look like. They’re simply operating off a mandate for change and the vibes of coaching agents while hoping they’ll catch a break.

In all these firing statements, administrators will talk about making decisions in the long-term interest of their universities. Realistically, they don’t even know what that looks like in a coaching carousel where this many schools are competing for a small handful of proven coaches who may or may not be willing to leave their current jobs.

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It’s all a guess, and it’s going to be pure chaos.

But in an era when perennial losers like Indiana, Ole Miss, Vanderbilt have moved into playoff contention due to smart investments while schools like LSU and Florida State spent themselves into a portal pickle, nobody can get their arms around what it’s supposed to look like in the first place.

In the old era, the traditional powers had all the advantages. The last three LSU coaches prior to Kelly all won national championships, and two of them — Ed Orgeron and Les Miles — were not exactly considered X-and-O gurus.

A job like LSU was hard to screw up. Now, it’s actually quite easy to screw up. In the SEC, where there’s rarely an easy week, a couple bad personnel evaluations and whiffing on a coordinator hire will bury your season and prompt a fan revolt by the end of October.

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That’s the new reality, and it argues for a complete rethink in how schools hire coaches. Why would an administrator give out an eight- or 10-year contract with huge, guaranteed money to anyone when you know there is such a small margin for error?

If LSU can be here, fewer than four years after hiring one of the most accomplished coaches in the sport, meeting with the governor of the state to try to figure out how to finance a buyout and a new coaching staff, it can happen to anyone.

But college football being college football, and agents like Jimmy Sexton holding a lot of cards, this hiring cycle will only ratchet up the pressure on administrators and the willingness for schools to spend whatever it takes for the sugar high of winning a news conference.

In a supply-and-demand world, there weren’t enough accomplished coaches to fill these jobs even before LSU opened. Now, if anyone is counting on restraint to bring sanity, LSU has arrived at the ball to inject even more crazy.

College football better be ready for the coaching shakeup that’s coming. By January, much of the sport may not be recognizable.