Revisiting and Ranking the Hires of the Wild, Chaotic 2018 Coaching Carousel
This carousel... sucked
With LSU, USC, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Florida, Miami, Oregon, TCU, Virginia Tech, Washington, Washington State, Texas Tech, as well as a litany of Group of 5 jobs all coming open, this carousel is universally regarded as the wildest one to date. That got me thinking, what was the most recent one that even somewhat compared, and I quickly realized I didn’t have to go back that far. In 2018 you had Florida, Texas A&M, Tennessee, Nebraska, Florida State, Oregon, just as the headliners of a carousel that saw 21 jobs open and close. Not surprisingly: many of those hires are no longer with the program that hired them, whether due to the coach being fired or moving on to bigger and better things. In this blog I’m going to go back, 4 years later, and rank the hires based on how they turned out/are currently going. No spoilers, but the hire that was considered the biggest slam dunk at the time, isn’t going so hot. And I find that delicious (no spoilers though).
1. Billy Napier, Louisiana Lafayette
If you had gone back in times and told the pundits in 2018 that ULL would make the best hire, out of all these college football giants, they would’ve asked what drugs you were on. But his resume speaks for itself, and it’s so good that Napier is now the new head coach at Florida. 7-7 in year one, followed by 11-3, 10-1, 13-1. Success that had never before been seen at that university, and he parlayed it into a top 10-12 job in the sport, when he could’ve bailed a year or two earlier and taken a job like South Carolina or Mississippi State. That’s enough to earn the top spot on this list.
2. Mario Cristobal, Oregon
Another coach who performed well enough to now get a bigger job (I say bigger because “better” would be subjective in this case). He stumbled down the stretch of 2021, but 2 ten win seasons in 4 years, a conference title, and a Rose Bowl victory are tough to argue against. He’s an excellent recruiter, and while some questioned his in-game coaching ability, he definitely had some of the best results of anybody on this list and gives Miami an immediate boost of life.
3. Jimbo Fisher, Texas A&M
Yes, he is overpaid, and if he didn’t have the number one recruiting class in the nation coming in there would probably be a coach or two that could edge him out. But he is an excellent recruiter, has his choice of three viable starting quarterback options next year, has a 9-1 season against a full SEC schedule to his name, and while you can say he’s underperformed, he still has had much better seasons than most of the coaches on this list and has the arrow pointed upwards.
4. Sonny Dykes, SMU
I was somewhat underwhelmed with the hiring of Dykes by TCU, he certainly didn’t have the G5 success that Napier or other potential candidates had, but he still had a good tenure for SMU. A ten win season, 3 straight bowl eligibilities (opted out of one in 2020), and had teams with fun to watch offenses quarterbacked by Shane Buechele and Tanner Mordecai. If you asked SMU, they got better than they probably expected.
5. Josh Heupel, UCF
His early success at Tennessee has made me partially reevaluate his UCF tenure, because I thought his 12-0 opening season was a product of what Scott Frost left behind, and the cheese was sliding off the cracker after that. But, he does have a 12 win season, 2 ten win seasons, and a NY6 bowl appearance to his name at UCF, and that was enough for Tennessee. I thought it was a joke of a hire, but so far I’m trending towards being wrong.
6. Jonathan Smith, Oregon State
No, his resume does little to blow you away on paper, with just one bowl appearance in a 7-5 season coming in 2021. But with some context added, you see that Smith came in and stabilized one of the 5 worst programs in Power 5, whose previous coach went 7-29 in the three previous seasons. And he had his best season to date this year with his starting quarterback Tristan Gebbia out for the entire season. Oregon State knew they needed to be patient, and it’s starting to pay off.
7. Dan Mullen, Florida
Definitely the most difficult one to evaluate. Through the first three seasons it seemed like Florida won this carousel hands down, with Mullen going 10-3, 11-2, and an 8-4 in which they won the SEC East, nearly knocked off Alabama in the title game, and was in the thick of the playoff race until the last week of the season. And when they played Alabama to the wire 31-29 in week 3 of 2021, there was no reason to believe anything was wrong. And then? He lost 5 more games, including a blowout to South Carolina, a meltdown loss to Missouri, and giving up 52 points in a win against FCS Samford. And just like that, Mullen was gone. I have to put him fairly high because he had three very good seasons, but his recruiting struggles coupled with his meltdown in 2021, he has to be docked and he becomes the first fired coach on this list.
8. Sean Lewis, Kent State
Similar to Jonathan Smith, Lewis took over a hapless program and has now stabilized it, with a pair of bowl appearances following an 8-28 record in the 3 years before he took over. He gets docked for losing 7 games this season despite having the best quarterback in the MAC in Dustin Crum, but Lewis still has the arrow pointed in the right direction for this program.
9. Chad Lunsford, Georgia Southern
You can make a very strong case that this was a premature firing, Lunsford did have 3 straight bowls heading into 2021 including a 10 win season in 2018. And yet, after a 1-3 start, Lunsford was out and now Clay Helton is in. Despite the firing, I have a hard time calling this tenure a failure, especially given how new Georgia Southern is to FBS football.
10. Joe Moorhead, Mississippi State
This goes to show how bad this carousel was; that a coach who got fired after 2 years can be this high. Granted, he probably was fired prematurely, with a pair of bowl appearances to his credit. It wasn’t the right fit, Moorhead wasn’t quite cut out for the SEC, but it’s hard to call this one near as much of a failure as some of the other coaches on this list.
11. Chip Kelly, UCLA
One of the hires that was widely regarded as a home run, for the first three years it seemed Kelly at UCLA was going to be a total failure. But an 8-4 season in 2021 allows him to keep the job and see if there’s further momentum in the program. It was a good season, but if you told people at the time that 8-4 would be the peak after 4 years, with 3 years missing a bowl game before, they’d view it as a disappointment.
12. Dana Dimel, UTEP
UTEP had probably the most pleasantly-surprising 7-6 records ever, and shows that the former Wildcats’ assistant has the Miners going in the right direction after taking over an 0-12 team. His back to back 1-11 teams in his first two years can’t be ignored, but making a bowl in 2021 was a huge accomplishment for UTEP.
13. Matt Luke, Ole Miss
We’re getting into the hires that went really bad, and it’s splitting hairs to decide which ones are worse than the others. I’ll slot Luke here because he never had any truly awful seasons, just three very “bleh” seasons with little reason to believe the Rebels were heading in the right direction coming out of the woods of the Hugh Freeze scandal.
14. Herm Edwards, Arizona State
A very bizarre tenure, his win loss record should on paper land him much higher, but the off the field issues can’t be ignored. It started with recruiting violations in the 2021 offseason, now he has only nine signees in his 2022 recruiting class, which lands the Sun Devils at 103rd nationally, in between UNLV and South Alabama. Oh and his star quarterback is now in the portal. This was a polarizing hire when it happened, and while the win loss record may have exceeded the low expectations, everything else that’s happened puts him low on the list.
15. Mike Bloomgren, Rice
Bloomgren has Rice stuck in a tough spot, where they’re better than they were when he took over, but are still bad. A 4-8 season in 2021 is not good, but considering Rice is one of the hardest jobs in America to succeed at, it’s passable given where they started. So, I don’t know, I guess keep it up Mike?
16. Scott Frost, Nebraska
In 2018, this was universally thought of as THE hire. The no-doubt candidate that landed at the perfect spot. Coming off a 13-0 season going back to the school where he won a national title as a player. The result so far? 15-29, no bowl appearances, coming off a 3-9 season in 2021. “Oh they aren’t as bad as their record! All their losses are by single digits!” Have these people not considered that consistently losing one score games is a sign of bad coaching? Given the hype around it, this is among the biggest coaching disappointments in the sport’s history.
17. Steve Campbell, South Alabama
This is one where he just never got it going. Campbell took over a bad team that was still fresh to FBS football, and his best season was 4-7. And in year one of Kane Womack, the Jags win 5 games. Not near as high profile as the failures in this bottom tier, because it’s South Alabama, but this was a gross three-year tenure.
18. Willie Taggart, Florida State
Taggart didn’t even get to finish his second season, and probably rightfully so. The 9-12 record doesn’t do it justice, it’s that he lost the fanbase almost immediately, that he had a new excuse in every press conference (ranging from blaming hydration for a team from Florida losing to a team from Idaho, or pinning a loss on the offensive coordinator rather than taking the blame himself). He mismanaged a team that had solid talent, and it got so bad that the Noles had to cut bait mid-year 2.
19. Kevin Sumlin, Arizona
Sumlin is a prime example of a guy who should’ve taken a break before his next coaching job. He had a worse record in year 1 than the last year of his predecessor, and then it got worse each year leading to a winless 2020. Perhaps worse were the stories that came out about his recruiting tendencies; which were non-existent. Reports were that he was too lazy to drive to local high schools to visit talented recruits… schools that he had children in school at. Sumlin should’ve taken his A&M buyout and taken a break, he clearly was not invested in Arizona football
20. Jeremy Pruitt, Tennessee
Pruitt’s record in his three years at Tennessee isn’t enough to land him in the bottom tier of this list, it’s everything else. It’s getting caught paying recruits straight cash out of McDonald’s bags. It’s getting caught on a hot mic trying to get his player out of legal trouble by implying that “I’ve been at places where this s*** doesn’t happen.” It’s putting in a true freshman quarterback for his first real action down 11 in the second half… only to hand the ball off SEVEN straight times. It’s starting your second season, when trying to build hope for the program, by losing to Georgia State and BYU back to back. Tennessee has had no shortage of bad coaches this century, but for my money Pruitt was the worst.
21. Chad Morris, Arkansas
To me, this is the worst coaching tenure I’ve ever seen in college football that didn’t involve a scandal. He did not win a single SEC game. He beat two total FBS opponents. He lost to CONFERENCE-USA opponents by a combined score of 89-36. Forget what he did against Alabama and LSU, he lost to Mississippi State by a combined score of 106-30 (a program whose coach also got fired during this stretch). And if all this wasn’t enough, Arkansas hired an offensive line coach who had zero head coaching experience and is now winning 9 games by year 2. I’m sure Morris is a nice guy, but my god what an abomination of a head coaching tenure.