Florida and Colorado State have fired their football coach, no word on when Wisconsin is going to pull the plug on Luke Fickell, but it seems like it might be soon. They still have Oregon, Indiana and Illinois on the schedule, along with Minnesota and Washington, so none of the remaining games are cakewalks.
Florida State will wait until the end of the season to make a decision on their coach. They might use backchannels to see who’s available and interested before pulling the plug on Norvell.
LSU has fired Brian Kelly, so there’s another high profile job open. Wisconsin has told their coach they’ll look at his performance at the end of the season.
WSJ’s sports/humor columnist (interchangeable for him) has a good take on the college football coach scene:
I really don’t understand what the advantage is to firing a coach this time of year. There has to be a reason as teams do it and are willing to drop millions of dollars to get it done.
To me it would make more sense to fire the coach once the season is completed and not seven or eight games into the season. I used to think it had something to do with recruiting but now with the portal recruiting isn’t nearly as important as it used to be.
As far as Kelly, he may not get another job in coaching, though he probably will if that is what he wants even if it is as a coordinator. However, since LSU has to pay him around $54M to buy him out he won’t hurt financially.
John Papenhagen.
I suppose the best thing that can be said about firing a coach mid-season is that it gets the school on the hiring track earlier. Sometimes there’s a lot of paperwork that has to be filed to declare a vacancy that needs to be filled quickly, bypassing normal HR prototols, especially at state schools.
There may also be back-channel communication between the schools and the people on their shortlist, through 3rd parties so that the school can claim they’ve had no direct contact with any working coaches.
To quote Shakespeare:
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly;
This referred to assassinating the King, but that’s not all that far out of line at some schools.
Auburn has fired Hugh Freeze.