Sheesh, we haven’t even made it to Halloween and we’re already experiencing one of the craziest college football coaching carousels we’ve ever seen.
National powerhouses like LSU, Florida, and Penn State have all decided to fire their respective head coaches in the middle of the 2025 season and contemporaries like Auburn, Florida State, and Wisconsin could be dropping the axe on their program leaders in the coming weeks as well. THE HOT SEAT has indeed been brought out and the ripple effects of these moves are going to permeate through every corner of the sport.
Silly season is now underway and you’re about to be bombarded with candidate lists, flight tracker nonsense, and Jon Gruden’s camp working overtime to get his name in the mix. So I’ll join in on the fun as well and fire off some early predictions over who will fill the current vacancies in the Power Four.
The beauty of these coaching carousels is that no one truly knows how they will turn out until it’s over, so feel free to come back and roast this post if all of these predictions are wrong. That’s the fun of it. Now let’s dive in.
LSU – Lane Kiffin
LSU is the top job on the board at the moment and to understand how they got into this mess, you must first understand Scott Woodward, the school’s athletic director. Woodward has developed a reputation as a big-game hunter, someone who will steal headlines by targeting the biggest known commodities in the sport. When he was the AD at Washington, he successfully convinced Chris Petersen to leave his Boise State empire for Seattle. When he occupied the same role at Texas A&M a few years later, he was able to lure Jimbo Fisher out of Tallahassee. And when Woodward returned to his alma mater LSU afterwards, he made a series of splash moves in 2021 alone, poaching Kim Mulkey in women’s basketball, Jay Johnson in baseball, and eventually Brian Kelly in football.
The Fisher and Kelly hires in particular involved two of the most expensive contracts/buyouts in college football history and both of these failed tenures has earned LSU’s AD tons of national criticism over the past few days. Questions persisted over whether the next hire would be left in Woodward’s hands, especially with campus leaders are already preoccupied with the search for a new school president. Let’s go to Louisiana governor Jeff Landry, who surely won’t bury the AD of the state’s flagship school in front of everyone…
You gotta love Louisiana politics in regards to LSU football. Huey Long would be proud. Anyway, it looks like a committee will be handling this coaching search and even though Woodward just had a wrestling promo cut on him by the governor, I’d imagine the decision makers will still align with him in targeting the biggest fish in this cycle. So Lane Kiffin, come on down to Baton Rouge.
Kiffin is the belle of the ball early in this coaching cycle and it’s understandable. He’s the only coach other than Johnny Vaught to have multiple 10+ win seasons at Ole Miss and barring a late-season collapse, he has the Rebels on track for a berth in this year’s College Football Playoff. He’s spent his five-year tenure in Oxford trying to rehab his image as a head coach and at the age of 50, one would imagine he’d want to get another crack at a top-10 job in the sport.
LSU would have its big name in Kiffin and unlike Kelly, they’d be poaching a guy with actual experience coaching in the SEC. Hell, the guy has beaten LSU in three of their last five matchups and his daughter is literally dating LSU linebacker Whit Weeks, if that’s worth anything towards his eventual decision. The Lane Train arriving to Baton Rouge would, however, leave another SEC program looking elsewhere…
Florida – Jedd Fisch
Lane Kiffin is the top candidate at Florida and I’d like to imagine UF and LSU boosters getting into Anchorman-style fights across the Gulf Coast for his services over the next month. Kiffin picking LSU cuts the Gators off from the big splash they were looking for and force them to look at second and even third options for Billy Napier’s replacement.
Florida’s identity as a program is tied to offense, going all the way back to Steve Spurrier’s days as both a Heisman Trophy winning quarterback and a national championship winning head coach in Gainesville. What makes Kiffin appealing to them are some of his similarities to the Ol’ Ball Coach, from his bonafides as an offensive play-caller, to his personality quirks, to his ability to rock a visor. If the Ole Miss coach turns them down, there’s another guy who fits that bill.
*Missouri’s Eli Drinkwitz raises hand*
No, not you. Him. *points towards Pacific Northwest*
That’s right. Washington’s Jedd Fisch, who got his start by pestering Spurrier with post-it notes to become a student manager for the program in the ’90’s. That foot in the door began a two-decade coaching career where he had several offensive assistant gigs in both college and the NFL, eventually landing the Arizona head coaching job in 2021.
His 16-21 record in his three seasons in Tuscon may not seem impressive until you consider that he took over a program that was left in ruins by Kevin Sumlin and made dramatic improvements each year. The Wildcats’ offense in particular made big leaps each season, going from 119th in offensive SP+ in 2021, to 21st in 2022, to 9th in 2023. That was thanks in large part for his ability to recruit and develop talents like Noah Fifita, Jonah Coleman, and Tetairoa McMillan, who is currently getting his feet wet as a first-round rookie wideout for the Carolina Panthers. He’s had Washington on a similar trajectory in his two seasons in Seattle and with a 6-2 record at the moment, the Huskies are still a fringe playoff contender heading into the final month of the season.
Fisch will not generate the same level of buzz as Kiffin or even Drinkwitz, but his ties to UF as an alum and his offensive prowess is a combo that makes sense for the program. If they fortify their NIL situation and surround him with a strong staff of talent evaluators, he can focus on scheming up some good ball plays and have the Gators cooking with gas quickly.
Penn State – Matt Rhule
James Franklin won 70% of his games through 11-and-a-half seasons at Penn State, achieving one Big Ten title, six 10+ win campaigns, four victories in New Year’s Six bowl games, and a trip to last year’s CFP semifinals. And yet, everyone in State College got sick of him losing to the Ohio State’s and Michigan’s of the world. Understandable. Once he started losing to the UCLA’s and Northwestern’s of the world this season, they wasted no time to eat his roughly $50 million buyout to make a change.
Given the accolades that I just rattled off, the Nittany Lions took a humungous gamble jettisoning a guy who had them on the doorstep of a national title game appearance less than 12 months ago. It’s a legitimate question to ask if there’s a candidate out there that can not only win at the same clip as Franklin did, but go a step forward and rack up W’s against the sport’s elite. They can either take a huge swing with someone that nobody is expecting or play it safe with the candidate that has been linked to this job since the beginning.
I think they play it safe. Matt Rhule, it’s time to leave Nebraska and come home.
The connections here are obvious. Rhule literally went to high school in State College before attending Penn State, where he played under Joe Paterno as a walk-on linebacker as the program entered the Big Ten in the mid-90’s. He began his coaching career shortly afterwards and eventually worked his way up to the Temple head coaching job in 2013, where he was hired by AD Pat Kraft who is, you guessed it, the current AD at Penn State. Even when addressing the speculation a few weeks ago, he didn’t necessarily shoot it down.
With the exception of his failed stint with the Carolina Panthers, Rhule’s calling card is his ability to fix distressed properties, as he was able to produce 10-win seasons at Temple and Baylor before taking Nebraska to its first bowl game since 2016. However, his 2-23 record against AP Top 25 teams is far worse than Franklin’s mark in the same category, so it’s a bit curious as to why they’d consider someone who also struggles at taking out elite opponents.
Well, if you’re going to take this big of a gamble, you might as well roll with someone who knows your program inside and out. It won’t be hard to rally the fans and donors behind one of their own and perhaps the resources at his disposal could elevate him to another level. Or this return home could be a colossal failure like the tenure of Scott Frost, Rhule’s predecessor in Lincoln. Either way, good luck.
Alright, now that I covered the “Big 3” jobs on the board so far, let’s make some quick predictions for the other Power Four jobs currently open.
Arkansas – Ryan Silverfield
Arkansas could end up as the fifth, maybe even sixth best opening in the SEC depending on how the rest of the coaching carousel plays out. AD Hunter Yurachek is working to step up the the football budget, but they may not attract some of the top names being floated around. So why not grab Ryan Silverfield, who literally just beat Arkansas earlier in the season.
Silverfield has maintained Memphis’ status as one of the top Group of Five programs in the country and has produced back-to-back 10-win seasons. His Tigers are currently in the thick of a very competitive American Conference title race and they would have the inside track to a playoff berth should they win out. We’d find out real quick if he could hang at the sport’s highest leve; in the SEC, but it would still be a solid hire.
UCLA – Sean Lewis
UCLA has structural problems that need to be addressed and this hire will be a referendum on just how serious the school is about football. It’s going to be difficult for the Bruins to attract top quality candidates without guaranteeing a full financial commitment to the program, so it’s hard to gauge who exactly will take the reigns in Westwood.
Uhhhhhh, I’ll take a shot and say San Diego State’s Sean Lewis. The Chicago-area native pulled off a near impossible job of getting Kent State to two bowl games before matriculating west, first as Deion Sanders’ first offensive coordinator at Colorado before taking the SDSU head coaching gig last year. This year’s Aztecs are currently in the mix for the G5’s playoff spot and could accomplish that if they run the table in the Mountain West. He could inject some life into UCLA and perhaps parlay that into a bigger gig in the Big Ten down the road.
Oklahoma State – Eric Morris
Mike Gundy was not comfortable embracing the rapid changes to the sport and as a result, Oklahoma State experienced futility not seen by the program since the early 90’s. Gundy was shown the door by his alma mater early in the season and the Cowboys will be without their former star QB in the building for the first time in 25 years. The game passed Gundy by and it’s hard not to imagine a younger coach that embraces both NIL and the transfer portal quickly getting OSU back near the top of the Big 12.
Enter North Texas’ Eric Morris, one of the later branches off the Mike Leach-Air Raid coaching tree. Morris has done a good job in his three seasons with the Mean Green, but the feather in his cap was discovering Cam Ward in his previous stop at FCS Incarnate Word. This season, he has turned freshman walk-on Drew Mestemaker into one of the more prolific passers in the entire country and he’d have an even bigger platform to cook if he followed Morris to Stillwater.
Virginia Tech – Bob Chesney
Virginia Tech is experiencing a bit of an existential crisis as Brent Pry’s firing marked the second failed coaching tenure in Blacksburg since Frank Beamer retired a decade ago. The school is beefing up its athletic budget to signal its commitment to football success, but it remains a question of who will actually take the job. They could simply look a few hours up I-81 to James Madison for a solution.
Bob Chesney has found success at literally every level of the sport, from DIII Salve Regina, to DII Assumption, to FCS Holy Cross, to his current role at JMU, where he currently has the Dukes sitting atop the Sun Belt. If this sounds vaguely familiar, this was almost the identical path taken by his predecessor Curt Cignetti, who has inexplicably turned Indiana football into a national championship contender. Chesney wins wherever he goes, it’s that simple. If Va. Tech is asking it can replicate what IU is doing, the answer is literally right up the road in Harrisonburg.
Stanford – Ken Niumatalolo
The Stanford job has been open since March, so Cardinal GM and school legend Andrew Luck has had extra time to evaluate who will fill that role. The program is in a uniquely weird spot being a California Bay Area school with rigid academic restrictions competing in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Luck is at least getting former players to drop heavy bags on the program though.
It’s hard to make head or tails of who will actually take this job as they could go in a number of directions, so I’ll say that they stay local and pull Ken Niumatalolo out of San Jose State. Niumatalolo has plenty of experience coaching a unique program having spent 15 full seasons as Navy’s head coach. He mastered the triple-option during his tenure at the service academy and has since operated a top-10 passing attack in both of his seasons at SJSU, producing a unanimous All-American in wide receiver Nick Nash last season. That ability to adapt and work with the tools that he has at his disposal is something that Stanford can benefit from if they hire him.
