2024-25 CFB coaching carousel

I know Solich had some health concerns when he left after the COVID season — when Ohio played only 3 games — but they had just gone 7-6 in 2019 after back-to-back 9-4 seasons, and he left having gone 12 seasons since his last sub-.500 campaign, so it didn’t seem like they were slipping. But they were 3-9 in 2021 under Tim Albin before back-to-back 10-win seasons (and potentially a third in succession this year).

The one who strikes me as getting out at the right time — maybe even too early — was Solich’s predecessor at Nebraska, Tom Osborne, who retired from coaching at 60. Three nattys in your last four seasons isn’t bad.

The thing that used to happen often was kicking yourself upstairs to full-time AD work — Frank Broyles, Barry Alvarez and Darrell Royal come to mind. And Bo Schembechler left to become the president of the Detroit Tigers, which is insane when looking back on it (and led to him firing Ernie Harwell).

 

Does he still live in Athens? I always admired him; found his niche, stayed there and seemed to be happy making a good living at a place where he was liked and respected. I suppose it's hard to tell if he was happy or not because I don't think he ever smiled during any game he coached. He sort of looked like a gnome on the sidelines.

So many MAC coaches have a year or two of success and then take horrible big-time jobs because they're ambitious and in a hurry to move up. I can't blame the guys who left Kent State or some tough places like that but lifestyle and salary-wise you could do a lot worse than being a successful coach at Miami, Ohio U, Toledo or Central and Western Michigan. Chris Creighton has stayed a long time at EMU but I'm not sure if he's had other opportunities.

 

Squandering Sam Howell and Drake Maye is what will be remembered most about Mack Brown Chapel Hill version 2.0. The Tar Heels will probably never again have a QB as talented as Maye fall into their laps — and if there wasn’t a family legacy involved, he’s most likely playing for Nick Saban.

 

Solich moved to Idaho. He has popped up doing the career victory lap recently. Nebraska honored in September (and also did something for him at its 2023 spring game, IIRC); Ohio did the same in October. He goes into the College Football Hall of Fame next month.

And you’re right about the MAC coaches leaving for bigger things. For every Gary Pinkel there are several Darrell Hazells. With Tim Albin, Ohio may have lucked into another Solich; he’s 59 and isn’t on anyone’s “up and coming” list, even though the program is back the same level as it was with Solich after a 2021 hiccup. Of course, he came to Athens with Solich in 2005.

 

Slightly disagree that Beamer hung around too long. He was three years removed from Tech's last 10-win season when he made his decision halfway through the 2015 season. He realized pretty quickly that the game was passing him by. The Hokies had slipped into their .500 hell at that point, but I don't know if him leaving a year earlier would have changed that trajectory. Tech simply stopped getting the game-changing recruits he picked up in the 2000s. He used to be able to get a decent haul out of Florida then, but also there were only a handful of FBS programs at that time down there. Now there are seven.

I said at the time -- probably on this board -- that VT fans were getting a little spoiled to be "only" winning 10 games and going to a BCS bowl every year. There is a path back to competing for conference championships, believe it or not. I know they're 5-6, but they're also 1-12 in one-score games under Pry. The talent is there. He's just not a very good coach tactically and it shows at the end of games. Too bad, because he's the perfect ambassador for the school. But you have to win some games, too.

 

Pry would probably be excellent in the “general manager”-type role that some schools might start carving out in the NIL/portal era. As a representative of the university, a salesperson for the program and a big-picture person, he’s excellent. But he is Nathaniel Hackett-tier awful at game management.

 

Bear Bryant got out at the right time. After a decade of never losing more than two games, he went 7-4 in the 1982 regular season and announced he was out after the bowl game, which they won. Never had a losing season in his final years.
Bear Bryant College Coaching Records, Awards and Leaderboards | College Football at Sports-Reference.com

 

Mack deserves a lot of credit for making UNC football relavent He may have not won the ACC or a major bowl but UNC reached heights they hadn't prior to Mack in the 1990s and he returned to get them back up to the top of the ACC in the 2010s

 

Bear was on the AD-only track too. (He’d done both jobs for years in an era where that was very commonplace.) But he only made it six weeks past the Liberty Bowl before dying.

 

Sequels also rarely work.

Johnny Majors 2.0 at Pitt was a flop.
I guess John Robinson 2.0 at USC was okay.
Bill Walsh at Stanford crashed and burned.
Bobby Petrino at Louisville the second time didn't reach what the first time did.

Only one that's working well is Schiano at Rutgers, who is some kind of horse whisperer for that school.

 

Brown only coached one year at UNC in the 2010s: The Heels went 7-6 (4-4 ACC) in 2019.
His best year in the sequel was 2022, when they won the Coastal Division title and lost to Clemson in the league championship game.

 

WVU beware?

West Virginia journalist floats possibility of Jacksonville State head football coach Rich Rodriguez returning to Morgantown if Mountaineers fire Neal Brown