The Hottest Trend in College Football: Firing Your Coach

“The time was right for new leadership of our football program,” said Babcock in a statement on Tuesday.

What’s unusual about Virginia Tech’s decision to fire its coach in mid-November is that this year, it isn’t that unusual. Top football programs historically have waited until the end of the season to fire the coach, no matter how badly things were going. 

Not this year. Fuente was the 11th coach in the top tier of Division I football to either get fired or step down so far in 2021, about equal to the midseason turnover equal to the last four years combined.

“College athletics is a reactionary industry,” said Kyle Bowlsby, founder of an executive search firm that helps universities vet coaching candidates. “A lot of these early moves midseason have created a bit of a panic in the marketplace and a race to get to a limited number of marquee candidates that are out there.”

Contributing to the madness is the top-drawer nature of the open jobs. Brand-name programs like LSU, Southern California and Washington are all looking for new leaders to see them into 2022. Schools making early moves want to become buyers while the supply of potential new coaches is still strong.  

The moves are also a direct result of shifting tides in college sports that have allowed players to move more freely between teams. Since the NCAA created the transfer portal and did away with regulations that required football players to sit out one season after switching schools, it’s easier than ever for star players and frustrated benchwarmers alike to find new homes.

That has made roster management—one of the most crucial aspects of running a college football team these days—even more challenging. 

Struggles on the field can quickly lead to dramatic roster attrition via the transfer portal, which in turn creates a talent deficit that can take years for teams to correct.

“You make that change early and that potentially helps you on both sides of the transfer portal, whether it is retaining the roster…or attracting potential transfers to your program,” said Connecticut athletic director

Dave Benedict.

His football team is in the market for a new coach after coach Randy Edsall agreed to step down on Sept. 6, one day after announcing he would retire at the end of the season.

UConn was the first team in the Football Bowl Subdivision to toss its coach. The Huskies have since been joined by USC, Georgia Southern, LSU, Washington State, Texas Tech, Texas Christian, Washington, Akron, Virginia Tech and Florida International.

The reasons for the dismissals vary by school, but some featured meltdowns of epic proportions. At LSU, Ed Orgeron got the boot in October for following up his 2020 national championship with a 9-11 record over the last two seasons. He’s seeing the Tigers through the end of the 2021 campaign as a lame duck.

Washington’s Jimmy Lake similarly needed just two seasons to go from hand-selected heir apparent to beloved coach Chris Peterson to persona non grata after embarrassing losses, including the season opener to Montana. He made an inexplicable gaffe by saying the Huskies don’t compete in recruiting with Oregon because the Ducks lack “academically prowess.” The final straw came after he was suspended from coaching last week for shoving a player on the sidelines, causing additional allegations of locker room aggression to surfac.

Another reason to move early involves the pressure that was created on the recruiting side in 2017 when the NCAA gave high-schoolers the green light to sign with universities on Dec. 15, about eight weeks earlier than National Signing Day in early February. It’s since become the most important date on the football calendar, with more than 80% of recruits in the Class of 2021 signing with teams in December 2020.

Athletic directors previously had the luxury of having several weeks to find a replacement coach if they fired their coach following the last game of the season. But with the December signing day barely two weeks later, making a leadership change after Thanksgiving is much riskier.

“An unknown situation can be very damaging,” said one athletic director at a top conference who fired his football coach in September at a previous university. “If you have issues with the transfer portal it could be a double shot to your program.”

Another reason why universities are willing to pay high prices to make middling football coaches go away is the lopsided financial structure of college athletics. Football, through ticket sales, television rights and sponsorships, is the engine that makes it possible for universities to sponsor smaller sports, like tennis and cross-country. Schools need football teams to make as much money as possible. 

“These are basically $100 million dollar annual enterprises,” said Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts. “A massively successful basketball program will never generate in revenue what a marginally successful football program will generate.”

If the football team starts losing, season ticket renewals might slip along with game day attendance, thus decreasing athletic department revenue and potentially forcing all sports at the university to adopt austere measures. If tight budgets keep the university from upgrading facilities or athlete amenities, that can further hurt recruiting and make the football team’s road back to greatness even steeper.

“Athletic directors are like the CEOs of the athletic department,” said a longtime executive in sports media. “If they don’t have the right football coach driving the revenue machine from the top down, they decide to be proactive.”

Athletic directors also have more money than ever before to throw around, thanks to impending expansion of the College Football Playoff and conference media rights deals that have mushroomed in recent years. The Big Ten, for example, distributed $55 million to league members in 2020 from its television deal with ESPN and Fox Sports. Those payouts stand to balloon further when the conference’s contract comes up for renewal in 2023.

“College athletics is a break-even business,” said Bowlsby. “They’re spending everything that comes in.”

That mind-set makes it a bit more palatable, if no less irrational, to pay a coach and his staff millions to go away via buyout clauses in football coaches’ contracts that entitle them to a portion of their salary should they be fired without cause before their term expires. According to USA Today, universities agreed to pay more than $108 million in “dead money” to coaches no longer in their employ in 2020, a year when dozens of athletic departments furloughed employees, cut sports and endured other budget cuts due to the pandemic.

Bowlsby said that several of his clients last year opted to hang onto their football coaches despite subpar results due to the Covid financial crunch, which could be contributing to the uptick in firings in 2021. Plenty of universities cleaned house anyway: it cost Texas $24 million last January to fire Tom Herman and his staff only to see his replacement, former Alabama offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian, amass the Longhorns’ longest losing streak in 65 years.

That’s why Alberts’ football coaching calculus at Nebraska this fall ran counter to most industry trends. Coach Scott Frost, the Huskers coach and former national championship-winning quarterback, was squarely on the hot seat after hurtling toward his fifth consecutive losing season. But rather than pay him to leave, Alberts restructured Frost’s contract to reduce his salary by $1 million annually and slash his buyout to $7.5 million from $15 million.

“Universities’ and donors’ desperation of wanting a winning football program can sometimes lead to bad business decision-making,” said Alberts. “We chose to make a decision that includes a little more patience.”

Write to Laine Higgins at laine.higgins@wsj.com