The nine worst college football coaching hires of this century

From Tommy Tuberville to Todd Graham, these were the administrative missteps that stood out in a crowded field

I feel like I’ve been doing this long enough and enough of my subscribers have been following me long enough that I can level with everyone on something.

I had to take an audible with this newsletter.

For one future story, I’m waiting on a response to a Freedom of Information Act Request from a particular, unnamed university and the other subject I was planning on writing about, due to unforeseen circumstances, is going to have to get pushed back a week or two.

Inspiration arose elsewhere, though.

Late last month, and one week after I wrote something similar, Rodger Sherman at Read Rodge had an excellent look at the ongoing Trent Dilfer debacle at UAB, which he joined the fine folks over at Split Zone Duo to break down. From there, it led to a discussion on the worst-ever FBS coaching hires, which raised a spirited conversation and got me thinking of who mine would be.

So from that, a newsletter is born.

Before we get going, I wanted to lay out a few caveats:

• This is from this century, so from 2000 on. There are undeniably some egregious decisions from athletic directors from decades or even a century ago, but I feel like I’m ill-equipped to judge them seeing as I either wasn’t born yet or wasn’t old enough to be following college football and understand the full extent of the administrative bungling that took place.

• This isn’t based purely on win-loss percentage, though that factors in. Some places are just absurdly hard to win at and I’m not going to include somewhere like UMass because they take a gamble on someone.

• The process or rationale behind a hiring has to be bad to make it on here. Sometimes, a hire can make all the sense in the world on paper, but not simply work out in practice. Think of Scott Frost at Nebraska as a good example. If I can see what an AD was thinking when they made the move, there’s a good chance I spared their hire from being included on here.

• Unless a coach previously had some baggage to his name, I don’t count hires whose tenures were torpedoed by scandal. Art Briles is a terrible human being, but he won a ton of games at Baylor and there wasn’t some kind of obvious indication he’d run a program that turned a brazenly blind eye to sexual assault.

Before the full list, here are a couple that just missed the cut:

Bryan Harsin, Auburn: It was an extremely awkward fit with poor results that should have been foreseeable, as the Tigers turned to a man who had spent all but three years of his life in the Pacific Northwest. But he was wildly successful at Boise State, with a 69-19 record, and an Auburn search that had predictably devolved into a mess could have done a whole lot worse than someone with his resume.

Michael Haywood, Pitt: Haywood was fired by the Panthers only about two weeks after being hired, when he was charged with felony domestic violence (the charges were later dismissed after he completed pretrial diversion requirements, counseling, and public service.) While he gave a notoriously poor performance in his introductory press conference, one that even had some members of his new team openly criticizing him, he had some bona fides to earn the job, having taken over a Miami (Ohio) program that went 2-10 and leading them to a 9-4 mark in just his second season. For any Pitt fan reading this, I understand I’m probably in the minority, but I think he would have done well there.

Now, on to the list itself…