College coaching market already in upheaval

Kyle Whittingham, 55, Utah: Team currently No. 12 in FBS playoff rankings; 2008 national coach of the year; is 8-1 all-time in bowl games.

Justin Fuente, 39, Memphis: Is 8-0 this season, resuscitating a program that had flat-lined when he arrived in 2012.

Tom Herman, 40, Houston: The former Ohio State offensive coordinator is tearing it up in his first season as head coach – 8-0, No. 25 in playoff rankings, averaging 46 points per game.

Matt Rhule, 40, Temple: So, the Owls lost perhaps their biggest game ever last week, a heart-breaker to Notre Dame. Someone still had to get the 7-1 team in that unlikely position.

Matt Campbell, 35, Toledo: Has taken the Rockets to three bowl games in the preceding four seasons. And they are much better this year – 7-0, ranked 24th by the playoff committee.

Rich Rodriguez, 52, Arizona: Has rehabilitated his resume after his fall at Michigan.

P.J. Fleck, 35, Western Michigan: The 2014 MAC coach of the year, has had the highest-rated recruiting classes in the conference the last three years.

The Hot Assistants

Kirby Smart, 39, Alabama: His name is the first mentioned whenever there's an opening. Especially in the south with all his SEC ties – a former Bulldog player who coached at LSU, Georgia and 'Bama.

Brent Venables, 44, Clemson: The Tigers defensive coordinator may never be more hireable, having been in charge of 2014's top unit and having rebuilt quickly this year.

Mario Cristobal, 45, Alabama: The one-time Miami lineman is a particularly notable candidate to replace Al Golden at his alma mater. A former head coach at Florida International, he now enjoys a prominent position on the Saban coaching tree.

Scott Frost, 40, Oregon: Currently the Ducks offensive coordinator, the former Nebraska quarterback actually has experience coaching both sides of the ball. He was a co-defensive coordinator at Northern Iowa.

Doug Meacham, 50, TCU: The co-offensive coordinator at a place where the offense has been borderline unstoppable. That's just the kind of thing that sells today.

The Long Shots

Jon Gruden, 52, ESPN: His name is always floating out there, begging the question, "Why would he ever want to leave the booth and go recruit?"

Bill O'Brien, 46, Houston Texans/Chip Kelly, 51, Philadelphia Eagles: A couple guys whose greatest success has been in college, and have found the professional game taxing. Come on home, gentlemen.

Hue Jackson, 50, Cincinnati Bengals offensive coordinator: He has a long coaching resume as both a head coach and assistant (including with the Falcons as Bobby Petrino's offensive coordinator). The Bengals offense is never going to look better than now.

Greg Schiano, 49, inactive: His hard-nosed ways did not play well in the NFL, but he may look better and better the more he puts the Tampa Bay experience in the rear view mirror.

THE CURRENT OPENINGS

From most attractive to least

1. Southern Cal.

2. South Carolina.

3. Virginia Tech.

4. Minnesota.

5. Miami.

6. Central Florida.

7. Illinois.

8. Maryland.

9. Hawaii.

10. North Texas.

COACHES ON THE HOT SEAT

(According to coacheshotseat.com)

1. Mike Riley, Nebraska.

2. Mark Richt, Georgia.

3. Kevin Wilson, Indiana.

4. Dana Holgorsen, West Virginia.

5. Todd Berry, Louisana-Monroe.

(And a few more for good measure)

1. Scott Shafer, Syracuse.

2. Mike London, Virginia.

3. Charlie Strong, Texas.

4. Steve Addazio, Boston College.

5. Bret Bielema, Arkansas.

The college football coaches’ killing ground is an uncommonly bloody place here just one week into November.

Who has time to wait anymore for a season to rationally play out before offing their under-performing or unpopular coach? Through a variety of firings and resignations, there currently are 10 gaping vacancies in the shank of the season. Citing Stats LLC, the New York Times reported that is more mid-season openings than the previous three seasons combined.

More firings are sure to come in a month, creating the potential for both a clattering chain of falling dominoes throughout the coaching ranks and a mad scramble to fill vital positions.

And if programs aren’t already positioning themselves for hiring season, they are falling behind.

“Very honestly, agents are working across the country right now,” Mack Brown, the former Texas and North Carolina coach now opining for ESPN, said.

“The coaches aren’t talking to the headhunters. They aren’t talking to the university athletic directors, (but) right now athletic directors are making decisions so they can start talking to the coaches. Obviously (an employed coach) is not going to talk, but his agent is constantly in contact.”

So buckle your chinstrap tightly if your school is going to be in the position to hire. Whether or not any nearby institutions will be involved — Georgia and its 15-year coach Mark Richt have been enveloped in wide speculation following a procession of disappointing losses — is unknown at this point.

With so many schools in the market for a coach, there’s bound to be high competition and higher angst fueling the process. And that all begins now.

Said Brown, “I think it will be very chaotic. When one university is thinking about making a change and they see ten others at the FBS level make one, then they get nervous that all the candidates are going to be committed to another university before they have an opportunity to talk to them.”

The mid-season casualties have fallen into three categories.

Some preemptively resigned or suddenly retired: Steve Spurrier at South Carolina; George O’Leary at Central Florida (after his team’s eighth loss of the season, a 59-10 pasting by Houston). Virginia Tech’s Frank Beamer announced last week that he would retire at the end of the season.

Others were caught up in issues not directly related to winning and losing: USC’s Steve Sarkisian was fired Oct. 12 after multiple incidents of reported alcohol abuse; Illinois’ Tim Beckman lost his job just before the season started amid allegations of player mistreatment; Minnesota’s Jerry Kill left due to his recurring epilepsy.

And some were just summarily canned: Al Golden at Miami; Randy Edsall at Maryland; Norm Chow at Hawaii; Dan McCarney at North Texas.

The specter of so many mid-season departures brought with it a panoply of issues.

The out-and-out firings raised certain familiar philosophical concerns of the college game once more being led down the path of professionalism. In the NFL, after all, mid-course corrections at coach are common (two already this season). But the colleges always had been a bit more civil.

As former Florida athletic director Bill Carr told the Times: “It’s more evidence of the monetization of college athletics.”

“It’s another indication that college athletics has adopted the same institutional logic — the same way of doing business — as professional football and professional basketball because the fans view it the same way fundamentally: They want the results now,” Richard Southall, professor of sport management at South Carolina, said in the same story.

All the jobs that are open now, as well as the ones to come at season’s close, also raise some very practical issues.

With the likes of the two USCs — Southern Cal and South Carolina — Virginia Tech and Miami, there is a roster of very high profile positions to fill. (And that’s without factoring in a program like Georgia, should it be added to the list). Will there be enough candidates of heft too fill those spots?

Then there will be the market forces that are sure to exert themselves on the hiring process. College coaches already make a lot of money, which is reason enough to shrug when they are purged en masse. Big pay equals big expectation.

While co-authoring a study on the relationship between coaches’ pay and production, University of Colorado-Denver economics professor Woody Eckard was struck by how their salaries followed no logical economic trend. And by the way, yes, on average, paying more to attract a coach does lead to more winning, the study found.

“We had trend data going back to a few years before the great recession in 2008, and did a coaches’ salary trend,” Eckard said. “There was hardly a blip at all for the recession. It was particularly amazing for us in academia when at the same time faculty salaries were frozen at many schools, coaches’ salaries just kept trending upwards.”

And the current situation is only going to feed that trend. Open your wallets wide, Coach-Seeking U, because there may be no bargains out there.

“It could end up if there are enough additional openings at the top schools, it could end up being a seller’s market,” Eckard said. “The most attractive among the available coaches might be able to bid up their salaries.”

The marketplace will adjust and adapt, the economist figures, but getting there is going to be a bit of a bumpy ride.

Because there always is some pain and a great deal of uncertainty involved, it’s never a great time to go coach shopping. It’s just that some years the path to a more promising future is more littered with the bones of the weary, the failed and the fired than others.