Each offseason seems to have a coaching trend that may or may not actually persist. A couple of years ago, it was about big game hunting ADs pulling headlining head coaches away from storied programs. You remember, Brian Kelly leaving Notre Dame for LSU and Lincoln Riley leaving Oklahoma for USC.
Those moves have quieted down. Not for nothing, the kinds of massive contracts that these moves require have been spoiling faster than a milk jug in the Swamp in September. Texas A&M spent over $70 million to make Jimbo Fisher go away, Michigan State could barely wait to dump Mel Tucker* after he put himself in trouble, and the heat is rising on Riley after two years of Caleb Williams with little to show for it. Plus Kelly just replaced almost half his coaching staff.
*Tucker wasn’t a big-fish catch for MSU, but they did massively extend him to keep LSU at bay during the cycle that netted the Tigers Kelly.
This offseason, the trend that grabbed the zeitgeist was guys leaving head coaching jobs for non-head coaching jobs.
Sean Lewis is kind of grandfathered into the trend. He left his job as Kent State’s head coach to be Deion Sanders’ OC last year, and he parlayed that into the San Diego State head coaching job this winter.
Examples from this cycle include a pair of Alabama hires — former Buffalo HC Maurice Linguist becoming the co-DC and Kane Wommack leaving South Alabama to become the other co-DC — and Georgia State’s Shawn Elliott leaving to become tight ends coach at South Carolina.
It wasn’t just G5 head coaches doing this. Boston College’s Jeff Hafley left to become the DC for the Green Bay Packers. Then, most notably and stunningly, Chip Kelly left UCLA to be OC at Ohio State.
That does seem like a lot. However, there are a few things at play here.
Let’s take Elliott first. He was offensive line coach previously at Carolina under Steve Spurrier and the first year of Will Muschamp’s tenure. His family never left Columbia when he took the job at Georgia State. So after seven years of being apart from his family, with his daughter nearly finishing high school, and little glory to speak of at GSU, Elliott took the opportunity to reunite. Unusual circumstances, but it’s very understandable when you learn the details.
Kelly, Hafley, and Linguist were probably getting out ahead of the posse. All three were going to be on hot seat lists for 2024.
Kelly very nearly got fired last year, but then he upset USC. That, combined with the general lackadaisical attitude towards football at a basketball school, meant he didn’t get fired. However the Bruins aren’t going to win much in the first year in their new conference, so ’24 was probably going to be it for Kelly. Plus, he knows Ryan Day very well. He coached Day at the University of New Hampshire, and Day was his quarterbacks coach for a year each with the NFL’s Eagles and 49ers. There’s a connection there.
Hafley was 22-26 through four seasons at BC with only two bowl appearances and few big wins to speak of. He had been in the NFL from 2006-18, so going back there is natural. Linguist was 14-23 in three seasons at Buffalo, and the worst record was 2023’s 3-9. There wasn’t a lot of hope for a turnaround.
All three of these guys could’ve stuck around for their buyouts, but all three decided it was more worth it to move on with their careers. Some guys just don’t want to be fired and have that on their resume, even if it looks like they’re avoiding it with a lateral or downward move.
Cases in point from close to home. Spurrier never forgave Bill Curry for not retaining him when the latter was named head coach at Georgia Tech. It’s the closest SOS ever got to being fired at the college level in his career. When the HBC got to play Curry’s Kentucky teams, he mercilessly ran up the score as much as possible. More recently, Billy Napier has been dogged by Clemson firing him as OC even though Dabo Swinney hired him for that role much too early. It still gets brought up when people talk about him despite years of head coaching under his belt.
Wommack is the one who sticks out, as he was just fine at South Alabama after making back-to-back bowls in 2022-23 and winning ten games in ’22. He didn’t have a personal connection to Tuscaloosa or incoming head coach Kalen DeBoer either.
That said, he was winning in a similar fashion but lesser degree to Jon Sumrall, who had gone 23-4 in two seasons at peer program Troy. The best Sumrall could get with that sterling record was the Tulane job. It echoes Lewis, who had an amazing record given Kent State’s history. He had to spend a year as a P5 OC just to get an AAC job. Insert reference to “Sun Belt Billy” here however you’d like.
Top level programs aren’t hiring G5 head coaches at the rate they used to. The podcast Split Zone Duo did an excellent episode on this topic last week specifically looking at the MAC. The period from the early 2000s to mid-2010s where MAC head coaching was a direct path to a P5 job was the aberration; head coaches in that conference routinely left for non-head coaching jobs in the decade prior to that era and have been doing so since.
The best path to a top job right now probably is through the coordinator ranks at other top jobs. With the SEC and Big Ten separating themselves so much, there’s real value in getting that stamp on your resume. It seems particularly so in the SEC, where every athletic director loves to tout SEC experience whenever they can for their hires.
So while the new rigors of NIL and relaxed transfer rules are making the job of FBS head coach harder, this offseason’s run of head coaches leaving for non-head coaching jobs may not be a sign of that making the job untenable. Most of the guys doing it either had special reasons, were getting out before being fired, or both. And even the one who doesn’t fit in there looks more like he’s trying to position himself for a future head coaching job than trying to get out of being an HC for good.
We’ll see if this becomes more than a one-year trend or if this is another Kelly-and-Riley coincidence, but don’t blame all the moves solely on NIL and transfer rules. It’s a narrative that makes sense at first but is too simple to cover everything.