These college football coaches better watch their backs through the end of the 2021 season
8 min read
Sometimes, the real-life hot seat doesn’t wait around for the CBS Sports’ Hot Seat Rankings. Since we updated you last month, five more coaches have been fired bringing the total to eight since the start of the 2021 college football season.
That saved us some work on Ed Orgeron (LSU), Nick Rolovich (Washington State), Matt Wells (Texas Tech), Gary Patterson (TCU) and Tom Arth (Akron). Clay Helton has been fired (at USC) and rehired (at Georgia Southern), replacing Chad Lunsford, since Sept. 13. Randy Edsall (UConn) left his second stint with the Huskies just two games into his fifth return season.
This isn’t a coaching carousel; it’s become bungee jumping with a whistle. With less than a month to go in the regular season, the Hot Seat Ranking have been updated again. Remember, the hot seat doesn’t necessarily mean imminent firing. At a minimum, it means it’s time to monitor the temperature of your coach’s seat from here on out.
A reminder: This is where we started with our annual offseason edition with ratings for all 130 FBS coaches before the season began. Now we are taking a third look with two full months of the 2021 season in the books.
Below is our ratings key. Here’s how the 130 FBS coaches sorted out before the season began. There were nine on the proverbial hot seat (rated 5 or 4) entering the season with another 14 starting to feel the heat (rated 3).
|
5 |
Win or be fired |
3 |
|
4 |
Start improving now |
6 |
|
3 |
Pressure is mounting |
14 |
|
2 |
All good … for now |
33 |
|
1 |
Safe and secure |
52 |
|
Untouchable |
22 |
That leads us to our updated Hot Seat Rankings. Here’s how things are shaking out just over two months into the season. Take a look below.
