The College Football Coaching Carousel: A Story of Unmet Expectations

Every year head coaches of major college football programs are shown the door, often with great cost to the school. In 2017, UCLA alone had to pay more than $12 million to buyout Jim Mora’s contract. With such a large cost to the university, it is important to know what may have led to these firings, beyond losing seasons. I will argue that the greatest determinant of coach firings are unmet expectations.

To test this theory, I took Rivals’ recruiting class rankings lagged by two years and compared them to the Final 2017 AP Top 25 Ranking. I lagged the recruiting class by two years because most of these players are expected to see considerable playing time by their junior season but are not yet eligible for the NFL Draft. The lagged recruiting class is a good measure of expectations for two reasons. The first is that the recruits themselves choose to sign to a school that they believe will perform well in the future. Secondly, teams with more talent are expected to perform better in the future than teams with less talent, all else equal.

In 2017, thirteen of the lagged 25 top ranked recruiting classes finished in the top 25. The expectations of each of these schools were met with successful outcomes. Of the twelve remaining teams who didn’t live up to the expectations set by their 2015 recruits, seven fired their head coaches during or after the season. These teams were Tennessee (Butch Jones), Texas A&M (Kevin Sumlin), UCLA (Jim Mora), Oregon (Mark Helfrich), Arizona State (Todd Graham), Florida (Jim McElwain) and Arkansas (Bret Bielema). An eighth team, Florida State, saw its head coach (Jimbo Fisher) leave to take another coaching job.

That leaves us with four schools that retained their head coach despite its shortcomings and all four had mitigating factors that cooled the hot seat. Three of the schools had hired their coach in the last two seasons: Texas (Tom Herman), South Carolina (Will Muschamp), and Ole Miss (Matt Luke) and the fourth, Stanford’s David Shaw received 2017 Pac-10 Coach of the Year Honors. If schools can better predict when the stakes are highest by keeping expectations in mind and write coaching contracts accordingly, they will be able to lower the cost of buyouts. If not, schools will continue to pay large buyout clauses to the very coaches who are most likely to be fired!

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