Until Saturday Newsletter ???? | This is The Athletic’s college football newsletter. Sign up here to receive Until Saturday directly in your inbox.
One quick Lane Kiffin thing: Yesterday in his defensive LSU intro, he said his proposal to remain in Ole Miss’ building throughout the Playoff didn’t make sense to the Rebels, but likely made sense “to all the national media.” Well, the Until Saturday newsletter might be the most-read digital publication in college football’s national media, and his plan did not make sense to me. On to other things:
This season, the chairs started opening early, and now the music is beginning to stop. Though, more chairs are also opening. It’s a complex metaphor. Here’s a quick timeline of FBS coaching moves since Sunday morning, when a trio ascended together from the American and into the SEC:
1. Arkansas hired Ryan Silverfield (50-25) from Memphis. The third straight Tigers coach to win a lot (Justin Fuente, Mike Norvell), he also disappointed a lot of fans by turning a relatively favorable NIL situation in the American into no conference title shots. In the SEC, the 45-year-old’s NIL situation will not be favorable. Then again, nobody at Arkansas reasonably expects title shots, so normal wins will do. (I fear the Tigers’ list will include my alma mater Kennesaw State’s 9-3 head coach, Memphis native Jerry Mack.)
2. Auburn hired Alex Golesh (23-15) from USF. Certainly much better than the buzz about promoting interim D.J. Durkin, whose hire would’ve been even harder to justify than Hugh Freeze’s. Golesh, who inherited a 1-11 USF team and has gone 9-3 this year, feels like Auburn’s first truly new chapter in a half-decade. The 41-year-old was born in Russia, so “can he speak SEC??” will be a thing, but it’s not like the Ohio State alum and former Tennessee OC showed up yesterday. I liked this story about him and his mentor.
3. Florida hired Jon Sumrall (42-11 overall) from Tulane. Gators fans are debating whether Sumrall, 43, has a resume too much like Billy Napier’s. But Sumrall led Troy’s best two-year run ever (23-5 with a No. 19 finish) before mostly sustaining what Willie Fritz built at Tulane, which isn’t as easy as it sounds, since powers plucked so many pieces of the Green Wave along the way. (Also, even if “almost as good as Fritz” were the full characterization, that would still be a really good coach.) The Sumrall-Napier similarities are surface-level.
4. Coastal Carolina fired Tim Beck (20-18). Please note this refers to the Tim Beck who was the OC at NC State, not the Tim Beck who is the OC at Vanderbilt. The latter Tim Beck has coached Diego Pavia’s entire Division I career after discovering the eventual Heisman candidate while watching the JUCO title game at Hooters. Tim Beck, who commands Vandy’s first-ever 10-win offense, would objectively be a great hire to replace Tim Beck, though I would advise against also hiring former Illinois HC Tim Beckman.
5. Kiffin to LSU. More on him below, unfortunately.
6. Ole Miss promoted DC Pete Golding to permanent HC. Not interim. Golding will oversee Ole Miss’ early signing day tomorrow, coach a Playoff game in a few weeks and presumably also coach next season. I’m always wary of the internal-promotion-to-rally-the-locker-room thing, but the Rebels have an incredible amount of rallying available. Popular among players, the 41-year-old Golding is the son of a Louisiana high school coach, was a four-year Nick Saban assistant (fwiw) and has fielded defenses that rank between decent and great, though one concern would be his 2022 DUI.
7. Michigan State fired Jonathan Smith (4-15) and immediately hired Pat Fitzgerald (110-101). Fitzgerald had some impressive highs at Northwestern, with his five ranked finishes in 17 years looking as nice as Gary Barnett’s two in seven during the 1990s. He also finished 4-20, and not the fun kind. The 50-year-old’s teams often played the country’s least watchable football, somehow making people believe he was the world’s only coach sturdy enough to go .500-ish at Northwestern. (His successor, David Braun, is .500-ish, as was his predecessor, Randy Walker.) For whatever reason, MSU found him worth associating its scandal-plagued self with Northwestern’s Fitzgerald-era football scandal.
8. Kentucky fired Mark Stoops (72-80) and quickly replaced him with Oregon OC Will Stein. After a two-year collapse, Stoops leaves as the winningest and arguably second-best coach in program history (definitely behind Bear Bryant, who went 60-23-5 in Lexington). The bad news: $36 million buyout. The good news: Despite opening after a million other SEC jobs had already filled, the Wildcats struck quickly, landing the highly sought, 36-year-old former Louisville quarterback whose smile was a meme like 15 years ago.
9. UCLA is hiring JMU’s Bob Chesney (131-51 across four levels of the NCAA). As this newsletter discussed weeks ago, Chesney would’ve been my No. 1 rec for nearly every school on the market. You’re all firing your coaches because you want a Curt Cignetti, right? Well, here’s the 48-year-old who’s winning at Cignetti’s former school even though Cignetti took most of its best players and coaches. Will it work at a school much less sports-affluent than Indiana? That much, I can’t promise.
10. Ohio announced head coach Brian Smith (9-4) is on leave and DC John Hauser is the interim. No further details at this time.
11. And now, Penn State and BYU are maybe battling over the Cougars’ Kalani Sitake (83-44), igniting a cookie booster’s bat signal. Mad Libs! EA Sports simulation glitch! Sitake is a phenomenal coach, repeatedly beating expectations in Provo and on the verge of the Playoff this season, though I worry a trip so far east might end up like Bronco Mendenhall’s middling Virginia run. There’s a lot of murkiness in Penn State’s search, but all of this has inspired the CEO of Crumbl Cookie, a BYU booster, to declare he’ll get involved somehow. Penn State vs. 70,000-calorie hand cakes: Who ya got?
Chris Vannini updated his FBS hire grades. Updated list of open jobs: Cal, Coastal Carolina, Memphis, North Texas, Penn State, Tulane, UAB, UConn and USF.
???? Oh right, early signing day happens before the postseason’s even finalized. Orderly as always. Can USC hold off Georgia, Alabama and Notre Dame at No. 1? Late drama all throughout the SEC! Hot starts by/for new coaches at Virginia Tech and Florida! Grace Raynor has your one-stop list of things to know heading into tomorrow.
???? As far as Playoff participation goes, the moving parts are BYU, North Texas-Tulane, Virginia-Duke, JMU and the three G5 conferences that will fire up PowerPoint if Virginia and JMU lose. (I am willing to hear out the Miami RedHawks.) Ahead of tonight’s penultimate Playoff rankings, Scott Dochterman predicts the final field.
???? Non-coaching news:
Kiffin’s pre-Playoff move out of Ole Miss is certainly one of the grossest and weirdest job changes in college football history, which is saying a lot. (Geez, it’s a lot just to say it’s the new No. 1 on Kiffin’s personal list of mess.) But I still wanted to arrange some fairly recent comps. In college football, whenever something unthinkable happens, it has already happened.
In general, whenever someone asks me about this Kiffin circus, I’ll send them (1) this furious Stewart Mandel post on all the hypocrisies being exposed and (2) this David Ubben explainer on college football’s calendar puzzle. I will also send them memes alleging Kiffin didn’t own the dog supposedly named Juice Kiffin … and was terrible at yoga all along.
As far as football goes, here are Kiffin’s main to-dos in Baton Rouge, along with inspo-posting through it until he can further rebrand himself once the Bama job opens at some point.
See you Thursday. Don’t forget to sign your paperwork tomorrow.