Go ahead! Fire your coach!
Why are teams better AFTER firing their coaches? PLUS! A new NCAA record, and fashion advice for getting your dream job.
OK, so last week I made a big mistake. I got my college football newsletter out as quickly as I could on Sunday, hoping to tell all of you guys about all the most important college football news …
… and then within like, MINUTES of me posting it, James Franklin got fired.
Not again. I waited this time because I knew Florida would fire Billy Napier. (I had no idea Colorado State would fire Jay Norvell.) Now you are INFORMED.
And for the rest of the teams in college football, … I have advice:
Fire your head coach
After looking at the results around college football the past few weeks, I have one question for the head coaches in the sport: What … would you say … you do here?
We’ve had a bumper crop of coach firings in 2025, with more each week. I’ve noticed something weird that keeps happening when teams fire their head coaches: They keep playing football. In fact, they’re often better than they were before firing their head coaches.
Last week, UAB fired Trent Dilfer, whose disastrous tenure as the Blazers’ head coach is the topic of the most popular article in this newsletter’s history.
The vibes instantly improved roughly 10,000 percent. The Blazers beat undefeated Memphis and won a gigantic bronze rack of ribs. Look at how happy these guys are to not be around Trent Dilfer:
UCLA continued its miracle win streak yesterday under interim head coach Tim Skipper. The Bruins have now won three in a row and remain on track to make the College Football Playoff as Big Ten champions if they win out. Sure, they’ll have to beat Ohio State and Indiana to do it, but they seem unstoppable right now.
Oregon State got its first win of the year yesterday, a week after firing Trent Bray. (Admittedly, it was against an FCS opponent.) Stanford beat Florida State with interim coach Frank Reich. Honestly, it’s just been a great year in general for interim coaches — Virginia Tech won their first two games with Philip Montgomery in charge, and Kent State has more wins with Mark Carney than they did in two years with Kenni Burns. Penn State and Arkansas haven’t won yet with their interims … but they’ve looked a little livelier than before firings.
So go ahead! Fire your coach! This isn’t a message to any specific teams (Wisconsin) whose fanbases are disappointed (Auburn) with recent results (Florida State) or the general vibe of the program (LSU.) It’s a message to everybody.
It sounds like I’m being facetious, but think about it: When a team’s starting QB is injured, they have to reconfigure their whole offense. Even a team’s long snapper getting injured can force a team to significantly alter its gameplan. But a head coach? They just keep playing football! (Seriously, Oregon State lost multiple games this year due to a long snapper injury and is just fine without their head coach.)
However, we’ve allowed head coaches to become The Face Of The Program. A pro coaching change feels like a personnel move; a college coaching change is The End of An Era. And, well, college is more like the pros than ever. You can literally just pay players to play at your school instead of paying a head coach to lure and retain them.
It’s time for teams to stop committing tens of millions of dollars to coaches so we can fire them the second we get mad. Bad loss? Fire the coach. Win that makes you feel weird? Fire the coach. We’re going to pay the coaches a competitive hourly wage and pass the savings onto the players.
Obviously, somebody needs to do the most visible head coaching tasks: stuff like yelling at the refs, talking to the media, etc. But IDK, I bet I could do a lot of those. I yell at the refs all the time for free, and I do media for … basically free. Just gonna go ahead and drop that subscribe button here.
OK, so now that teams have fired so many coaches, there are a lot of head coaching job openings. Go ahead, apply for one! A lot of schools literally do post their job openings on their university career websites for the public to apply.
You might think these schools are looking for someone with coaching experience — but what schools really want is someone who looks the part. And that’s something you can do by going to Homefield Apparel Dot Com for their selection of Coaches Jackets. They’ve got one for most of the schools with an opening, including this Arkansas jacket:
Or try one of these pullovers — they’ve got a real “1990s head coach” look that should convince schools you’ve been coaching for decades.
Pitch them on my “pay the recruits instead of me” concept (cost-effective, innovative, shows you’re thinking about how to lead the program into a new era) AND wear one of these beauties? You might get hired by the end of the day.
The Full Montie
An all-time NCAA record was demolished yesterday. Montie Quinn, running back for the Division III Curry College Colonels in Milton, Mass., ran for 522 yards in his team’s 71-27 win over Nichols College.
That’s the most rushing yards ever by any player in any game at any division of college football. The previous NCAA record was 465 yards by fellow DIII running back Cartel Brooks from Heidelberg, set back in 2013, and the all-time FBS record is 427, set by Oklahoma’s Samaje Perine in 2014. The only 500-yard rushing game I’ve ever heard of was in Derrick Henry’s high school game log. (Henry had Andrew Jackson ON SKATES, which makes sense because he’s been dead for so long.)
Video of the entire game is available here, and it’s honestly breathtaking stuff. Quinn got his 522 yards on just 20 carries — that’s 26.1 yards per carry — with touchdown runs of 30, 58, 64, 78, 84, and 85 yards. He’s obviously the quickest guy on the field, but also flummoxed Nichols’ defenders with nasty jukes and hit some perfect cutbacks the few times an opposing defender actually closed in on him.
(BTW, searching for “Curry College” on YouTube led me to Steph Curry’s appearance in an “I Love College” parody video when he was a Davidson student. Truly a snapshot of a moment in time.)
This didn’t come out of nowhere. Quinn was already leading Division III in rushing yardage, and led the division in rushing yards per game in 2023 and 2024. And amazingly, this wasn’t even the first NCAA record set against Nichols’ defense this year. They lost 92-60 to the Coast Guard Academy — yes, there’s a Coast Guard Academy, no they don’t run the triple option — setting the Division III record for most combined points in a game.
Clearly, Nichols is extremely good at allowing 70-yard touchdowns. I’m going to be generous and assume they’ve adopted a unique defensive strategy trying to prioritize TFLs and turnovers late in games that leaves them susceptible to allowing 70-80 yard touchdown passes, instead of writing them off as the worst defense in the history of football. After all, the Bisons were actually on a two-game win streak before playing Curry after beating Maine Maritime and New England College, who rank #765 and #766 in Bill Connelly’s ranking of all 766 college football teams … and those two teams play each other next week. I’m considering the road trip up to New Hampshire for that one.
For a full rundown of this week in college football, take a listen to my appearance on Split Zone Duo’s Sunday morning Hurry-Up. It was an awesome week — four of the AP top 10 teams and five of 11 undefeated teams lost:
Unfair Catch
My heart breaks for the Washington State Cougars. Abandoned by the merciless whims of conference realignment, the Coogs have no conference schedule to rely on, and had to schedule back-to-back games across the country against ranked teams. Last week, they almost beat then-undefeated Ole Miss, 24-21, after unveiling some beautiful 2 QB plays. This week, they almost beat surprising ACC contender Virginia, only to be doomed by the rulebook.
Wazzu had a 20-17 lead on the Hoos when Zevi Eckhaus threw a pick that set up a game-tying Virginia field goal. When WSU’s Leyton Smithson began returning the ensuing kickoff, the refs blew their whistles and called the play dead:
What happened is that Smithson’s fellow return man, Kirby Vorhees, briefly signaled for a fair catch before starting to block for Smithson. When one player signals for a fair catch and another player catches it, that’s considered an “invalid fair catch signal.” An invalid fair catch signal works basically the same as a regular fair catch — the team gets the ball at the spot of the catch. But in college, a fair catch on a kickoff moves the ball to the 25, which is why Washington State signalled for it in the first place. But that carve-out doesn’t extend to an invalid fair catch, so Wazzu got the ball at the 1-yard line.
Wazzu was pushed even closer to the end zone by a false start, and then Virginia tackled Vorhees — the running back who made the fair catch signal — in the end zone for a game-winning safety.
There are other ways you can get dinged for this: It happened Week 0 to Hawai’i when a player signaled for a fair catch at the 1-yard line and fielded a kickoff on a hop, and last year to Nevada when a player signaled for a fair catch and then muffed the kickoff and recovered it at the 2-yard line. Clearly, these teams aren’t trying to be deceitful — they just want the ball at the 25-yard line. It seems unfair to punish teams so hard over these technicalities — and in the case of our poor, beautiful Washington State Cougars, it cost them the game.
After going shirtless last week, Oklahoma State’s fans have added clothing … or more precisely, costumes. They’re bananas:
After ClapGate last week, Lane Kiffin took a brief moment in Ole Miss’ matchup with Georgia to prank a ref:
After getting embarrassed in its first three games against power conference opponents, Bill Belichick’s UNC squad almost beat Cal before this devastating late fumble:
At this rate, I believe UNC will grow into a team that can potentially beat mid-tier ACC opponents by Belichick’s 75th birthday.
The Tennessee-Alabama broadcast highlighted UT-Martin head coach Jason Simpson, father of Alabama QB Ty Simpson. The elder Simpson actually coached a game earlier that day against Gardner-Webb in Boiling Springs, N.C. That game kicked at 1:30 p.m. ET, and ended with UTM beating Gardner-Webb, 37-7. The Skyhawks ran the ball a lot, possibly because it was the best way to ice a blowout win, and possibly because it was the best way to get Simpson on a plane quickly. Simpson spent some time in the locker room after the game, then got on a plane (likely this one, which took off at 5:09 p.m. ET and landed in Tuscaloosa at 5:12 p.m. CT) and got to his seat on time. Even as an experienced college football traveler, I’m impressed.
Utah lost the Holy War game against archrival BYU. More importantly, it used 5-foot-11, 330-pound Semi Taulanga as a tight end:
They call him Semi because that man is a truck! (Also because it’s his name.)
Nichols' DC has been trying the rarely used "Break, don't bend" scheme.
I can't remember who coined it but the effect of winning a game after firing a coach is referred to as the Dead Coach Bounce (I believe there is a similar concept in finance when a CEO is fired called the Dead Cat Bounce). Usually the team gets a brief bump then continues losing. I have no idea how UCLA keeps winning though.