The final week of the college football regular season usually brings about a flurry of firings and retirings, and after some of the results we’ve seen this year, we can expect more vacancies to be advertised among the multiple openings currently available. Heading out of the Week 14 action, who are the college football hot seat coaches who could be relieved of their duty soon?
5 Coaches on the College Football Hot Seat
Ryan Day, Ohio State
Having a 66-10 overall record. Coaching six Consensus All-Americans. Winning the Big Ten Coach of the Year. Never having a season below .800. It’s the sort of resume that would ordinarily ensure your place in program history books, maybe earn a statue outside the stadium years after you retire on your own terms to pursue a broadcast career or simply go fishing in the fall.
Yet, at the Ohio State Buckeyes, that simply isn’t enough when you consistently fail to win “The Game.” Make no bones about it, after the latest defeat to their bitter rival Michigan Wolverines, Ryan Day is well and truly on the hot seat. If it were up to fans of the program to decide his fate, the Buckeyes head coach would be at the employment center searching for work by Monday.
Saturday’s defeat to Michigan was comfortably the worst of Day’s tenure as the leader of the Ohio State football team. They faced a Wolverines team lacking the talent of recent seasons, having suffered through their own ignominy of a national championship hangover under a new coaching staff, but the Buckeyes were ineffective and embarrassing in a 13-10 defeat on home soil.
Day’s demeanor on the sideline, watching a post-game brawl unfold before defending his player’s role in it during the post-game press conference, was of a defeated man. He’s now lost four times in a row to Michigan (for the first time since 1988-1991) and has missed out on the Big Ten Championship Game in a season that was meant to be there for the Buckeyes’ taking.
Luke Fickell, Wisconsin
“I have every confidence that he will respect and honor the foundation that has been set for our football program over the years while embracing the exciting opportunities ahead.”
When Wisconsin Badgers’ Director of Athletics Chris McIntosh secured the services of Luke Fickell from the Cincinnati Bearcats, he anticipated a football future brimming with success. Why wouldn’t he? After all, he arrived in Madison after leading an unprecedented era of football at his previous stop.
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However, Fickell is looking at the wrong end of Wisconsin football history after guiding the Badgers to their first losing season since 2001. The program had one of the longest bowl eligibility streaks in college football, but that came to an end with a pitiful defeat to the Minnesota Golden Gophers in the battle for Paul Bunyan’s Axe.
Fickell is now 13-13 as the Wisconsin head coach. Paul Chryst ended his eight-year tenure as the leader of the Badgers’ football program with a 67-26 record. While some members of the fan base are urging patience as he attempts to shape the team in his image, a large subsection made their feelings known on Black Friday, booing and voting with their feet as the stadium emptied long before the Golden Gophers took the axe to the goalposts.
Dave Clawson, Wake Forest
Dave Clawson commands a lot of respect in coaching circles and with due cause. He has done an outstanding job at a program that doesn’t make it easy to establish continued success. High academic standards cause problems in recruiting for the Wake Forest Demon Deacons, and mastering the transfer portal is difficult for similar reasons, but he’s largely weathered that.
However, after losing to the Duke Blue Devils to end the regular season, Clawson has now led the Deacs to successive four-win seasons. Aside from the 3-9 seasons that opened his tenure, that’s the worst back-to-back record since the middle of the Jim Grobe era, which is largely forgotten because he followed the second with 11, nine, and eight-win seasons.
Worse than the overall record, Clawson has struggled in the ACC for successive seasons. Last year, the Deacs won just one game. This year, they’ve won just two. The program won as many ACC games in its 8-5 2022 season as it has in the past two combined. The conference has changed with realignment, and Wake Forest is in danger of getting left behind unless something changes.
Some of the decisions made by the coaching staff during this doomed season have piled the pressure on Clawson, ensuring his place on the college football hot seat. The final play that saw Duke escape Winston-Salem with a win was straight out of a bad dream. Many fans are questioning whether Sam Hartman’s time with the Deacs masked their current coach’s deficiencies.
Kenni Burns, Kent State
We’ve seen multiple second-year head coaches fired in this cycle, but none have had a worse record through 24 games than Kent State Golden Flashes head coach Kenni Burns. After losing the season finale to the Buffalo Bulls, the program is now 1-23 with the former Indiana Hoosiers running back at the helm.
The defeat to Buffalo on Tuesday night gave Kent State their first winless season since 1998. Burns had already entered the team’s record book (negatively) the previous week when the defeat to the Akron Zips ensured that the Golden Flashes had lost 11 games in back-to-back seasons for the first time in program history.
Yes, the 2024 Golden Flashes team achieved historical levels of terrible. Even Pete Cordelli didn’t lead the team to such desperation, but he was fired after the winless 1993 season, and that is the direction that Burns is headed for based on the on-field product alone. However, there’s more than football at play with his position on the college football hot seat.
Last week, it was revealed that Burns is being sued by Hometown Bank for nearly $24,000 in unpaid credit card debt. That was followed by a rumor that linked the Kent State head coach to gambling debt. With a combination of off-field issues and a lack of results, Burns could find himself out the door far more quickly than his current contract expiration of 2028.
Neal Brown, West Virginia
After guiding the West Virginia Mountaineers to their best season since 2016 last year, the administration handed Neal Brown a contract extension that appeared to secure him at the helm. However, dig below the term extension, and Brown took a pay cut to remain the head coach for an additional season.
After a difficult 2024 campaign, he might not see out the term of that extended contract. Considered on the college football hot seat before the 2023 campaign, Brown returns to a scorching seat after a failed season against elevated expectations based on last year’s performance. That 9-4 season is an outlier in a sea of mediocrity during his tenure.
Brown’s area of expertise throughout his coaching career has been the offense, but the Mountaineers have been in the bottom half of the Big 12 for points scored in all-bar-one of his seasons in charge. Meanwhile, a once-vaunted defense has been abysmal during a season that ended 6-6. They can still end the year with a winning record with a bowl win, but that won’t calm the fans.
The final nail in the coffin for Brown might be the nature of their defeat to the Texas Tech Red Raiders in Week 14. The West Virginia head coach described the performance as “just not good enough,” which was a sizeable understatement in summarizing the 52-15 defeat. Mountaineers’ fans on social media were far more vociferous in their evaluation of the game, and the season.
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