Every school dreams of hiring the next Nick Saban who can transform its football program into a national champion.
CBS Sports recently championed the 25 best coaching hires of this century, headlined by Alabama hiring Saban in 2006. Over 17 seasons in Tuscaloosa, Saban dominated the sport, winning six national championships and nine SEC championships.
Unfortunately, the vast majority fail miserably at even finding a winning coach, let alone one capable of winning major championships. That’s where this list comes in.
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If there are 25 best hires, we believe there must be 25 worst ones, too. These are the hires that still make you shudder if you’re a fan of the program. The coaches who delivered lows you didn’t even believe were possible.
This isn’t simply about win-loss record, though. While that obviously factored into our rankings, there’s much more that goes into why a hire failed than just the on-field results. Other things we took into account:
- Did the hire make sense in the first place?
- Did the coach’s predecessor have success?
- Does the program have the resources to win?
- Why didn’t it work?
With all those things in mind, we came up with the worst of the worst: The 25 worst coaching hires this century.
Note: We only counted hires whose first season was 2000 or later. An asterisk denotes record impacted by vacated wins.
10 who just missed the cut: Herm Edwards (Arizona State), John L. Smith (Arkansas), Paul Pasqualoni (Connecticut), Ted Roof (Duke), Todd Graham (Hawaii), Larry Porter (Memphis), Bill Callahan (Nebraska), Scott Frost (Nebraska), Jimmy Lake (Washington), Paul Wulff (Washington State)
25. Mike Locksley, New Mexico
Record: 2-26
Locksley wanted to be a head coach but jumped at an opportunity that didn’t make geographic sense for the school or the D.C. native who built his early reputation on his recruiting prowess. His time at New Mexico was an abject disaster from the back-to-back 1-11 seasons to off-field issues that included a physical altercation with an assistant coach. Locksley got another head coaching opportunity in 2018 at Maryland where he has considerably more success, including three consecutive bowl wins from 2021-23.
Record: 4-12
This hire made zero sense from the start. Addazio had success at Boston College, going to six bowls in seven seasons, but wouldn’t have been a serious candidate for another head coaching job had his former boss at Florida, Urban Meyer, not recommended him to Colorado State AD Joe Parker. The definitive Addazio moment: Getting ejected in the second quarter of his final game as CSU’s coach, a 52-10 blowout loss to Nevada.
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Record: 19-19
The record itself isn’t as bad as another Nebraska coach (Scott Frost) who just missed making this list. But when you fire a coach in Bo Pelini who won at least nine games seven consecutive years, you better nail the replacement. Nebraska decided the guy to improve the program was one who had won nine games only once in the preceding five years and had a 12-13 record over the previous two seasons. It wasn’t the slam dunk hire Nebraska needed to justify dumping Pelini, and the lackluster results shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Riley had one nine-win season in 2016 but he started the Cornhuskers’ decline that led to an improbable eight-year bowl drought for a program that won three national titles in the 1990s.
Record: 10-28
Collins had back-to-back winning seasons at Temple when Georgia Tech picked him to replace Paul Johnson. Collins ditched Johnson’s successful triple option offense, and the Yellow Jackets never came close to matching the success they had become accustomed to over the previous decade. There were some recruiting wins like eventual first-round pick Jahmyr Gibbs (who eventually transferred to Alabama) but the results never matched the hype and promises Collins made when he arrived in Atlanta. Collins never won more than three games in a season while his successor, Brent Key, has done so for three consecutive seasons.
21. Chris Ash, Rutgers
Record: 8-32
Rutgers is a well-known challenging job, but Ash’s struggles were particularly egregious. The first-time head coach, who was Ohio State’s co-defensive coordinator at the time of his hire, won only three Big Ten games in four seasons, lost 11 games in Year 2 including to Buffalo and never showed any signs of competency or improvement. If there was a positive from the Ash era, it led Rutgers back to the guy who knows how to win in Piscataway: Greg Schiano.
20. Charlie Strong, Texas
Record: 16-21
The initial hire made sense on paper after Strong took Louisville to a Sugar Bowl and back-to-back top 15 finishes. But Strong couldn’t capitalize on what could be the best job in the country with every advantage and resource at his disposal. Strong lost at least seven games in each of his three seasons at Texas, with the worst coming in an overtime loss that sealed his fate to a 2-10 Kansas team that had lost 19 consecutive games to Big 12 opponents. With the way Steve Sarkisian has Texas rolling right now, it’s still hard to believe it got that bad under Strong.
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19. Bryan Harsin, Auburn
Record: 9-12
Auburn spent more than $21 million to fire Gus Malzahn, held off a booster push to promote Kevin Steele and then plucked Bryan Harsin away from Boise State. It was an outside-the-box hire from the jump and Harsin never seemed to get comfortable within the insular Auburn community, including blowing off high-level boosters that proved costly. Harsin started his first season strong, including a win over top-10 Ole Miss, but lost the last five games of the season and almost got fired as a result. He staved off an awkward investigation into his program, entered Year 2 on the hot seat and could only make it to Halloween before losing his job.
18. Karl Dorrell, Colorado
Record: 8-15
Dorrell hadn’t coached in college in six years and had spent almost all of the previous decade in the NFL when Colorado hired him to replace Mel Tucker. The timing of the hire was tough, but it was still a head-shaking decision that predictably didn’t work. Dorrell fared well with Tucker’s players in Year 1, even winning Pac-12 Coach of the Year in the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season, before the wheels fell off with a 4-8 2021 and 0-5 start in 2022 before he was fired.
17. Kevin Sumlin, Arizona
Record: 9-20
In hindsight Sumlin needed at least a year off from leading a program after the stress of coaching Johnny Manziel at Texas A&M. Instead, Arizona quickly gave him a second opportunity as Rich Rodriguez’s replacement that was a mess from the start. Sumlin never had a winning season in Tucson, with a final indignity of a 70-7 blowout loss to Arizona State enough to end his time in 2020. Sumlin is part of a recurring theme here: The big name retread rarely works out at a lesser school than one he was already fired from.
Record: 7-24
Bowling Green’s hiring strategy went like this: AD Chris Kingston looked up which school had the best offense and decided he had to hire someone from the coaching staff. That somehow led him to Texas Tech running backs coach Mike Jinks, who had never been a coordinator at the college level before getting the Bowling Green job. Taking over a program that Dino Babers led to a 10-4 record the previous year, Jinks never won more than four games in a season and was fired midway through his third year.
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Record: 9-12
You can squint your eyes and see what Florida State was thinking when it stole Willie Taggart away from Oregon. The Florida native had already had success at South Florida and had recruiting connections around the state. With closer inspection, though, that lone mediocre 7-5 season at Oregon should have been a warning sign that Taggart wasn’t ready for the pressure and expectations of leading a major program. The program was already slipping under Taggart’s predecessor, Jimbo Fisher, but he tanked it so quickly FSU had no choice but to fire him after only two seasons. That it had to pay nearly $18 million to do so makes this one of the biggest bust hires of the last 25 years.
14. Darrell Hazell, Purdue
Record: 9-33
Purdue wanted more out of its program than back-to-back bowl games when it dumped Danny Hope. Instead, there was incompetency and despair in Hazell, whose first season featured only a single six-point victory over 1-11 FCS Indiana State. Hazell never won more than one Big Ten game or three games total in any of his three-and-a-half seasons in West Lafayette. For a program that experienced consistent success under Joe Tiller, blowout losses to Northern Illinois and Central Michigan were hard to swallow.
13. Jon Embree, Colorado
Record: 4-21
Embree’s qualifications for the job seemed to boil down to simply being an alumnus. He had never been a coordinator, let alone a head coach, at any level when Colorado hired the then-Washington Redskins tight ends coach. He did inherit a program that was on the downturn, but his 1-11 record his second season — the lone victory, a one-point win over Washington State — ended his time after only two years.
12. Ryan Walters, Purdue
Record: 5-19
The second Purdue coach on the list and you could basically flip a coin on which coach was the worse hire. Walters gets the unfortunate edge here because of what he inherited, taking over a Purdue program that Jeff Brohm had just taken to 9-4 and 8-5 seasons. Walters was a trendy defensive coordinator name, but clearly wasn’t ready for a supersized Big Ten for his first head coaching opportunity. There was hope he could build off a 4-8 first season that included three Big Ten wins but the wheels fell off in 2024 with a 1-11 record and three embarrassing blowout losses where the Boilermakers didn’t score a point and lost by 35 or more points. Walters shares one unfortunate piece of trivia with Hazell: In both of their 1-11 seasons their only wins came over Indiana State.
11. Greg Robinson, Syracuse
Record: 5-37*
Robinson was endlessly positive but the on-field results never matched his optimism. Robinson inherited a program that had only one losing season in 14 years under previous coach Paul Pasqualoni, but he immediately had the worst year in Syracuse’s storied history with a 1-10 record in 2005. He won only 10 games on the field in four seasons — five of those were later vacated — in the low point of Orange football.
Record: 15-21
Dooley had the pedigree but not the resume when Tennessee hired Vince Dooley’s son to replace Lane Kiffin. Dooley had only made a single bowl game and had a 17-20 record at Louisiana Tech before making a jump to Knoxville that proved to be too big for him. Dooley went 3-2 against Kentucky and Vanderbilt, 0-6 against Georgia and South Carolina, finished sixth in the SEC East twice and lost 14 of his last 15 SEC games. Dooley led Tennessee to its first back-to-back losing seasons in 100 years and set the program back years.
9. Ron Turner, FIU
Record: 10-30
FIU AD Pete Garcia would be a lock to make a list similar to this one if we were ranking the worst ADs of the last 25 years. Garcia made the bold — and clearly wrong — decision to fire Mario Cristobal after a down 2012 season despite the future Miami coach guiding FIU to bowl games the previous two seasons, the program’s first ever bowl appearances. His decision to replace Cristobal with Ron Turner, who hadn’t coached in college in nearly a decade, predictably backfired. Turner never came close to matching the success of Cristobal and was ultimately fired in Year 4 after an 0-4 start.
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8. Les Miles, Kansas
Record: 3-18
Miles had been out of college football for more than two years and was even pursuing an acting career when Kansas made the bold swing to hire him as David Beatty’s replacement. It didn’t work, to put it mildly. The game had passed Miles by in his time away, and his quirks were no longer quite as charming as they once seemed down in Baton Rouge. Amidst a brutal 3-18 start to his KU tenure, the school parted ways with Miles after it learned of an investigation into alleged inappropriate treatment of female students while at LSU. Like Sumlin and others, Miles is a good example of the well-known retread rarely working, especially dropping down to a school with less resources than the previous one.
7. Jeremy Pruitt, Tennessee
Record: 5-19*
Pruitt was the end result of an embarrassing coaching search that featured a fan revolt over the expected hire (Greg Schiano), the firing of an AD (John Currie) and almost-hires (Mike Leach). Pruitt had the SEC pedigree but quickly proved he was no Kirby Smart. His time in Knoxville not only didn’t meet expectations, but invited serious NCAA scrutiny into a program that was allegedly handing out money to player parents in fast food bags. In the end, Tennessee was found to have committed hundreds of NCAA violations and multiple coaches, including Pruitt, received multi-year show-cause penalties.
6. Ty Willingham, Washington
Record: 11-37
By all accounts Ty Willingham is a good man who cares about his players. But Washington giving him another prominent job so soon after his failed Notre Dame stint felt foolish in the moment and only aged worse from there. Willingham flamed out spectacularly in Seattle, never posted a winning season and ended his time with the lowlight of an 0-12 final season in 2008.
5. Charlie Weis, Kansas
Record: 6-22
Another failed Notre Dame coach who got a bounce-back opportunity that ended horribly. It’s not simply the ghastly 6-22 (1-18 in Big 12) record in two-and-a-half seasons that lands Weis on this list. He also deserves extra blame for a JUCO-heavy recruiting approach that left Kansas hamstrung for years afterward. Weis went with the quick-fix approach, it blew up in his face and it took one of the game’s best coaches (Lance Leipold) to finally deliver Kansas’ first winning season more than a decade after Weis’ arrival.
4. Chad Morris, Arkansas
Record: 4-18
It didn’t take long for Arkansas officials to realize they’d made a mistake in hiring Morris in 2017. Arkansas was taking a major leap of faith that Morris’ mediocre 14-22 record at SMU would somehow improve in the more difficult SEC and…shockingly, it didn’t. Morris was in over his head from the start and will be best remembered for never winning an SEC game (0-14) in his nearly two seasons in Fayetteville. Morris is one of a few coaches listed here that have as strong a case as anyone for being the worst hire of the last 25 years.
Record: 0-12
Johnson is the infamous architect of the worst turnaround in college football history. Inheriting a team that went 12-2 the year before under Larry Fedora, Johnson drove the Golden Eagles straight into a ditch in a disastrous 0-12 season. Johnson never should have been hired in the first place and surrounded himself with a staff that included a head strength and conditioning coach that hadn’t worked in college football in 20 years. The Ellis Johnson experiment mercifully ended after only one season but Southern Miss has never really been the same since. Before Johnson, Southern Miss had 18 straight winning seasons. Since Johnson’s firing in 2012, USM has only had six winning records.
T-1. Mike Price, Alabama and Michael Haywood, Pittsburgh
Record: 0-0
It is impossible to make a worse hire than having to fire your coach before he ever coaches a game as both Alabama and Pittsburgh had to do. Price, who came from Washington State, was a bad fit from the start and was infamously fired after inappropriate behavior at a charity golf tournament that involved strippers. Alabama president Robert Witt said at the time of his firing, “His mistake has severely hurt our university, and will hurt our university for years to come.”
Haywood made a big jump from Miami (Ohio) to Pittsburgh but lasted only a few weeks after he was arrested and charged with felony domestic violence charges. Todd Graham, who just missed the cut from his time at Hawaii, lasted a single season as Haywood’s replacement at Pittsburgh before bailing for Arizona State.
Alabama had to pivot to Mike Shula, the son of legendary coach Don Shula, its fourth coach in four seasons. Shula had one top 10 finish before his tenure was better remembered for what-ifs, including if Tim Tebow opted for the Crimson Tide over Florida, than the success Alabama fans expected. After Shula’s firing, Alabama was wandering in the wilderness with many questioning its place in college football’s hierarchy…until some guy named Nick Saban arrived.
