http://grantland.com/the-triangle/colle ... -rankings/The dust has begun to settle on the annual college football coaching carousel and — brace yourself for the shock — it’s been another banner winter for middle-aged white guys, who are a perfect 14-for-14 in filling available FBS openings. In order to help you distinguish one receding hairline from the next, we’ve put together this handy, highly scientific ranking of the new hires, from the most likely to succeed to the least. Remember: Success is defined differently at Nebraska than it is at, say, Tulsa, and all hires are graded according to that curve.
2. SMU
Everything that could have gone wrong for SMU in 2014 did go wrong, pretty much right from the start. But if Chad Morris isn’t right for this job, it’s possible no one is. Like Baylor’s Art Briles, architect of one of the sport’s all-time overhauls just down I-35, Morris is already familiar to Texans as a longtime high school coach, having won state championships in 2008 and 2009;1 also like Briles, Morris was an early adopter of the up-tempo/no-huddle system that has subsequently overtaken the college ranks, and successfully adapted his system to the FBS level as Clemson’s offensive coordinator.
The last coach to leave SMU with a winning record was Bobby Collins in the mid-’80s, on whose watch the program was temporarily nuked by the NCAA; since suffering the “Death Penalty,†the Mustangs have lost at least five games every year, giving them one of the worst winning percentages in the nation. But there’s more than enough talent in Texas to go around for a coach who knows the backroads, and the guy who changes SMU’s fortunes will climb to the next rung on the career ladder — possibly in Austin when the Longhorns run out of patience with Charlie Strong? — in short order.
Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2015 4:45 pm