Plenty of prominent places have new faces in the football coaching position as we celebrate Memorial Day and head into summer, including Texas, USC, Penn State and Washington, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see more big-name programs join the list by the end of December. Coaches might be used to getting at least a full recruiting cycle to prove themselves, but with patience at an all-time low now in the sport, athletic directors can be quick to pull the trigger.
Here are the coaches under the most pressure to win in 2014:
• Mike London, Virginia: Despite going winless in the ACC and finishing 2-10 last year, London — a man of few words, it seems — still managed to sign a respectable recruiting class, but there’s been little else to be happy about, and it’s hard to imagine London actually guiding this class through their entire college careers.
London is 18-31 in five seasons in Charlottesville, his one bowl appearance coming in an 8-5 season in 2011, and his record looks even worse given his high-priced assistants, including defensive coordinator Jon Tenuta and two former FBS head coaches. He’s won a total of two conference games since that bowl appearance, while also losing to Louisiana Tech and Ball State. With that 48-27 home loss to Ball State last year, it seemed as if Virginia would be better off not letting Cardinals coach Pete Lembo leave campus without agreeing to replace London.
Virginia seems like the only team that doesn’t have even an outside shot at winning the wide-open ACC Coastal, and with UCLA, BYU, Florida State and Louisville also on the schedule, London will have trouble winning enough to stick around.
• Will Muschamp, Florida: Ron Zook went 23-14 in his three seasons. Will Muschamp so far has gone 22-16. Zook unsuccessfully bridged the gap from Steve Spurrier to Urban Meyer, and Muschamp has struggled to come anywhere near the heights Meyer achieved.
Both Spurrier and Meyer were revolutionary offensive coaches; Muschamp, a great defensive coordinator, has presided over offenses that ranked sixth, 12th and 14th in the SEC in yards per play. To be fair, Florida couldn’t have suffered from worse injury luck last year, but the downward trend is still troubling. Florida fell from the Sugar Bowl to 4-8 — its first losing record since 1979 — and a loss to an FCS team, Georgia Southern, that had zero passing yards. The offense felt aimless and helpless, and that’s especially unacceptable at a program that has peaked under two offensive innovators.
Muschamp now appears to be moving away from his ultra-conservative philosophy, hiring Kurt Roper to install a more modern, uptempo, spread offense, after Roper achieved nearly unprecedented success with the respected David Cutcliffe at Duke. Anchored by Dante Fowler and Vernon Hargreaves, Muschamp’s defense should again find success, and it’s simply a matter of the offense becoming competent enough to sustain drives without shooting itself in the foot repeatedly. Quarterback Jeff Driskel, who’s been uneven and turnover-prone, is healthy again (with star recruit Will Grier waiting behind him should he falter), but the receiving corps has really struggled lately. Running back Kelvin Taylor — the son of Fred Taylor — might be poised to break out as a sophomore.
• Dana Holgorsen, West Virginia: What appeared to be a happy marriage has fallen apart quickly. After the bizarre coach-in-waiting transition that saw Holgorsen get promoted to head coach a season earlier than expected, he began his stint in Morgantown with a 10-3 record and a 70-point outing in the Orange Bowl.
His upward trajectory continued into the first half of 2012, when the combination of Geno Smith, Tavon Austin and Stedman Bailey raced out to a 5-0 record under Holgorsen’s high-powered offense, including a jaw-dropping 70-63 win over Baylor. But the Mountaineers hit a wall in their Big 12 move in October, dropping six of their last eight games to finish 7-6. Smith’s Heisman campaign fell apart rapidly, as did Holgorsen’s standing as one of the game’s best young coaches.
It only got worse last year, as they finished 4-8 with a revolving door at quarterback, ending the year with consecutive losses to Kansas and Iowa State. Since beating Texas on Oct. 6, 2012, West Virginia has gone 4-12 in Big 12 play. It’s been a rough transition to a league where West Virginia is geographically out of place, and while a defensive shake-up — the promotion of Tony Gibson to coordinator and the addition of longtime Penn State assistant Tom Bradley as associate head coach — could help a unit that gave up 33 points per game, this season could get ugly in a hurry.
The Mountaineers open with Alabama, visit a Maryland team that beat them 37-0 last year and host Big 12 favorite Oklahoma — all before the end of September.
• Charlie Weis, Kansas: Weis has gone 4-20 in two years at Kansas, after going 16-21 in his final three years at Notre Dame. Nobody said winning in Lawrence was easy, but Weis’ brash personality doesn’t give him much margin for error.
Two of his four wins have come against South Dakota State and South Dakota; one of the others was an unwatchable 13-10 win over Louisiana Tech. So, thus far, the only thing Weis can cling to is last November’s 31-19 win over floundering West Virginia, which was followed by a 34-0 loss to Iowa State and a 31-10 loss to Kansas State.
Weis has bet big on juco players (although not as many in 2014), following the model of in-state rival Bill Snyder, but so far it’s not working. Weis struggled to develop recruits at Notre Dame and has always felt like a better fit for the pro game. Thus far, all the reservations about his getting the Kansas job have borne out.
• Tim Beckman, Illinois: One of the most bizarre occurrences in recent college football history has to be Illinois’ appearance in the Rose Bowl in the 2007 season.
The Fighting Illini didn’t win the Big Ten and finished 9-3, but they got a bid to Pasadena anyway, because of the Rose Bowl’s insistence on inviting a Big Ten replacement for Ohio State, who played for the national title. It was Illinois’ first bowl bid since 2001, as Ron Zook had gone 4-19 in his first two seasons, and he then went 21-28 over the next four years before getting fired. Beckman has gone 6-18 in two years, with only one of those wins coming in Big Ten play, against hapless Purdue last November.
He did double his win total last year, at least, as the offense found renewed life thanks to the inspired hire of coordinator Bill Cubit, but confidence is not exactly high in Champaign.
• Kyle Flood, Rutgers: Just about every piece of Rutgers football news since the Big Ten invitation came has been bad. Flood has passed the time quietly and comes very cheap, by Big Ten standards, but any momentum that Greg Schiano had built up has petered out by now.
Sure, the Scarlet Knights now have a stable place in the FBS hierarchy with a spot in the lucrative Big Ten, but last year, they finished 6-7 in the American Athletic Conference, were held under 20 points in five of eight league games, threw 22 interceptions and struggled on the recruiting trail.
The once-stingy defense has also taken a big step back, and Flood has a pair of new lieutenants: former Maryland coach Ralph Friedgen as offensive coordinator, and the promoted Joe Rossi on defense.
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