Why 2025 is already one of the most bizarre years ever for the college football coaching landscape

We’re at the halfway point of the 2020s in college football, and the coaching landscape is in a stranger place now than it was at the start of the decade. Mind you, the start of the decade included a pandemic season wherein everyone wondered if universities would still be able to hire and fire coaches because of the home ticket revenue lost in the 2020 season.

Yeah, the 2025 coaching landscape cranked up the weirdness to 11. It’s shaping up to be as bizarre as any year in recent memory.

Let’s start with how we just witnessed a coach go into the postseason as public enemy No. 1, only to exit it with a national title and a new contract. Ryan Day did the unthinkable by losing a game that likely would’ve gotten him fired in any other year of the sport, only to go on a postseason run for the ages.

In a way, Day’s run might’ve actually prevented 2025 from being crazy instead of just being bizarre. What do I mean by that? “Crazy” would’ve been the chain reaction that the Ohio State vacancy created. You know, like when Nick Saban’s retirement at Alabama also led to coaching changes at Washington, Arizona and San Jose State.

That move alone was responsible for 3 vacancies at the Power Conference level. It was the exclamation point at the end of a cycle in which 15 Power Conference coaching changes took place. At the end of 2024, only 5 Power Conference teams had coaching changes.

(Sorry, Washington State. You no longer get to be considered a Power Conference team when you face 3 teams that belong to a real Power Conference and you have just as many true road games at schools like Colorado State, North Texas and James Madison.)

To recap, the 5 Power Conference coaching hires were:

• Bill Belichick, UNC
• Jake Dickert, Wake Forest
• Barry Odom, Purdue
• Rich Rodriguez, West Virginia
• Scott Frost, UCF

Let’s start with the elephant in the room here. We’re going to watch Belichick coach American college football games in 2025. At some point, Belichick will be coaching games that are broadcast on The CW. If you don’t think that’s bizarre, you’re probably one of those people who think it’s perfectly normal to have 20 snakes as pets.

The Belichick-Frost showdown on Sept. 20, 2025, at UCF will mark the most message-board coaching matchup in the history of college football. The best coach in NFL history will travel to “The Bounce House” — it won’t be Belichick’s first road game because UNC somehow has to travel to face Charlotte in Week 2 — for a battle with Frost, AKA the former can’t-miss hire at Nebraska who returned to his second home (UCF) because he was fired at his alma mater after becoming the worst 4th quarter coach in college football history.

That game sounds like something that someone would’ve created 2 months into the pandemic for no other reason than they were bored out of their mind and in need of an activity that wasn’t counting blades of grass.

But yep, that’s happening. Frost’s reunion at UCF will have a different full-circle feel than Rodriguez’s, who went back to West Virginia 17 years after he left as the hottest up-and-coming coaching commodity in the sport. Go back and tell a 2007 West Virginia fan that one day, Rodriguez would return home and be welcomed with open arms after he recorded 1 single AP Top 25 finish in his nearly 2 decades away (that’s as many as Deion Sanders has through 2 years at Colorado). Sure. Also go tell any 2020 college football fan that the Mountaineers’ post-2024 vacancy would be filled by Rodriguez, not by idle coach/West Virginia native Jimbo Fisher.

To recap, 40% of the post-2024 Power Conference vacancies yielded reunions. That doesn’t include Belichick, unless you include the handful of years that he spent in Chapel Hill when his dad was an assistant at UNC during the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration.

(We won’t count that.)

We had 2 more Power Conference reunion hires than we had SEC coach changes. In case you didn’t realize it, the 16-team SEC didn’t have a single coaching change. That was the first time that happened since the end of the 2018 season. Go figure that trend coincided with what was considered a disappointing SEC season. Why? Sam Pittman, Billy Napier and Clark Lea all got off the hot seat by posting winning seasons. Disappointing SEC coaches like Hugh Freeze and Brent Venables were still early in their respective tenures, and the SEC’s longest tenured coach, Mark Stoops, had a 4-win season, but he also had a $45 million buyout that UK didn’t want to pay to its most successful coach in program history.

Speaking of Stoops, he’s 1 of 9 SEC head coaches entering Year 5 or more. Even the Big Ten, which prides itself on stability and not being the revolving door of coaches like the SEC is associated with, only has 7 coaches entering Year 5 or more in the 18-team conference.

Bizarre times, these are.

We’re about to enter a year in which the amount of Super Bowls won (6) trumps national titles won (5) by active college coaches. Belichick is 100% to blame for that. Some would argue that the anticipation of the revenue sharing era is to blame for the lack of movement among Power Conference coaches. We’d need to see that trend play out over multiple years and not just say a weird 2024 coaching carousel — one in which nobody paid a fired coach a $10 million buyout even though there were 42 FBS coaches with buyouts of at least $10 million last season — is a sign of things to come.

It remains to be seen what’s to come in 2025. At this time last year, we were all just trying to move past the shock of Saban actually retiring instead of coaching into his 80s. Now, we’re all still adjusting to what’s been one of the stranger, more unpredictable times in the coaching landscape.

All I know is that no amount of time will be enough to adjust to Belichick coaching games on The CW.

Connor O’Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He’s a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.