The storyline of the 2025 college football season has been the firing of coaches midseason. Numerous high profile coaches—like Penn State’s James Franklin and LSU’s Brian Kelly—have been fired this year, along with Auburn’s Hugh Freeze, Florida’s Billy Napier, Arkansas’s Sam Pittman, Virginia Tech’s Brent Pry, Oregon State’s Trent Bray, Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy, UCLA’s DeShaun Foster, Colorado State’s Jay Norvell and UAB’s Trent Dilfer.
With all of these firings taking place before the end of the season, the coaching carousel is expected to be more action-packed than ever this offseason. However, firing a head coach doesn’t mean that a team will hire the right one on their next try.
Texas coach Steve Sarkisian posed a question along those lines as he weighed in on the firings as of late, as schools wrestle with the large buyouts required to make a coaching move.
“If you're not willing to pay a coach what his contract is, well maybe you're probably not gonna get one of the coaches you thought you might get,” Sarkisian told reporters this week. “I always find it interesting ... everybody wants to fire their coach, who you gonna hire? There's all these jobs out there right now, who's everybody going to hire? I don’t know, we’ll find out.”
When asked by @JimVertuno about the coaching carousel around the country and the contracts that are involved, Steve Sarkisian spent over two and a half minutes giving his opinion on the topic...
— Cory Mose (@Cory_Mose) November 3, 2025
"If you're not willing to pay a coach what his contract is, well maybe you're… pic.twitter.com/qSdJKrosBJ
Firing a coach at midseason has officially become normalized this season, and Sarkisian wisely pointed out that this lack of job security may not make a coaching position very attractive.
“Who wants to take a job with the amount of pressure that coaches are under, the amount of scrutiny they’re under, the amount of one week you’re a hero the next week you’re a zero mentality that fanbases and people wanna have,” Sarkisian noted. “Surely coaches want some security to what they sign up to go do. We work really hard. I get it, we all wanna win and we’re all busting our tails to try to win and sometimes things don’t go your way, especially in our conference, it’s tough. ... Somebody has got to be willing to say. ‘Hey, let’s see if this can work itself out.’ Not every year, not all 16 teams in the SEC are gonna go to the playoffs. It’s just not reality. We’re talking about trying to get four or five in this year, last year we got three.”
This offseason will not only be interesting to see who all these teams end up hiring, but to see over the coming years if these moves either pan out or backfire. Will these teams’ lack of patience come back to bite and make them pay another buyout? Or will they prove to be just what some of these teams needed to turn their programs around?
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Steve Sarkisian Has One Question for Every College Football Team That Fired Its Coach.
