Note: rankings for this series are set by TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings. These will shift as the offseason goes on, with more transfer data becoming available over time.
One of the most noteworthy trends in college football coaching circles has been a shift from firing coaches around bowl season to firing them in the first half of the following regular season. Oddly, such moves often feel simultaneously too reactionary—as when Wisconsin moved on from Paul Chryst after a Week 5 blowout at the hands of a good Illinois team—and too overdue—as when Nebraska ditched Scott Frost following a predictably poor start to the season, culminating in a humiliating loss to Georgia Southern. Equally paradoxically, the reasoning goes that rather than getting the dregs of the end of one coaching cycle, teams can set themselves up for the future better by delaying to land at the start of the next coaching cycle.
Whether it actually works, as with so many recent stress tests of the sport’s loose restrictions, is still up in the air. Getting in early on a fresh coaching cycle has paid massive dividends in some programs, but punished overconfidence and aggressiveness in others. Stepping back to the 2020 carousel, from which new hires have now coached two seasons, there’s plenty of success and failure no matter when moves were made.
The earliest moves? A thoroughly mixed bag. Southern Miss fired Jay Hopson coming off a 7-6 season after just one game and, in Will Hall’s second year, went…7-6. Meanwhile, South Carolina was the first P5 team to make a move, ending Will Muschamp’s second consecutive eight-loss season early, and within two years they’ve turned around to winning eight games under Shane Beamer. The jury’s still out on Blake Anderson at Utah State and Clark Lea at Vanderbilt, the other two coaches for whom the search began before December.
Later moves? Also far from conclusive. UCF was the final school to make a new hire in the vicinity of the 2020 carousel, and they’ve levelled out at a good-not-great nine wins in both years under Gus Malzahn. On the other hand, the reason for that vacancy—Tennessee’s hire of Josh Heupel—assumed a scandal-ridden 3-7 program and got them to the Orange Bowl in two seasons. Late arrivals Andy Avalos and Steve Sarkisian have had bumpier rides at Boise State and Texas, respectively, with both jobs carrying daunting expectations.
What are we to make of all this? Who knows! As with the radical divide between coaches making massive commitments to the transfer portal or NIL and those shunning these unproven team-building strategies, we just have to wait and see whether belated firings prove effective as a rule. But one of the few conclusive things we can say about this pattern: it’s made things pretty awkward for programs that see surprisingly strong performances from interim coaches.
This was all over the 2022 season—in fact, it might be the defining trait of the year in college football looking back when all is said and done. Of course, plenty of interim HCs did predictably little with the opportunity, often forced to wrangle players who had quite reasonably checked out on the season in September or October. Shaun Aguano (2-7 at Arizona State), Mike Sanford (1-6 at Colorado), and Mickey Joseph (3-6 at Nebraska) never made particularly strong cases to stick around, and all three schools turned to the open market without hesitation.
But that wasn’t the case everywhere. The five other long-term interim coaches in the 2022 season all stepped up from their predecessors, creating intrigue ranging from minor (Pete Rossomando, 2-2 at Charlotte) to notable (Jim Leonhard, 4-3 at Wisconsin) to mystifyingly unacknowledged (Cadillac Williams, 2-2 at Auburn). And, of course, there was Brent Key, who somehow got a 4-4 finish out of Geoff Collins’ 1-3 start and became the only interim coach to actually win the full-time gig.
Somewhere in between lies Bryant Vincent, whose 2022 season arguably wasn’t even an “interim” one. Predecessor Bill Clark, the architect of UAB football’s resurrection and rapid ascent to the peak of Conference USA, stepped down due to worsening back pain in late June, and Vincent—the Blazers’ offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach of four years—was thrust into the role barely a month before the start of the season.
On the field, his debut season was unquestionably a step back, as UAB finished 7-6 (their worst winning percentage since returning to play in 2017) and defeated only one team with a winning record. Yet given the extenuating circumstances under which Vincent served as a head coach for the first time since leading an Alabama high school in 2010, it was an accomplishment to keep the Blazers from completely falling apart. Perhaps more importantly, the season also set up the program’s immediate future, as they largely averted losses to the portal in the wake of the sudden coaching change due to players rallying around Vincent. Members of the roster penned an open letter to the athletic department, stating their desire to see their interim HC retained and the ongoing coaching search ended. The next move seemed obvious: hand him a contract for a couple more years and see what he could do with the foundation he’d laid.
Instead, UAB let Vincent go, not even retaining him as their OC, and hired former NFL quarterback Trent Dilfer out of private Tennessee high school Lipscomb Academy. Past coaching carousels should make us wary to call anyone a success or failure before they’ve taken the field, but nothing about this hire feels good, right? Overruling the stated wishes of the team to take a massive risk on someone with zero experience in any college coaching staff is a decision that exposes a clear disconnect between the Blazers’ AD and their football program.
We can wish Dilfer the best and acknowledge that he’s taking interesting steps to make the most of this situation, on which The Athletic has a story here that’s worth reading. All things considered, though, it’s hard to feel like we won’t be back here in two or three years dissecting what went wrong—and, hopefully, how UAB improved on it with their next hire. In any case, it’ll be fascinating to watch the damage control after one of the 2022 carousel’s longest and messiest coaching searches.
The Last Five Years
In appreciating the recent history and immediate future of UAB football, it’s hard to know which of their three coaches since returning to FBS to focus on—Clark, Vincent, and Dilfer are all fascinating in their own ways. But we should, of course, not lose sight of how completely Clark engineered a full-scale turnaround from this program’s discontinuation to its rise to the top of CUSA. What we see across the last four years of his tenure here is as consistent a winner as there’s been in the Group of 5; what we would see if we stepped back a little further is that they didn’t exist two years before this. It would take a lot for anybody, whether Vincent, Dilfer, or whoever comes next, to fill those shoes.
2022 and 2023
Predictably, quite a few student-athletes were incensed at the decision to hire Dilfer, leading to the portal exodus Vincent had worked so hard to avoid. Quarterback Dylan Hopkins followed the unretained coach to New Mexico, six offensive skill players departed, the offensive line was left bereft of any returning starters, and breakout safety Jaylen Key took his talents to Alabama. Very few major pieces remain from the 2022 team, having largely departed either to other schools, graduation, or the NFL.
It’s probably for the best that Dilfer gets the time to construct his roster that Vincent didn’t—the 2023 schedule is a bit of a nightmare anyway. In their first year as an AAC member, the Blazers not only draw reigning Cotton Bowl champs Tulane and CUSA champs UTSA; they also have to face, oh, the two-time reigning national champion and consensus #1 team when they visit Georgia. All of that comes in a single four-game stretch, and when you combine the third-worst returning production in FBS (according to SP+) with a strength of schedule with the fourth-toughest strength of schedule in the G5 (according to TERSE), you are not going to have a good time. Check back in 2024.
The Next Five Years
The reason this article focuses so heavily on Vincent, to the extent that I’ve spurned the usual convention of including the actual new coach in the headline, isn’t just because I think he was the obvious choice and UAB missed a trick by moving on. It’s also because the point of this series, for the most part, is to take an optimistic view of what coaches can do in their new roles, regardless of process (because process isn’t everything). It’s not always about that, because of course there are more important things to talk about when it comes to Jamey Chadwell at Liberty or Hugh Freeze at Auburn, but I’ve seen enough overconfident forecasts for the Dilfers of yesteryear to know this isn’t a doomed hire. Very few hires are.
Then again, if you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say nothing at all, and I’m grasping for anything nice to say about the state of the UAB program right now. The fact that this team had to overcome being abruptly shut down by its athletic department, then reinstated six months later when supposedly-unattainable capital materialized with just a bit of fundraising, isn’t just the setup to their heartwarming comeback and ascent. It’s also evidence that something is direly, fundamentally wrong with the way the Blazers’ AD is attempting to understand and accommodate student needs, if it’s even trying to do that.
Dilfer has every chance to succeed, and even if he doesn’t, it’s not like a few bad years would undermine everything UAB has built in showing that this program can be a G5 powerhouse. But the most important hire here wasn’t Vincent, it isn’t Dilfer, and it won’t be whoever follows him; it’s whoever succeeds school president Ray Watts, who oversaw the disastrously tone-deaf decisions to shutter the program and to conduct a coaching search throughout the 2022 season. UAB football has the pieces to succeed and the commitment from students and athletes that so many G5 teams crave, but they won’t realize their full potential until the decision to invest in what they already have comes straight from the top.