Cincinnati needs Scott Satterfield to buy in
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.
Many FBS coaching hires are not what they appear to be on the surface. Working on this series, forcing myself to spend time analyzing choices of which the evaluations initially seem obvious, has made it clear that first blush often tells you very little about these moves. I’ve come to love the picks of Biff Poggi at Charlotte, Tom Herman at FAU, and Tim Beck at Coastal Carolina, just as I’ve come to question the picks of Brian Newberry at Navy, Jamey Chadwell at Liberty, and Trent Dilfer at UAB. There’s more to many of these cases than it appears on the surface.
So, while the narratives surrounding Scott Satterfield’s arrival at Cincinnati are obvious and damning, I’m wary of repeating them without carefully weighing the pros and cons of this decision. I myself have been a fan of Satterfield in the past—his 2019 season convinced me he was capable of incredible things at Louisville, and while he could never deliver on that promise, dragging a two-win team back to the top of the conference in his first year remains a remarkable feat. So does overcoming a rough, injury-ridden season from Malik Cunningham to get a talented defense clicking, turning a 2-3 start into a 6-2 finish while knocking off #10 Wake Forest in the process.
There were positives to Satterfield’s tenure with the Cardinals, and while the fanbase was more than happy to see him go (especially with Jeff Brohm filling the vacancy), that had more to do with his off-field flirtation with other jobs. On paper, he is a fine football coach, with plenty of positives to go with the negatives on his résumé.
But…institutional fit is a huge part of the hiring process, and Satterfield is a strange one for Cincinnati. For one thing, he arrives directly from the top gig at one of their oldest and biggest rivals, just a hundred miles down I-71. Sure, that gives him some local ties (though he’s spent most of his career at Appalachian State), but it certainly doesn’t help the criticisms of his disloyalty.
And, of course, right now seems like a particularly bad time to risk instability with a coach who isn’t good enough to be worth that risk, doesn’t it? After all, Cincinnati just joined the Big 12, part of a massive wave of realignment that just gave them four more new conference rivals, and finding their footing in a power league is vital. Their projected win total this season is hovering around 5.5, suggesting they’re as likely as not to have their first losing season since 2017 and just their fourth since hiring Brian Kelly in 2007. If they want to maintain something of the success they’ve found during their time in the Big East and the AAC, landing on their feet in these first few Big 12 years is obviously critical.
Why, then, did the Bearcats make a risky hire amid such program upheaval? It’s not like Satterfield was so good that they had to hire him over other available candidates with less off-field drama; the likes of interim HC and longtime Ohio State staffer Kerry Coombs, former Wisconsin DC Jim Leonhard, and Buckeyes OC Kevin Wilson were all on the market. Names like then-JSU coach Deion Sanders and Michigan DC Jesse Minter were thrown around here…yet they landed on Satterfield, who was in jeopardy at a job that frankly isn’t that much better than Cincinnati.
Well, lest we forget, Satterfield did have a career in football before the protracted debacle at Louisville, which has never been the easiest place to coach, in fairness. It’s often overlooked that, when perennial FCS titan App State jumped up a level in 2014, he guided the Mountaineers to their first of four straight 7-1 conference finishes in just their second FBS season.
The quality of Satterfield’s coaching in Boone is certainly more encouraging than what he did in Louisville, but more notable is the stability he exemplified there. From 1998 to 2018, he spent just three years away from App State, filling five different roles on the offensive coaching staff before he was called up to serve as head coach in 2013. Nobody would associate that version of Satterfield with the air of disloyalty and disinterest that dogged him throughout his Cardinals tenure.
Expecting this Tommy Tuberville–like turn to stop short at Cincinnati1, which is a lot more like his last gig than it is his long rise through the ranks at his alma mater, would be optimistic. But if I had to guess, I would tentatively suggest that AD John Cunningham thinks he can make this a more tempting place for Satterfield to settle down than Louisville was. On the one hand, having to continually recruit your own head coach to keep him from making a lateral move hardly sounds like a winning strategy. But on the other hand…I mean, can it be that hard to be more appealing than Louisville?
I kind of get what Cincinnati is going for here. But, ultimately, it still feels like a lot of unnecessary risk and disruption just to hire a middling coach from a local rival. These are among the most important seasons in program history, and if the Bearcats think this is the best they could’ve done, they don’t have enough respect for what Luke Fickell has built over the last six years.
This is, for as long as the term has any meaning at all, a power-conference program now. I’m eager to see what it can do when it starts seeing itself as one.
The Last Five Years
How are you supposed to summarize the Fickell tenure, though? His performance at Cincinnati was so exceptional for so long that, at times, he almost seems to have been forgotten. With a 57-18 record, two top-ten finishes, two AAC titles, and a CFP appearance under his belt, he’s unquestionably the best HC in Bearcats history—at a program which has seen Mark Dantonio and Brian Kelly at the helm. You’ve got to admit, it’s a hard act to follow.
2022 and 2023
Cincinnati ranked 108th in defensive returning production last year after that unit held opponents to 16.9 points per game, leading them to the first-ever G5 playoff bid. The Bearcats gave up 31 points to #19 Arkansas in the season opener, perhaps suggesting that they had indeed missed a beat…and then didn’t allow 30 points to anyone else the rest of the way, including the sensational SMU and Tulane offenses. Miami-Ohio transfer Ivan Pace Jr., in particular, was ridiculously good, finishing as the AAC Defensive Player of the Year with 137 tackles, 21.5 TFL, 10 sacks, 4 pass breakups, and 3 forced fumbles.
Once again, Cincinnati is 108th in defensive returning production, and with the offense undergoing a full reset everywhere aside from the rushing corps, it’s even more critical to keep this side of the ball riding high. Take PFF grades with a grain of salt, but they ranked exactly one player in the country higher than Pace last year—his teammate Dontay Corleone, a freshman who made 45 of his 47 attempted tackles and had an insane 15.6% stop rate on rushing plays2. Pace’s brother Deshawn is another big name to watch, expected to step into a similar role as the Bearcats’ ballhawk, as he was in that magical 2021 season (95 tackles, 9.5 TFL, 4 interceptions).
The Next Five Years
Maybe claiming that Satterfield isn’t good enough for Cincinnati is wishful thinking. Soon enough, the Bearcats will be finding their footing in a 16-team league, one where almost every other team is an established member of the power conferences, and where most have a better claim to the heart of the Big 12’s recruiting territory. Past P5 transitions have often gone better than outsiders expect, but that’s not to say a future where Cincinnati serves as a bottom-feeder is impossible.
But I do think this move betrays a certain expectation that ending up in that role is more or less inevitable. Satterfield is at his best when he punches up and tries to make the most of an underwhelming roster, which suggests that the Bearcats believe that’s a position they’ll be in often. Maybe they’re right, but I don’t think selling yourself short before seeing what you’re capable of is the right move here.
The greatest successes Cincinnati has experienced haven’t come from taking things realistically, after all. We talk a lot in football hiring circles about understanding where your ceiling is, but that’s not because they’re impossible to break through; it’s just that taking the next step as a program, whatever it looks like, is a move that must be taken seriously. Fickell understood that, and bought in heavily when the time was right to build a team so good that neither the CFP committee nor the Big 12 could deny it. Let’s hope Cunningham and Satterfield understand, then, that this is no time to sit back and see what happens. The Bearcats again stand on the brink of something better, and if the program remains committed to its future in football, raising their ceiling even further is by no means impossible.
I mean, hey, Tuberville’s did when he came here. Although that was probably because he’d burnt his bridges with just about everybody aside from then-AD Whit Babcock.
Something you can take with less of a grain of salt: since 2019, nobody else with at least 150 run defense snaps has combined a sub-5% missed-tackle rate with a stop rate over 15%. The last player to do it was 24; Corleone was 19.