The college football coaching carousel has been more intense during the 2021 season than at any other time in recent memory. There have been openings at some of the sport’s top programs, more midseason firings than usual and record-high salaries doled out. These developments have led even casual observers of the sport to wonder why this season has proved so unusual.
Many see college football as a bastion of traditional American values, including stability and group loyalty — which often meant coaches spending their entire careers at one institution. It would seem, then, that coaching chaos would be at odds with the sport’s history. But, in fact, the wildly unpredictable changes in college football coaching are rooted in that very same past, specifically in the relationship between college football and the media, which has unleashed an arms race that has placed pressure on coaches from all angles.
College football’s intimate connection with and reliance upon mass media has shaped the sport from its inception. Football rose to prominence during the 1890s, when William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer engaged in circulation wars. In competition for readers increasingly interested in spectator sports like baseball and boxing, Pulitzer hired a “sporting editor” and created a separate sports section for the New York World. Hearst followed suit, solidifying sports reporting as a key component of modern news publishing.
Newspaper coverage popularized football, too, which at the turn of the century was a relatively small-scale game. Before the late 1880s, it was played almost exclusively at elite northeastern colleges, but sports reporters’ vivid descriptions of games helped football gain national attention. The newspapers, in turn, relied heavily on the entertainment value of football reporting to boost circulation. It was a symbiotic relationship in which media coverage helped colleges attract students, fans and donors, and newspapers grew readership and ad revenue.
As the scope and scale of media evolved, so did college football, bringing with it increased money and exposure.
When radio took hold in the 1920s, colleges turned to the new medium as a way to make money through sports broadcasts. Some feared radio might depress game attendance, but instead it made the sport accessible to new audiences outside of the college community, attracting new game attendees and, thus, providing a new source of revenue. Universities, like Notre Dame, even developed extensive radio networks, enabling them to become household names well beyond their regions.
College football coaches recognized, and to some extent worried about, the implications of this growth. In 1934, Glenn S. “Pop” Warner bemoaned the power of money in the sport, calling it an “evil of the boom days of college football.” Warner noted that the rising salaries exceeded those of professors and university presidents and led to jealousies. In 1955, legendary University of Oklahoma coach Bud Wilkinson concurred, describing coaching as a “knock-around profession” because the pressures associated with increased money had begun to lead to instability in the profession.
The rise of television in the 1950s and ’60s brought more revenue but not a national audience for college football. The NCAA adopted a television plan that limited the number of games broadcast to protect stadium attendance and revenue for smaller schools. This revenue was integral to funding their athletic departments. Games of the week therefore often varied by region, emphasizing conference championship contenders and local rivalries. Less successful teams or those without prestige seldom, if ever, found themselves on TV and so received less scrutiny for their lackluster records.
With national exposure still elusive, recruiting also remained localized, with few schools attracting athletes outside their conference’s geographical footprint.
But in 1984, everything changed. The University of Oklahoma challenged the NCAA’s television plan as a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the Supreme Court agreed. NCAA v. Oklahoma revolutionized college football by dramatically expanding the access TV viewers had to games and driving an “athletics arms race,” thanks to major revenue increases and the desire to be one of the sport’s national powerhouses. Schools competed to build better facilities to recruit top-tier athletes, expanded stadiums to increase attendance and provide luxurious experiences for alumni, and offered higher salaries to draw the best coaches.
Within a decade of the Supreme Court’s decision, college football coaching salaries soared. The University of Florida’s Steve Spurrier became one of the first coaches paid a million-dollar salary in the 1990s, setting the bar for seven-figure offers that would only grow from there.
This media-driven arms race also produced seemingly endless conference realignments beginning in the late 1990s as the “power conferences” repeatedly expanded to grow their geographic footprints in the name of scoring even bigger media contracts. The increased revenue generated by larger conferences, in turn, has only furthered the arms race — and increased pressure on coaches.
For one, realignment into super conferences has made winning more difficult. Schedules are tougher and include more games. And a team’s strength of schedule became relevant in affording schools the opportunity to play for a national championship, with the rise of the first Bowl Championship Series (BCS) in 1998 and now the college football playoffs.
What’s more, conferences with footprints across the country and nationally televised games have made recruiting battles national, making it difficult for some less glamorous state schools to retain local talent. Powerhouse teams from other regions are now on television in their states, making it easier to lure recruits away from home.
All of this has intensified the spotlight and pressure on coaches — putting under scrutiny their prowess at recruiting, scheduling and holding their own in conferences with no margin for error. Patience from university presidents, athletic directors and alumni has also waned as programs fear falling into obscurity and being left behind in the sport’s ever-changing landscape.
And the media only intensifies this pressure. As television networks invest more and more money in college football, they also increase their coverage, which includes more scrutiny of coaches. Wins and losses, recruiting battles and even news conference behavior matters to administrators trying to maximize profits and placate alumni. In a 24-hour news cycle, egged on by the rise of cable sports networks and now even networks devoted to individual conferences, athletes’ behavior, every play call and more receive scrutiny. Demands for results are immediate. And any potential drama — players’ misbehavior, impatient alumni questioning a coach, intrigue about the coaching carousel — makes for good television, even as it distracts coaches from their day-to-day jobs and ratchets up scrutiny that much more.
For over 150 years, college football has operated as a public relations tool for universities creating media narratives that provide a valuable connection between educational institutions, taxpayers and alumni. Yet, the synergistic relationship between the sport and the media has now fractured the tie between the sport and its traditional values, which derived from the educational mission of universities. While the mythology surrounding college football hasn’t changed and still paints it as a bastion of values like loyalty, the reality is that the sport is big business in 2021 — and operates like it.
Nowhere is this clearer than the coaching carousel. Coaches serve as the face of most teams and receive the brunt of the blame when things go wrong. Administrators and alumni pay exorbitant salaries because of the intensity of the job and the instability that increased media attention has placed upon coaches. Money and media attention have made the coaching profession more fickle — coaches know that one bad season might cost them their jobs. (Louisiana State University parted ways with coach Les Miles less than two years removed from a national title.) Accordingly, they have less loyalty to institutions.
Gone then are the days when coaches spent their careers at one school. Instead, the game reflects the world of high-stakes business in 2021, with its emphasis on personal gain and recent success.