College Football Angst Watch 2024: Week 13 (Turkey)
A Quick Look At Fired Coaches
Angst Watch is a weekly recap of the existential misery caused by college football. It’s also my ongoing tracking of Colorado, USC, Texas A&M, and Ohio State, four programs I thought were going to cause their fanbases a great deal of misery.
But that hasn’t really been the case so I’m kind of scrambling on what the schtick of this is supposed to be.
The State of Angst
If you heard a loud bang last week that sounded a bit like a gunshot, don’t worry. That wasn’t a summary execution of all the turkeys Joe Biden didn’t pardon. It was just North Carolina University firing the starting pistol on college football’s coaching carousel.
After an extended will-he-or-won’t-he, the 73 year-old Mack Brown announced he planned on returning to coach the Tar Heels next year. North Carolina subsequently him in announcement that could’ve been four words: “the fuck you are!” He will coach the final game of the season and then his 41-year coaching career will effectively be over.
Yes, we’ve finally reached tailend of the season, the point in the year where embattled coaches are getting fired. What better time to talk about a bunch of turkeys than Thanksgiving?
Mack Brown is not quite a turkey, but he is arguably turkey-adjacent. Fired certified turkey head coaches include ex-Charlotte head coach Biff Poggi (presumably because he refused to stop wearing tank tops), former Florida Atlantic coach Tom Herman, and UMass’s now ex-head coach and mustache connoisseur Don Brown.
But the most interesting certifiable turkey firing is that of Kevin Wilson.
Kevin Wilson was the head coach of the University of Tulsa something-or-others until a couple of days ago. The administration was unimpressed with his 7-16 record over the last two years, and torpedoed him out of the building.
ESPN reported that “the decision came down to results and culture, as a new administration did not foresee an environment that could easily change [with Wilson in charge].”
The university athletic director released this statement:
“With the rapidly evolving landscape of college athletics, we know the importance of positioning our football program and athletic department to thrive and excel in the upcoming years. Our standard will be to play in bowl games every season, compete for conference titles, and build a program that everyone connected to the Golden Hurricane will be proud of. Our national search for a new head coach begins today.”
Translation: Kids do not want to play football for him and, frankly, we get it.
Wilson is a respected purveyor of the spread offense, coordinating highflying passing attacks at Oklahoma and Ohio State, and ruining everybody’s day by briefly making Northwestern good at football.
But he has never had success as a head coach. And this firing, evidently for being exceptionally difficult, tracks with his past.
His last college football head coaching job was at Indiana. But the immense number of passing yards the Hoosiers put up under him never directly translated to wins. His defenses could not stop a toddler from shoplifting, and the first season Indiana went to a bowl game under his watch was powered by a memorably strong running game carried by Jordan “The Bulldozer” Howard. Wilson’s tenure ended with an abrupt resignation the next year amongst an internal investigation into alleged mistreatment of players. Wilson’s next boss, Urban Meyer, described the resignation as being over “philosophical” differences. Meyer would subsequently get fired from the head job of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars after berating his staff for their lack of credentials (who hired them Urban??) and then kicking his kicker.
His only other other head coaching job came in 1989 at the high school level. He was the Fred T. Foard High School Tigers in North Carolina. He held the job for one year. They lost all ten games on the schedule, and reading between the lines of this Yahoo Sports retrospective on the season written while Wilson was at Indiana, what we’ll call his “grumpy style” showed its head early. Take a look at this quote from a former player: “You can't yell at kids every day and tell them that they suck because kids will eventually say, ‘I'm not playing for this guy anymore. I'm getting yelled at every day. It's not fun.’”
Wilson’s screamy style of leadership, or “philosophy” as Urban Meyer would put it, did not fly in 1989, and it clearly isn’t going to fly in 2024. It’s hard to foresee him getting another head coaching job unless he undergoes a substantial personality change. Will he? Probably not. Not unless he straps himself into the Clockwork Orange machine and mainlines Ted Lasso season one for two days straight.