10 best college football coaching hires
By John Buhler
The college football coaching carousel has run its course at the end of the 2016 regular season. Here are the 10 best head coaching hires of this cycle.
Just before the holidays, the college football head coaching carousel has run its course. 17 Division I college football programs have decided to go in a different direction at head coach this season. Some of the hires were high-profile, while others will end up being sneaky-good.
As we are about to turn the page on the 2016 NCAA season entirely, let’s take a look at the 10 best head coaching hires from this trip on the coaching carousel.
The Fresno State Bulldogs needed to make a change at the head coaching position after a disastrous 1-11 campaign in 2016. Tim DeRuyter’s teams got progressively worse every season he was at the helm. Fresno State went from being a mid-major beast with players like Derek Carr and Davante Adams in 2013, to not finishing above .500 in the last three seasons.
Fresno State should be one of the better mid-major schools in Division I and the Bulldogs made an outstanding hire in getting former California Golden Bears head coach Jeff Tedford to lead the program in 2017.
Tedford was an incredible head coach for Cal from 2002 to 2012. When he was in Berkley, the Golden Bears were a Pac-10 power, arguably the second best program in the conference behind Pete Carroll’s USC Trojans. At Cal, Tedford went 82-57 (50-45), winning the Pac-10 in 2006.
Fresno State is Tedford’s alma mater and he is a great quarterback whisperer, working with guys like Aaron Rodgers, Kyle Boller and Mike Glennon with the 2014 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Tedford had his health issues a few years back, but this is the type of hire that Fresno State needed to make to get back to the glory days of the Pat Hill era of Bulldogs football.