College football coaching carousel: UCLA, Florida make brilliant hires, Tennessee fans say no to Greg Schiano

Thanksgiving weekend was one to remember in college football as a series of events beginning with Chip Kelly taking the UCLA job resulted in the wildest weekend I can ever recall.

I’ve long maintained sports is the greatest reality TV show. You watch sports long enough, you’re going to see something you’ve never seen before and sure enough, that happened in college football over the past few days. With the regular season coming to a close, that means it’s time for the coaching carousel to start spinning and see who gets fired, who keeps their job and who gets hired but also fired because a fanbase vetoes the move via social media. Okay, ready, get set, let’s go and take a spin on the coaching carousel and try to make sense of everything that happened over the Thanksgiving weekend.

The Big Fish and the Homecoming

Chip Kelly was the big fish in the coaching search and he picked UCLA over Florida with the formal announcement made on Saturday morning. This is a slam dunk hire for the Bruins who get a coach with a 46-7 career record during his time at Oregon and should be a tremendous recruiter in the state of California. Give UCLA two years and they’ll be on the cusp of competing for a Pac-12 title and a Playoff spot after that.

With Kelly taking the UCLA job, that meant Florida was down to Plan B which was UCF head coach Scott Frost, but he turned them down. Oregon coach Willie Taggart may have been in the mix too. But the coach that always seemed like the most realistic and logical was Mississippi State’s, Dan Mullen, who took the job on Friday evening.

This was not a flashy hire, but it was a smart hire. Mullen was the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach under Urban Meyer at Florida where he won national championships and was instrumental in the development of Chris Leak and Tim Tebow. Further, he developed Alex Smith at Utah and Dak Prescott at Mississippi State. Mullen’s ability to coach quarterbacks and offense is exactly what Florida needed.

In other coaching moves

• Bret Bielema fired by Arkansas as he walked off the field after losing to Missouri.
• Nebraska fired Mike Riley. Not surprising, but they need to bring Scott Frost back home, and not settle for Bret Bielema.
• Texas A&M fired Kevin Sumlin. If they don’t get Jimbo Fisher, this could backfire.
• Arizona State fired Todd Graham. Look for Sumlin to land on his feet here
• Ole Miss removed the interim tag on Matt Luke and named him the Rebels head coach.

Nothing entirely too crazy, although the crazy was just getting started in Knoxville where a soap opera took place on Sunday.

The Greg Schiano debacle at Tennessee

Jason La Canfora from CBS Sports reports Tennessee is still talking with Jon Gruden and are offering him $10 million per year, which would make him the highest-paid coach, and another $8 million committed to his assistants, which would include former Tennessee quarterback, Tee Martin, who would be his chief recruiter and offensive coordinator.

That was so crazy and I didn’t believe it for a second.

But what happened next was even crazier.

Tennessee found their guy. It was former Rutgers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach and current Ohio State defensive coordinator Greg Schiano. This didn’t sit well with Tennessee fans after they learned Schiano had connections to Jerry Sandusky at Penn State. They took the moral high ground and publicly called for Tennessee fans, students and politicians to boycott this hire. They wanted to stand up and show they had a voice in who coaches the football team they root for. As for the stance they took that Schiano covered up Sandusky’s actions at Penn State, there are some who believe it, and there are some who think it’s faux-rage masking their disappointment they didn’t get Gruden or an otherwise marquee hire.

I’m not sure what to believe, but I read this piece from Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel who covered the Sandusky story closer than anyone in the media and it’s an informative read that touches on the dangers of groupthink and the mob mentality that may have cost an innocent man his reputation, millions of dollars and the chance to ever be a head coach again because of third-party hearsay.

As the fan backlash began to grow and grow, Tennessee politicians and former players voiced their concerns about the hire. Boosters voiced their displeasure with the process to find and hire a coach and now the call for Athletic Director John Currie’s job began to happen.

Ultimately, Schiano and Tennessee signed a mutual of understanding agreement, but the deal fell through and Schiano was not named the head coach at Tennessee. Essentially, he was fired by the fans before he was officially hired because of something that may have happened based on something that someone said someone else said.

Got that? Yeah, I told you things got crazy.

Next: NFL Draft: Projecting the first round

I don’t fault the Tennessee fans for doing what they think is right. I wish more fans would stand up for what is right. But make no mistake, this was a national embarrassment for Tennessee because of the actions of Currie. Why he didn’t float Schiano as the leading candidate before to gauge the reception from the fans is beyond me. What’s even more distressing is Currie reportedly only vetted Schiano’s time at Rutgers and didn’t know about his ties to Penn State.

That’s incompetence at its finest and a fireable offense. Tennessee will eventually find their head coach, but there has to be zero influence from Currie after the egregious mistake he made in the Schiano decision that capped what was the wildest spin on the college football coaching carousel I’ve ever seen.