College Football: 5 best coordinators who will be head coaches by 2021

Every year, top assistants from major programs got on to lead their own. Here are five coordinators poised to lead their own college football team in 2021.

As it is with every year, some college football programs will opt to make changes from the top down after the season ends. They may realize the guy they entrusted to lead the program just can’t cut it anymore. Of course, there are others who get poached by universities who have a vacancy at a better job. Perception is everything, but the coaching carousel continues to revolve.

Some schools may want to go with a more established coach or a well-known commodity to get the boosters excited about the new man in charge. For others, retreads aren’t going to cut it, so they look for the next up-and-coming coach out there on the college football landscape. Many of the best coaches in the country today are thriving in their first stint sitting in the big chair.

Eventually, it does kind of present itself. By November, we have a feeling about what top assistants in the college game are gearing up for a big leap forward in notoriety. Though they had great success coordinating on one side of the ball, these guys are now the face of their respective universities, having to answer every tough question and make every tough decision.

Here are five of the best coordinators that are likely one more season away from being future head coaches in college football, beginning with Wisconsin defensive coordinator Jim Leonhard.

For an assistant to become a head coach, he’s going to need one of two things to happen: His boss either leaves and he is the in-house successor, or his team has such a great season other programs in desperate need of a quality coach will tell themselves, “I want some of that.” He’d have to leave the Wisconsin Badgers, but let’s consider Leonhard.

Paul Chryst isn’t going anywhere. The former Badgers quarterback left the Pittsburgh Panthers to go coach at his alma mater where he used to play quarterback for. For Chryst, this is his dream job. While Leonhard, a former Badgers defensive back, may covet the job best associated with Barry Alvarez, he has to realize he’ll need to leave Madison to become a head coach in the college ranks.

Leonard was a three-time All-American at Wisconsin before going undrafted in 2005. He spent 10 years in the NFL, most notably with the Buffalo Bills and the New York Jets before retiring in 2014. Two years later, he was on Wisconsin’s coaching staff leading the defensive backs. In four years, Leonhard just might be ready to lead a program of his own. That is if he’s up for leaving Madison.

It has been defense that has led to Wisconsin becoming a top-10 program again under Chryst, not offense. Leonard is in his late 30s and could go the route of his coaching mentor Dave Aranda, who parlayed his defensive coordinator role at LSU into becoming the main man at Baylor. If a Big Ten job opens up or one of the better gigs in the MAC becomes available, maybe Leonhard leaps at it?