Toasty Buns: 10 college football coaches on the hot seat entering 2023
By John Buhler
Let’s toast some buns and put some Power Five college football head coaches on the hot seat.
Unlike Hagrid’s hut, the hot seat is not the place to be…
Every year, college football head coaches come and go. While there are the lucky few who are able to sail off into retirement or get an opportunity in the NFL, not everybody gets to choose when their gig ends. Boosters love wins more than their own families sometimes. It’s great stuff, and we wouldn’t have it any other way! So if you like toasting some buns like I do, have I got a list for you…
Here are 10 Power Five head coaches who find themselves on the hot seat entering this season.
College football hot seat watch: Who is feeling the heat entering 2023 season?
Tom Allen has won as many games the last two years he did during all of COVID
Although Indiana is one of the hardest jobs in the country, the last two years have not been kind to Tom Allen’s Hoosiers program. Now entering his seventh season at the helm, Allen is two years removed from Indiana’s unforgettable 6-2 COVID season. That team had Big Penix Energy, as IU would have actually made the expanded College Football Playoff if it were such a thing that year.
However, Allen’s Indiana program has won as many games in the last two years combined as he did during the COVID season, which is still two less than the high mark of eight set in the 2019 campaign. Is Indiana capable of sustaining that? No, but Allen has shown at times he is a good enough head coach to have IU close to achieving bowl eligibility. Frankly, he will need five wins.
While seeing the Big Ten move away from divisions will almost certainly help a bottom-feeding program like Indiana, it’s not getting any easier going forward. The league is picking up four Pac-12 defectors in Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington. This new 18-team league should be outstanding on the gridiron, but we have to wonder if Indiana will be regularly finishing in 17th or 18th place…
Allen is somewhat on the hot seat, mostly because he has not had a winning season in two years.