Mandel: Grading college football’s head coaching hires in the 2019-20 cycle

minion_doog · January 2020

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Bread · January 2020

FAU (B): Former Florida State coach Willie Taggart. Remarkably, this is the 43-year-old’s fifth head coaching job in the span of a decade and fourth since 2016. This will be the first where’s not walking into a total rebuild job, and he demonstrated at Western Kentucky and USF that he can win at the Group of 5 level.

Washington State (A): Hawaii coach Nick Rolovich. Rolovich, 40, is a perfect fit for Pullman both in continuing the program’s recent tradition of wide-open offenses (his version being the Run n Shoot) and possessing a personality that will keep fans engaged. Already, the guy who once brought an Elvis impersonator to Mountain West media days in Las Vegas and paid a late-night visit to the owner of a parody twitter account has held an impromptu Seattle bar meet-up with fans. He also knows how to coach, leading the Warriors to a 10-win season and division title in 2019.

Mississippi State (B-): Washington State coach Mike Leach. This felt like a hire driven more by publicity (after the Bulldogs’ rival hired headline magnet Kiffin) than football. I’ve always wanted to see how Leach’s Air Raid system would fare at a place where he’d have access to more high-end recruits (like when he almost got the Tennessee job in 2017), but Mississippi State is not that. This is a guy who, after his seventh consecutive Apple Cup loss last year, said it shouldn’t be surprising given Washington’s higher-ranked recruiting classes. He’s going to find the talent gap even more daunting against annual division foes Alabama, LSU, Auburn and Texas A&M.

Washington (A-): Defensive coordinator Jimmy Lake. Lake, 43, spent the past eight seasons with Petersen, who bumped Lake up to DC in 2018 in large part to avoid being outed as a racist. Everyone was talking about the difference between Kwiatkoski 2017 and Lake 2018. You never fully know how well someone will transition from coordinator to head coach, but everyone is talking about the differences between Petersen 2019 and Lake 2020.