Ranking the FBS coaching hires: How all 30 moves grade out

After compiling a perfect coaching pedigree -- he played for Bill Walsh, Tom Osborne and Bill Belichick and coached for Frank Solich and Chip Kelly -- and going unbeaten at UCF in 2017, former Nebraska quarterback Scott Frost returned to Lincoln to save a flailing Cornhuskers program. It was perfect timing, and there seemed to be approximately a 100% chance of things working out beautifully. Frost went 16-31 and was fired early in his fifth season. After leading Cincinnati to extended success (53-10 from 2018 to 2022, including making the 2021 College Football Playoff), former Ohio State player and longtime Buckeyes assistant Luke Fickell took the Wisconsin head coaching job. He had a great résumé, had proved his player development chops and had modern ideas but was grounded in Big Ten physicality. It was a perfect hire. Three years in, Fickell is 17-21. During the season, speculation swirled about his job status, and when the school announced he was returning for 2026, the Badgers actually perked up and played well down the stretch. But they still went 4-8, their worst record in 35 years. The two most perfectly logical college football hires of the past decade either didn't work out or haven't to date, proving that the process of grading coaching hires immediately after they're made is almost completely pointless. We never know how coaches will handle their new surroundings, and so much is determined by the school doing the hiring (or, in some cases, plain old luck). Grading hires is also fun, however. And in this moment in college football's transition to becoming a player-compensation sport, it's a particularly interesting thought exercise. So we're going to do it anyway. Though a few vacancies are still on the board, we've seen 30 FBS head coaches hired thus far in the 2025-26 coaching carousel. Some schools sought a proven winner and committed the type of big-money (and guaranteed) contracts for which the sport has become increasingly known. Others opted for up-and-coming assistants, potentially choosing to invest some of those savings into player talent. We don't yet know who will be rewarded for their moves, and we know we're going to be wrong with about half of our opinions. But let's grade this year's hires based purely on the logic at hand. I'm honestly a pretty easy grader -- I just need to understand (and, preferably, agree with) the thought process. Therefore, a hire ranking into the 20s might still land a pretty good grade. But in theory, the higher the grade, the more likely the hire will succeed. Grade: A+ (probably the best job available, filled by the best available coach) 1. Lane Kiffin, LSU. We won't overthink this one. Everything about the run-up to Kiffin's departure from Ole Miss was dramatic and strung out, and it will forever be part of his coaching biography that he left an active playoff team for a school he had beaten weeks earlier. But in his past nine years as a head coach, he...

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