The coaching carousel has arrived early this fall — far earlier than expected.
Typically, the first firings trickle in from the Group of 5 ranks in mid-October. Last season, the first true pink slips didn’t land until Oct. 20, when Southern Miss dismissed Will Hall after a 14-30 record and East Carolina parted ways with Mike Houston, who had gone 27-38 with the Pirates. Those moves marked the unofficial start of the carousel. This year, however, the carousel jumped the tracks in mid-September, as Virginia Tech and UCLA both moved on from their head coaches just three weeks into the season.
(I also think it’s a great time to bump what life in the hot seat is like for a college football coach.)
Virginia Tech cut ties with Brent Pry after an 0-3 start, closing the book on a four-year tenure that ended at 16-24. Pry’s career in Blacksburg began and ended with losses to Old Dominion, a cruel symmetry to a tenure marked by frustration. A lot of it.
The Hokies were 1-12 in one-possession games under Pry, and they haven’t beaten a Power 4 nonconference opponent since 2017 — a run of 15 consecutive losses. Pry’s buyout is expected to exceed $6 million, a steep price tag for a program already struggling to climb out of the ACC’s middle tier.
Out west, UCLA fired alum DeShaun Foster after only three games into his second season. The Bruins were outscored 108-43 in losses to Utah, UNLV, and New Mexico, and the quarterback drama made matters worse. Foster aggressively pursued Nico Iamaleava, displacing transfer Joey Aguilar — who promptly landed at Tennessee and is now thriving in Knoxville. Foster’s five-year, $15 million contract signed in February included annual raises and incentive clauses, but it also guaranteed him a hefty buyout. UCLA owes Foster $5.27 million for firing him before Dec. 1; had they waited until December, the amount would have dropped to $3.35 million.
The decision is just a footnote in UCLA’s mounting financial strain in athletics. The athletic department has run deficits for six straight years, including a $51.85 million shortfall in 2024 alone. Across that stretch, the accumulated deficit has ballooned to $219.55 million, the largest in the country. Layer on the $10 million annual “Calimony” payments the Bruins must send to UC Berkeley until 2027, and the question becomes obvious – can UCLA actually afford to take on new “opportunity costs” in the form of buyouts and fresh contracts?
The UCLA football program operates on a budget of $45.7 million, which is well below the Big Ten average of $57 million. That puts the Bruins in the league’s bottom tier financially, trailing peers like Washington, Nebraska, and Michigan — and rubbing shoulders with Illinois, Maryland, and Purdue. For a school that just entered 13 months ago to one of the richest conferences in college athletics, the gap is glaring.
Virginia Tech faces a parallel challenge in the ACC. Its football budget sits at $40.9 million, below the league average of $45 million. The Hokies are grouped with NC State and Virginia in the conference’s middle class, while Clemson and Florida State spend north of $60 million annually. For both programs, the message is the same: they are chasing upward in leagues where the financial arms race is relentless, and each misstep makes the climb steeper. Big thanks to Matt Brown of Extra Points for these numbers.
Back to UCLA, athletic director Martin Jarmond is now under the microscope. Fresh off a contract extension (December of 2024) that runs through 2029, Jarmond signed Foster’s deal, and he will be tasked with leading the next hire. Yet his credibility is already under fire.
The Los Angeles Times wasted no time blasting his leadership, writing: “Martin Jarmond has steered this football program into a steaming wreckage, failing to properly manage the most important asset of any modern-day athletic director, turning the Bruins’ largest and most lucrative national presence into a sputtering embarrassment, and you have to wonder. Now that he has buried them, is Martin Jarmond the right person to dig them out?”
The timing of both firings, however, isn’t just about poor starts. The transfer portal looms large. NCAA rules allow athletes on teams with coaching changes to enter the portal immediately, giving Hokies and Bruins players a 30-day window starting Monday. Because neither team has played more than four games, players can also redshirt the 2025 season if eligible, effectively granting them a reset year. For UCLA, the chaos is amplified by its quarter system — classes don’t even begin until Sept. 25 — giving restless athletes additional flexibility to leave or look to bounce from Westwood early.
Do I expect them to leave physically? No. Student-athletes still need to remain eligible for their next school. They’ll just train, study, and do everything else on their own. Granted, if they had all online classes, they technically could leave this week.
Contrast all of this with last season, when the carousel didn’t truly hit the Power 4 until late November. Mack Brown announced his “retirement” at North Carolina on Nov. 26, ending his second stint in Chapel Hill with a 44-32 record. Just days later, Purdue fired Ryan Walters on Dec. 1 after a 66-0 humiliation against Indiana, capping a 2-10 season, while West Virginia let go of Neal Brown the same day, closing the book on his six years in Morgantown with a 37-35 record. Compared to that timeline, September dismissals at Virginia Tech and UCLA feel very radical.
And yet, in the era of revenue sharing, NIL, and roster fluidity, this may be the new reality. Athletic directors are under pressure to identify new coaches early, both to stabilize locker rooms and to prepare for the December portal frenzy. The urgency comes at a steep price, as millions in buyouts are stacked onto already fragile athletic budgets. However, the rationale is simple– it has never been easier to flip a roster, and as a result, expectations for instant success have never been higher.
Is this September creating the new norm? Perhaps not, but the incentive structure has changed. UCLA and Virginia Tech are the first schools to pay the price in 2025, both literally and figuratively.
If this weekend’s shockers are any indication, the coaching carousel no longer waits until Halloween — and a few coaches on the hot seat are surely spooked.
