The 2025 football season is officially here. Week Zero gave us a taste last weekend, but now the full slate arrives. Alongside the touchdowns, tailgates, and rankings comes another storyline that never goes away: the hot seat.
Every year, around 50 jobs across the FBS and FCS open up. Some come from splashy hires, others from quiet resignations, but most are the result of a coach’s seat getting too hot.
What does it actually feel like to live in that space?
I spoke with a Division I athletic director managing a coach under pressure and a head coach staring down the final year of his deal, the classic “lame duck” season.
Successful or even semi-successful coaches rarely reach the end of a contract without an extension. Sometimes those extensions are real agreements, but often they are “faux extensions” intended more to protect others than to secure the coach’s future. These deals usually favor the university with friendlier buyout language and lower risk.
As one anonymous athletic director put it, “Look, the reality is the last few years we haven’t gotten it done on the (football) field. Coach is great with fans, donors, and season ticket holders, but it’s just not working out. I like our team this year and hope we can turn it around, sh*t, I pray we turn it around.”
On the other side of that reality is a coach who feels the strain not just on Saturdays, but elsewhere.
“I know we need to win. I hear the chatter. My wife knows it, my kids know it. They hear it at school too, which as a parent is the worst. I love some of our returners and what we got in the portal, but we just need to stay healthy. I think we’ll get there.”
Agents have long been part of the hot-seat conversation, pushing athletic directors with familiar arguments about stability and recruiting. But the transfer portal and revenue-sharing era have shifted that dynamic.
“Agents honestly have taken a little bit of a step back,” another AD told us. “They still buzz every chance they get, but deep down, they know recruits worrying about if their coach will be there for four years is out the window. The bigger concern for me is attracting quality assistant coaches. Nobody wants to join the staff in the last year of their deal.”
Fans often assume athletic directors or departments secretly want a coach to fail so they can move on, but in reality, it is the opposite. Wins make everything easier, from fundraising and ticket sales to corporate partnerships and general morale. Athletic departments are full of competitors, and nobody is celebrating on Monday morning after a loss. Even financially, replacing a coach rarely saves money. A new hire almost always costs more. You don’t make that move expecting to spend less; you make it because you need to invest or maintain. For an AD, firing a coach is also an admission of failure, especially if it was their hire in the first place.
The politics of timing add another layer.
If a new athletic director inherits a struggling coach with time left on the deal, it is not unusual to give them another year. Making a coach hire starts the new AD’s own clock. Waiting extends the honeymoon and leaves the responsibility with the previous administration. Coaching searches themselves are exhausting and time-consuming, as the athletic director admitted. “Coaching searches look exciting. But they really do suck. They drain you, they eat up your time, and once you make the hire, you have to make sure your new coach feels comfortable, has the resources, and gets their needs met, especially if they’re your guy.”
Hot-seat stories rarely end with dramatic firings on a tarmac. More often, they resolve quietly.
Buyout clauses often include offsets, which means a fired coach’s next job reduces what their old school owes. A $500,000 buyout can shrink quickly if that coach lands an OC job paying $400,000, especially if the AD who did the firing gives a strong recommendation (wild, right? It happens!). Of course, new employers know the game too, and sometimes offer well below market rate, knowing the salary is still subsidized by the old school.
As the coach told me bluntly, “As the old saying goes, you’ve either been fired or you’re about to be fired.”
The hot seat isn’t just talk radio fodder or Twitter speculation. It is stressful for coaches, their families, and administrators balancing budgets, politics, and pressure. The season brings excitement, but it also brings the ticking clock. Somewhere between Week 5 and Week 12, the first firing of 2025 will happen. From there, the carousel spins, the agents circle, and the next coach inherits the same reality. The hot seat never really cools off.
