After all the college football coach firings we’ve seen so far, and all the ones that are still presumably coming, it was noteworthy how nonplussed everyone’s reaction to Florida firing Billy Napier on Sunday was.
Florida is a big job, it won the previous day and it next plays rival Georgia after a week off. Ordinarily, canning a guy under those circumstances would be a five-alarm-fire, circle-the-jets story in college football. But firing was met with a collective yawn; Napier had essentially been fired in everybody’s minds weeks ago. It was a little like finding out that this is the final season of “Grey’s Anatomy.” Huh, wow, I had no idea that show was still on the air. Though I’m pretty sure Shonda Rhimes wouldn’t have lost at home to South Florida.
At its midway point, the 2025 college football season seems destined to be known for two not-unrelated things: parity (at least until Ohio State, Georgia or Alabama wins the national championship) and coach firings.
But when we talk about coaching changes, we should remember that we are not talking about out-of-control athletic directors and university administrators.
We are really talking about angry fan bases.
Often, when a coach is fired after only two or three years on the job, people will bring up Hall of Fame coaches who got off to slow starts when they were first building a program, like Bear Bryant (who started 1-9 at Texas A&M) or Frank Beamer (who went 2-8-1 in his sixth season at Virginia Tech) to argue coaches should be given more time and fans should be more patient. But fans are less patient now because we’re all less patient now: We, as a society, just don’t have that sort of chill anymore.
Now, coaches are getting fired because fans are demanding it. Athletic directors are merely reacting to the angst (and fury).
Coaching changes aren’t inherently because “this person is a bad coach, let’s get rid of them because they do not know how football works.” They’re because the lid has finally popped off the pressure cooker.
The circumstances are specific to each fan base — its history, its expectations, its ferocity. Here in Athens, where I live, Georgia football was famously desperate for a championship not just because it had gone several decades without winning one despite being a college football blue blood, but also because, during its drought, every one of its rivals (or geographic competition) did win a title: Florida, Auburn, Alabama, Tennessee and, heck, even Georgia Tech (1990 counts!). When Georgia finally got one on that frozen January 2022 night in Indianapolis, there was nearly as much relief from people that they would not die before getting to celebrate a title as there was joy. Dawgs fans have not quite been the same since.
After Georgia won its title, the next fan base most famished for a title had to be Michigan, which hadn’t won one since 1997 — and wanted one so badly that it dropped every high-minded ideal it had held onto (or at least pretended to hold onto) for decades for Jim Harbaugh to make it happen. And once it did, there isn’t a Michigan fan in the world who regretted that deal, and please don’t kid yourself: Your fan base would be the same way.
Winning a title does not give a coach a lifetime hall pass. Just ask Ed Orgeron or Gene Chizik (or Mack Brown, even) about that. But it is proof that the mountain can be climbed and, at least once in your lifetime, the sun can shine on you. And if there’s one thing all these coach firings have in common, it’s that the fan bases of those teams believed (often not incorrectly) they deserved a national title but no longer had the right guy to get them one.
As Florida fans can tell you, this vicious cycle will not be broken until they find the one who will.
Last month for The Athletic, Jim Root ranked the most tortured college basketball fan bases, and he did an excellent job with it, even if he placed my Illini too low. (I will be cursing Sean Higgins and Sean May on my deathbed.) For years, until they won their titles, Georgia and Michigan, I would argue, would have clearly topped a college football list like this. But who tops it now?
To calculate such rankings, you have to consider:
• Years since a title. This is an argument against Florida, all told. In the past two decades, 10 teams have won a national championship, and Florida is one of them. It has actually won twice! I know it does not feel that way now, Gators fans, but you’ve had it plenty good. You have to be in the desert longer to be truly tortured. We’ll omit Texas here too, but not for long; in January, it will have been 20 years since the Vince Young-led win over USC.
• Expectations. Rutgers hasn’t been very good in football, but no one expects it to be. You can’t be that tortured if you consider the Pinstripe Bowl an achievement.
• Rabidness. This is where, say, Miami comes up short. I know getting around the Miami area on a Friday night is difficult. But there were a lot of empty seats at the loss to Louisville last week for the No. 2 team in the country. Sorry. One of the reasons it’s so exhausting to hear the lament of Penn State fans is that there are so many Penn State fans. That counts. You can often tell how dedicated a fan base is to its team by how annoying that fan base is to the rest of us.
I’d argue, as of this moment, five fan bases meet the Georgia/Michigan pre-title level of desperate/insane/irrational/fevered/screaming-into-a-mirror-until-your-face-melts-off desire for a championship.
I’m going to put these in alphabetical order rather than ranking them because I’m sure enough of you are mad at me already.
Notre Dame (last title: 1988)
We are seriously nearing 40 years without Notre Dame winning a championship. That Notre Dame is a relic, a school and team out of time, is one of its primary selling points, and surely has always been true. In the same way that some actors seem to have been in their mid-40s from birth (there is no way Clint Eastwood was ever a teenager), Notre Dame has always felt old-fashioned and nostalgic. It’s central to the program’s appeal. Notre Dame fans seem slightly more rational than your average Southern football fan — the school has lost two national championship games in the past 13 years, and each time it did sort of look a little happy just to be there — but four decades without a title, for a signature college football brand with a fan base that expects to compete for one every season, is a Red Sox-level drought.
Oklahoma (2000)
I was in Norman this summer and stopped by to see Heisman Park, which is impressive and reverent and speaks to the seriousness of that fan base. It still will never stop being strange that a massive statue of Jason White exists on this planet. (There has never been a single person outside the White family who has visited that statue and not had to peek at the inscription to find out who exactly they’re looking at.) Joining the SEC had some observers wondering if Sooners fans’ eyes were maybe a little bigger than their stomach, but only five teams have more titles than they do and, it should be said, Texas isn’t one of them.
Oregon (none)
It’s the ultimate New Money powerhouse, and a title is the only thing missing. There hasn’t been a new first-time national champion since Florida in 1996, but the Ducks keep coming close. That has been happening longer than you might realize; Oregon lost by only three to Auburn in the BCS in 2010 and was actually favored heading into the first College Football Playoff title game in the 2014 season. Of all the teams on this list, this one seems most likely to get a title within the next half decade or so. But I’m sure everybody said that a decade ago.
Penn State (1986)
Self-explanatory. Whoever takes this job next is going to hear the music from “Jaws” every time he walks into a room.
Texas A&M (1939)
One of my favorite all-time sports internet stories happened in 2006, when Robert Gates was appointed secretary of defense. What was the last thing Gates did before taking the job? He posted to the TexAgs message board to reveal himself as “ranger65,” an avid poster on Aggies football so renowned that he felt he had to say goodbye and that he was sorry he couldn’t post anymore. “I have listened and paid more attention to you than you might imagine,” the secretary of defense said about his football message board friends. Texas A&M is No. 3 in the this week’s AP Poll, its best ranking since 1995 and higher than it has finished in any year since 1939. The Aggies actually breaking through could be the stealth biggest story in the sport.
There are other potential options here if you want them: USC, Tennessee, maybe Ole Miss. (Sorry, Nebraska fans, you’re in this only in your minds and your memories.) But these are the most desperate, the most tortured, that perfect mix of desperate, famished and accomplished.
It is often forgotten, with the billions of dollars that drive college football, with everything that surrounds it, with all the change that has roiled the sport, that the reason all of this exists, the coal that fuels this whole engine, is the fans — the people who pay for all of it.
We can talk about buyouts. We can talk about coaching carousels. We can talk about shortlists. But what we are really talking about is passion: Wanting your team to win, lamenting when it doesn’t and believing, through all the pain and the frustration and the waiting, that someday, the sun will indeed shine on you and your team.