Coaching Carousel · 2026-27
The hot seats, the open jobs, the candidates that won't say they're candidates. The annual reshuffle that reshapes the sport, mapped chapter by chapter as it happens.
January: The Hires Settle, Lanning Stays, and the Auburn-Drinkwitz Surprise
Florida hired James Franklin from Penn State. Auburn hired Eli Drinkwitz from Missouri (per the read). Maryland hired Indiana coordinator Tino Sunseri. The hires we wrote up as the cycle's most-likely outcomes were not the hires that landed.
The cycle settled in the second week of January with three hires that, taken together, produced a different chapter than the candidate boards we wrote up in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 had projected. Florida hired James Franklin from Penn State on January 8 — a hire that became possible after Penn State's CFP semifinal loss, when Franklin and AD Patrick Kraft mutually concluded that the institutional plateau had been reached and that the next chapter of Franklin's career needed to be at a different program. Auburn hired Eli Drinkwitz from Missouri on January 11, completing the move that the Cover 3 pod had projected in Chapter 2 as the most-likely outcome. Maryland hired Tino Sunseri, the Indiana defensive coordinator and former Curt Cignetti deputy at JMU, on January 14 — a hire that the boards had not projected and that the program's search firm had clearly produced from the second tier of options.
We picked this thread up in Chapter 1 by writing that Lanning was the candidate of the cycle, and we picked it up in Chapter 2 by tracking Florida's pursuit of Lanning as the cycle's defining negotiation. The negotiation did not produce the outcome the boards had projected. Lanning, after a 72-hour window in which Florida reportedly offered him a contract approximately 30% richer than his existing Oregon deal, declined to leave. The reasoning, sourced cleanly by Pete Thamel in his ESPN column on January 7, was structural: "Lanning concluded that Oregon's institutional resources, the program's recruiting trajectory, and the conference's structural elevation in the Big Ten gave him a higher-probability path to a national championship at Oregon than the SEC platform at Florida did. The conclusion was personal. The conclusion was also defensible by the math. Florida bid against an Oregon retention package that Oregon was prepared to fund at a level the boards in Eugene had not realized the program had the institutional ceiling to fund. Both bids were at the top of the market. Lanning chose the program he believed had the better roster."
“Lanning chose the program he believed had the better roster.”
The Lanning decision freed up the timing for Florida to pivot to Franklin, which they did within 36 hours. The Franklin-to-Florida move had been on the long-tail watch list for years — Franklin's profile (longtime Power 4 head coach, established recruiter, Big Ten experience) is a clean fit for what Florida had spent two years searching for, and his contractual situation at Penn State allowed for a faster-than-usual move. The move surprised the Penn State boards in its abruptness but not in its substance. "We knew this could happen," one Black Shoe Diaries reply read. "Franklin had taken the program as far as he could without the breakthrough we have been waiting for. The breakthrough did not happen. The next coach inherits a roster Franklin built and a program whose ceiling has been demonstrated. We will see what they do with it."
The Auburn-Drinkwitz move was the cleanest hire of the cycle and the one that played most exactly to the projection in Chapter 2. Drinkwitz, with Jimmy Sexton representing him, signed a six-year deal worth approximately $9.5 million per year. The buyout structure protects him through year four. The contract's recruiting-bonus and CFP-bonus structure are substantially richer than Auburn's previous coaching contracts, which signals an institutional commitment from John Cohen that the AD's prior critics on the boards had not fully credited him with being capable of. "Cohen got the candidate he should have gotten," Brett McMurphy wrote in his summary on January 12. "He paid market. He used the search firm efficiently. He did not get into a bidding war with Florida that would have driven the price up further. The Drinkwitz hire is, in candidate-quality terms, an A-minus hire. The contract terms are A-minus terms. The cycle's most-likely outcome happened in the way the most-likely outcome was supposed to happen."
The Maryland hire — Sunseri at $4.2 million per year — was the cycle's structural outlier, and the one Bruce Feldman wrote about most carefully. "Sunseri is a 38-year-old defensive coordinator with one season as a Power 4 coordinator (Indiana under Cignetti)," Feldman wrote on January 15. "His prior experience is as a JMU position coach and an FCS-level coordinator. The Maryland board had hoped for a name with more head-coaching experience. The board did not get it because the candidate pool that Maryland had genuine access to did not contain it. Sunseri is what Maryland's institutional position can credibly attract this cycle. The hire is a developmental hire. It will succeed or fail on whether Sunseri can scale the Cignetti playbook to a program with structurally weaker resources than Indiana had when Cignetti arrived. The bet is reasonable. The bet is also a bet."
The Penn State opening — created by Franklin's departure to Florida — became the cycle's late-arriving fourth chapter. The program's search, run by AD Patrick Kraft with the search firm Korn Ferry, settled in late January on Manny Diaz, the Duke head coach who had built the Blue Devils into a credible ACC program over three seasons. The Diaz hire was substantially less surprising than the Sunseri hire to Maryland. The Penn State boards on Black Shoe Diaries received the hire with the characteristic mix of "this could work" and "why not Lanning, why not Drinkwitz" that has accompanied every Penn State coaching announcement since Franklin's hire in 2014. The thread titled "Diaz it is" ran 600 replies and the dominant view was guarded optimism. "Diaz is a serious head-coaching hire," one reply read. "He has built a program. The program he built is structurally smaller than Penn State, but the playbook scales. The hire is not the splashy hire we wanted. The hire is a substantive hire. We will see."
The losers' bracket of the cycle — programs that whiffed on their preferred candidates and ended up with second-choice hires — included Maryland (we just wrote it up), Tulane (which had hoped for a Power-4-jumping G5 coach and ended up retaining its existing offensive coordinator as interim head coach pending a longer search), and James Madison (which had hoped to retain its head coach Bob Chesney through the cycle and lost him to a P4 OC opening at Wake Forest). The losers' bracket is the chapter the carousel always produces and that nobody outside the affected programs spends much time on. We are noting it because the chapters in this thread compound, and the losers' bracket of one cycle becomes the openings of the next.
The recruiting-class disruption — and we will track this as Chapter 4 lands in the spring — has been substantial. Florida's class, which had been ranked No. 12 going into Black Friday, fell to No. 19 by early February as Napier-recruited commits decommitted and Franklin had to rebuild. Auburn's, by contrast, held — Drinkwitz's reputation as a closer combined with the program's institutional commitment to retention work that Cohen had front-loaded as part of the Drinkwitz hire produced the kind of recovery McMurphy had projected as plausible. The Penn State class, in the chaos of the Franklin departure, is the chapter we cannot yet fully read. Diaz's first month will determine whether the program retains its top-fifteen class or rebuilds further down the rankings.
We pick this thread up in Chapter 4 in the spring of 2026 with the new hires settling, the recruiting classes finalized, and the early evidence on whether each hire is producing what the program hired the coach to produce.