Editor’s note: This story is part of the Secrets of the Coaching Carousel series exploring unique aspects of college football coaching changes and more.
Written by Nicole Auerbach, Matt Fortuna and David Ubben.
Only one team can win a national championship each year. But at least a dozen college football programs believe they should be doing just that on an annual basis. That makes jobs like Nebraska, Texas and Tennessee particularly challenging. Does it make those gigs harder than those at low-resource schools? Wouldn’t coaches still take that any day over the likes of UMass or UConn?
The Athletic polled more than 60 people working in college football to find out. Turns out, “hard” is … a hard word to define.
“What makes a good job a good job is commitment, support, tradition, but nothing is more important than access to players,” one Group of 5 head coach said. “There are just some places where you just don’t have it that have been historically good places and it’s just harder to recruit than people think it is.”
A Power 5 athletic director summed up high expectations: “There are places with so much history that are so far away from touching that again. They may never touch it again.” But that doesn’t mean those programs are ready to wave a white flag.
Then there’s the double-edged sword of a place like Alabama.
“I tend to think the jobs with the highest and most unreasonable expectations are the hardest, which means I think a place like Alabama is a really hard job,” one longtime Division I administrator said. “They happen to have someone in it who is doing a fantastic job, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard.
