Forty names, games, teams and minutiae making news in college football, where you never know when someone with 16 career rushing yards is suddenly going to go for 259 in his first college start. First Quarter: Does Anyone Want to Be National Champion?
Second Quarter: Dash Domino Theory, 2026 Version
The carousel has finally begun to spin, with three head coach openings in the last week: Maryland, North Carolina State and Baylor. Losing to Rutgers, Stanford and Kansas, respectively, will get a man whacked.
Of the three jobs, The Dash would rank Baylor first. It sits deep in the heart of talent-rich Texas, has prominent alumni backing, is in a conference that allows for upward mobility and has had some recent success. Each of the last three coaches (the just-deposed Dave Aranda, Matt Rhule and Art Briles) had at least one 11-win season and a top 15 finish. You can reach the College Football Playoff from Waco, especially in the easy-button era that is to come.
Next: North Carolina State. The fan base is starved for a taste of big-time success and should be willing to fund a roster accordingly. The state of North Carolina produces a good number of players, as does the surrounding area. Like Baylor in the Big 12, the Atlantic Coast Conference is fluid enough for programs to rise under the right leadership. Other than Miami, there is nobody else light years ahead of the pack. (And the Pack.) The ACC’s chances of multiple playoff bids increase immediately in 2027.
Maryland is third of three because it’s in the wrong conference, but it is not without hope. Look no further than Indiana and UCLA, which were both 3–9 the season before they made home run hires. Check the Big Ten standings now for further details. If Penn State and Michigan choose to stink, take advantage of it.
Even though none of these jobs are considered A-list material, they could set off a chain of events that shakes the sport. The 2026 Dash Domino Theory leans heavily into coaches parachuting out of a deteriorating situation for a fresh start.
Step one: Lincoln Riley to Baylor (11). Patience is expiring at USC, where Riley has failed to deliver on big expectations and a bigger salary. After a splashy first season in Los Angeles with Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams, Riley’s Trojans have gone 30–17 and failed to contend for anything. This was the No Excuses Season, with a talented roster and the Trojans ducking rival Notre Dame to soften up the schedule. Instead, USC has been beaten handily by a pretty good Wisconsin team and a wildly disappointing Oregon, with no quality wins to speak of and three top-10 opponents still to come. Making matters worse, Bob Chesney is making Riley look terrible across town at UCLA.
So it’s time for Riley to look for a soft landing in his home state, and in a league where wide-open offense might better compensate for insufficient defense. Baylor fans loved the scoreboard-exploding Briles era (despite all the baggage that came with it), and Riley is a current extension of that football philosophy. Time to beat the posse out of L.A., Lincoln.
A competing domino theory sends Matt Rhule (12) back to Baylor, with fans at Nebraska eagerly helping Rhule pack. But even after the disappointments at USC, Riley is the more attractive choice than Rhule, whose post-Baylor record in the NFL and at Nebraska is 35–48. With, as everyone knows, exactly zero notable victories.
Step two: Kalen DeBoer to USC (13). Trojans athletic director Jennifer Cohen hired DeBoer at Washington in 2022, to the mutual benefit of both. DeBoer went 25–3 in two seasons, taking the Huskies to the 2023 CFP championship game. This reunion opportunity would be an upgrade over Riley for USC and get DeBoer out of the permanent shadow of Nick Saban at Alabama.
He has a 26–10 record to date at Bama—good in most locales, but this is a different place. That exact mark got Bill Curry run out of town in 1989, bailing to Kentucky. There are differences between DeBoer’s 26–10 and Curry’s 26–10—Curry was 0–3 against Auburn, for instance, whereas DeBoer is 2–0—but it’s still well short of Saban-esque.
That would open up a whopper job, leading to …
Step three: Dan Lanning to Alabama (14). Lanning has been viewed as immovable at Oregon, in no small part due to a personal financial deal with Nike founder and Duck major donor Phil Knight. Maybe this bust of a season loosens those ties, with Oregon 4–3 and essentially eliminated from playoff contention after starting the year ranked No. 2. He also knows how Alabama works and would theoretically come with the Saban stamp of approval, having worked under him in 2015.
Does Oregon’s sudden downturn send up warning flares about Lanning? Was his success just a product of Will Stein’s wizardry as offensive coordinator? No. Before Stein, with Kenny Dillingham as offensive coordinator, the Ducks were 10–3 in Lanning’s first season. His overall record is 31–7; it takes more than three losses this season to cool the ardor of a nation full of athletic directors who have lusted after the 40-year-old Lanning for years.
Step four: Jake Dickert to Oregon (15). The Ducks would try to pry Stein back to Eugene, but he’s not ready to leave his home state and a dream job at Kentucky after one season (the Kentucky counteroffer would be as ambitious as anything the school has ever done for a football coach). Same situation with UCLA’s Chesney, who is next on the list. Would the Ducks also make a run at BYU’s Kalani Sitake? Maybe, given the two programs’ overlapping success recruiting Polynesian players.
But Dickert gets the job, one far easier than the two where he has excelled to date. He’s 14–5 at Wake Forest, best record for a coach through his first 19 games at the school in more than a century. Prior to that he was 23–20 at Washington State, which was a dead program amid the dismantling of the old Pac-12.
Step five: Dabo Swinney to Wake Forest (16). Look, the Dash Domino Theory dream is always for Dabo to end up where he thematically belongs, at Liberty. But assuming we can’t pull off another parachute special—Shane Beamer to Maryland, Jamey Chadwell to South Carolina and Swinney to Liberty—this is another exit route for him from a deteriorating situation at Clemson.
During the halcyon days, Swinney won 40 straight games at home. Over the last 10 games in Death Valley against power-conference competition, the Tigers are 2–8. The two victories were last year over a Florida State program that has forgotten how to win on the road and this year over North Carolina, after a divine intervention lightning delay stalled a Tar Heels drive inside the Clemson 10-yard line.
Clemson is a scarcely recognizable 11–9 over the past two seasons. The school doesn’t want to fire the greatest coach in school history, so this would be a way out—if America’s most stubborn coach can admit he needs a reset, and is willing to take on his former program in the same league. Pray on it, Dabo.
Step six: Shannon Dawson to Clemson (17). Georgia defensive coordinator Glenn Schumann and Indiana DC Bryant Haines could be options here, but the pain of watching Swinney’s offenses flail the past few years pushes athletic director Graham Neff to address that side of the ball. Dawson’s offenses have put up big numbers at Miami with a different quarterback each of the past three seasons. Neff can get the inside scouting report on Dawson from his former boss at Clemson, who is also the recently retired AD at Miami, Dan Radakovich.
As for the other two open jobs? Philip Rivers to NC State (18) topples no dominos but would raise some eyebrows. This would win the news conference for sure, bringing back a program hero with an NFL Hall of Fame résumé to coach his four-star quarterback son. Would it win anything else? To be determined. It would certainly be a calculated risk on a guy whose coaching experience is only at the high school level. (Ask UAB how that worked out with Trent Dilfer.)
The other one: Charles Huff to Maryland (19). This would be Huff’s fourth job in four years, bouncing from Marshall to Southern Mississippi to Memphis, but he’s a Maryland native with Big Ten coaching experience as an assistant at Penn State, plus time spent with Saban at Alabama. That would create one more juicy parachute opportunity …
Mike Norvell to Memphis (20). Norvell running it back at a place where he went 38–15 in four seasons would be a wildest-dream scenario for Florida State, which has been lugging around his huge buyout like a millstone for two seasons. The Seminoles would be free to make a hire that brings back the glory days—until they decide to reheat leftover Jimbo Fisher.
PODCAST: Listen to Sports Illustrated’s college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, hosted by Pat Forde, on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s college YouTube channel or on SI TV.
Add us as a preferred source on Google