No SEC football coaches were fired a year ago. What’s the encore to that? Buckle up for a particularly spicy hot seat this season.
Proud programs like Oklahoma, Auburn and Florida starve for success at a level their current coaches haven’t supplied. The hot seat doesn’t end there, either.
On this edition of “SEC Football Unfiltered,” a podcast from the USA TODAY Network, hosts Blake Toppmeyer and John Adams identify their top five SEC coaches on the hot seat.
Their lists each feature the same quintet of coaches, although they disagree on the ordering.
At the top of the list, they agree on the coach sitting on the hottest seat in the SEC. He’s a coach who won nine games in 2021, but he’s been unable to match that previous bar of success.
SEC football coaches’ hot seat ranking
Mark Stoops (Kentucky)
Toppmeyer’s ranking: No. 5 on hot-seat list of SEC coaches
Adams’ ranking: No. 2 on hot-seat list of SEC coaches
Why he’s on the list: Stoops enters Year 13 at Kentucky. He’s the longest-tenured coach in the conference. He once seemed unfirable, but he’s coming off a 4-8 season that ranked as his worst in more than a decade, and the 2025 outlook doesn’t look much better.
Momentum hasn’t stalled. It’s reversed. The combination of SEC expansion, elimination of divisions, and big spending by conference peers didn’t do Stoops any favors, either. Perhaps, a new coach would galvanize fundraising for Kentucky football.
Stoops’ best protection is a buyout that currently checks in at about $40 million.
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