The pickings are slim in the college football hiring market, and still Maryland understood it couldn’t continue with a sunken coach.
The hopium of a coaching search trumps losing with a coach who’s so clearly not the answer.
So, Mike Locksley is out at Maryland
, and the 2026 coaching carousel kicked into gear, but the Terrapins now face a harsh reality. The coaching candidate pool is shallow — not just for Maryland, but for most schools that might consider firing their coach.The candidate pool got thinned after last year’s frenzied spin of the carousel raided the cupboard of Group of Six coaches and top coordinators.
Expect Wake Forest coach Jake Dickert to be the belle of the carousel if his Demon Deacons keep winning. Dickert can do better than
Maryland. Memphis coach Charles Huff — he’s from Maryland — might make sense for the Terps, if he’d be willing to trade a premier Group of Six job for one of the most challenging Big Ten jobs.
Brian Kelly to Maryland? Well …
If a school like Maryland wants to hire someone with head coaching experience, it won’t get very far down the list before it arrives at Brian Kelly.
That shows just how shallow the candidate pool is.
I don’t mean that as a stinging criticism of Kelly, a lifelong winner and whose .708 LSU winning percentage might age gracefully if Lane Kiffin keeps losing to Kentucky. But, when one of the sensible names for a Big Ten job is a guy who got fired less than a year ago from a well-resourced school, it speaks to the realities of the hiring market.
I question how interested Kelly would be in a Sisyphean struggle at Maryland, when LSU is paying him millions to not coach.
Slow start to college football carousel. What’s next?
The cupboard of candidates isn’t empty, but trendy names like Dickert and New Mexico’s Jason Eck can afford to be choosy, wait out the market, see what opens in November, or even wait until next season.
Marquee openings could be scarce, not because schools suddenly developed more patience, but because several of the most ravenous programs with underperforming coaches (see LSU, Florida, Auburn, Penn State and Michigan) made their moves last year.
Still, keep an eye on Southern Cal, Texas and Florida State. If Lincoln Riley, Steve Sarkisian and Mike Norvell swirl the drain, that’ll turn a sleepy start of the carousel into a tilt-a-whirl.
What does college football candidate pool look like?
Several years ago, many Power Four schools gravitated toward hiring established coordinators. Plucking from the Nick Saban tree of coordinators became a particularly popular move — that’s where Maryland found Locksley — but that hiring methodology produced a checkered track record.
In recent years, many Power Four schools lean toward hiring coaches who’ve proven themselves within the Group of Six ranks or coaches with Power Four experience who need a bounce-back job (think James Franklin to Virginia Tech or Pat Fitzgerald to Michigan State).
Trouble is, many of the hottest Group of Six coaches got scooped up last year, when the top four coaches from the American Conference, which is typically viewed as the top Group of Six league, got scooped up by the Power Four. UCLA hired the Sun Belt’s best coach, Bob Chesney of James Madison.
Now, Eck heads up the G6 list, while Dickert would be a candidate to springboard from the Power Four to a Super Two job, akin to Matt Campbell leaving Iowa State for Penn State.
Will Stein becoming a raging success in Year 1 at Kentucky could make athletic directors more comfortable of hiring a coordinator. Stein had proven himself to be an ace quarterback developer as a coordinator at Oregon.
Top coordinators include Georgia’s defensive coordinator Glenn Schumann and Indiana’s Bryant Haines (defense) and Mike Shanahan (offense), who shares no relation to the Shanahan football family.
Then there are the ex-coaches living in Buyout World, headed up by Kelly and Jimbo Fisher.
“I don’t have to coach again unless it’s the right coaching position,” Kelly told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview in April, “but I want to coach.”
Couldn't you see Kelly showing up in Maryland with a bucket of crab legs in one hand, a canister of Old Bay Seasoning in the other?
OK, so maybe Kelly talking like he just finished a marathon watch of “The Wire” would swiftly extinguish the hopium.
But, there’s hopium, and there’s reality, and coaches seeking a rebound have a chance to stand out like a beacon in this market.
Slumping programs like Maryland can’t justify employing failed coaches. So, they'll cut the buyout check and plunge into the sobering waters of a shallow candidate pool.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network's senior national college football columnist. Listen to his podcast, "College Football Unfiltered." Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why Brian Kelly to Maryland football isn't as crazy as you'd think
