The college football carousel is always moving. Season after season, athletic departments make decisions about when to fire coaches and who to hire to replace them.
Unfortunately for college football fans of their respective schools, a lot of these hires don't work out. A lot of times, coaches' on-field results fall well below the expectations for them when they took the job. Wins and losses aren't everything in college football, but it's often what makes a coach keep or lose a job.
My colleague Brad Shepard broke down the most disappointing hires of the last five years last year. While there are a couple of the same names on this list, we broadened our list since we have five more years to work with.
Let's run through some of those hires over the last decade that fell way short of the high hopes they arrived with.
Author's note: Hugh Freeze at Ole Miss and D.J. Durkin at Maryland were not included in this list, even though they loom large in the history of disastrous coaching tenures during the past decade. While they should be considered bad hires given the scandals that brought their respective tenures to an end, we limited this list to coaches who faced higher expectations when they were hired.
USC's Clay Helton
USC was one of the biggest head coaching vacancies during last season's carousel. After the second week of the season, the Trojans cut ties with Helton, who compiled a 46-24 record as USC's head coach.
It seemed like Helton was the right guy for USC in the beginning of his tenure. Helton was named USC's interim head coach in 2015. He took over for Steve Sarkisian after Sarkisian took a leave of absence (then was fired a day later) early in the season.
After going 5-4 as USC's interim coach, he was named the permanent head coach at the end of the season. Things looked good for the Helton era in Southern California early on. In 2016, Helton led USC to a 10-3 season, capped off with a Rose Bowl victory over Penn State. The next season, USC went 11-3 and won the Pac-12 championship.
But things went downhill from there. USC finished 5-7 in 2018, and the Trojans went 8-5 the next season. In 2020, the Trojans had their lowest-ranked recruiting class in school history, checking in at 63rd nationally. USC went 5-1 in a shortened COVID-19 season, and Helton was fired last season after losing 42-28 to Stanford in Week 2.
Cincinnati's Tommy Tuberville
Tommy Tuberville made a name for himself during his career at Auburn in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But Tuberville's time with the Bearcats got off to a rocky start thanks to how he left Texas Tech. Tuberville reportedly ditched Tech recruits at dinner to take the Cincy job.
Although Tuberville went a combined 18-8 in his first two seasons at Cincinnati, the Bearcats finished 7-6 in 2015. Cincy lost three out of its last five games that year, including a 42-7 loss to San Diego State in the Hawaii Bowl.
In 2016, Cincinnati finished 4-8, the Bearcats' first losing season since Butch Jones' 2010 4-8 year. The Bearcats also finished just 1-7 in American Athletic Conference play and lost their last five games. Following a 20-3 loss to BYU, Tuberville told a heckling Bearcats fan to "go to hell" and added "get a job" as he entered the tunnel.
Before Cincy's last game of the season, Tuberville spoke at length about wanting to stay the Bearcats' head coach. A week after Cincy's 40-37 loss to Tulsa, Tuberville resigned.