I know he meant well, but all cocknfire’s exercise here did was to remind me of how worthless all these coaches hot seat lists really are.
First, unless it’s based on data coming directly from the decision maker(s), a hot seat list is little more than meaningless speculation. After the ’97 season, Jim Donnan got an under the table raise from Michael Adams; by 2000, he was gone, because Adams was unhappy about a three-game losing streak to Georgia Tech, despite the fact that Donnan kept winning at least eight times a season. Who saw that coming? (I’m not even sure Adams did until the very end.)
Second, sometimes there’s more to an evaluation of a coach’s longevity than wins and losses. The perceived heat on Mark Richt after his two bad seasons was likely mitigated by the football program’s continued financial success.
Third, at its heart, the whole hot seat thing is too damned arbitrary to be useful. It’s not exactly hard to come up with a standard that could make any coach come up short. Could anybody in the SEC survive an Edwin Edwards test? What coach could get away with shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die? (Well, maybe Saban, if he did it to ease an oversigning logjam… ah, probably not.) I keed, but the point is, in a conference where a coach got fired two seasons after winning a national title, there’s always something freakish that could happen at any given time. So why bother worrying about it? Best keep this stuff where it belongs, in a Bleacher Report slide show.