The Curry Hires: Five Programs in Free Fall and the Decisions That Caused It

In December 1986, Alabama hired Bill Curry. Curry had the résumé; a winning record at Georgia Tech, a Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year award, the right kind of credentials and the right kind of bearing for a program that had decided it needed a non-Bear successor with academic seriousness. He went 26-26 over three seasons in Tuscaloosa, never beat Auburn, never won the SEC, and was effectively run out of town in 1989. Gene Stallings replaced him, won a national title four years later, and the Curry interlude became the cautionary tale that Alabama spent the next thirty years pretending it had learned from.

It turns out Alabama had not learned. Neither had four other programs in college football, all of whom made the same mistake, hiring the man with the right résumé instead of the man who could win their conference, and all of whom are entering 2026 looking exactly like Tuscaloosa looked in 1988.

These are the five programs in free fall, and the decisions that got them here.

5. Washington: the price of being good once

In January 2024, Washington was 60 minutes away from a national championship. They lost the title game to Michigan, lost their head coach to Alabama, lost their offensive coordinator to Alabama, lost Michael Penix Jr. to the NFL, lost their three best receivers in the same draft, and then watched Jedd Fisch arrive from Arizona to inherit a program that had just been emptied out from the inside.

Two seasons later, the Huskies have done exactly what programs do when their entire identity walks out the door at once: gone 7-5, then 6-6, and entered 2026 as a roster that nobody quite knows how to grade because the talent is mid-tier Big Ten and the coaching staff is technically competent and the schedule is exactly as unforgiving as a Big Ten schedule is supposed to be. Fisch has decided to call his own offense in 2026, which is the kind of decision a head coach makes when he doesn't think any of the available offensive coordinators are going to help him win more games. He may be right. He may also discover that head coaches who call their own plays are the second-fastest-fired head coaches in the sport, behind only the ones who refuse to hire a defensive coordinator at all.

The Curry parallel is exact: a program that hired the right kind of résumé candidate instead of admitting it needed to rebuild from scratch. The result is going to be 6 or 7 wins in a conference where 6 or 7 wins is the new bottom. Washington fans are about to find out what the cost of one great season actually is.

4. Michigan: three head coaches in three years

Bryce Underwood was the No. 1 overall recruit in the 2025 class. He committed to Michigan when Sherrone Moore was the head coach. He arrived on campus in August 2025 with Moore still the head coach and a returning offensive coordinator in Kirk Campbell. By the end of his freshman season, Moore had been fired for cause, an inappropriate relationship with an employee, Campbell was gone, and Chip Lindsey, the interim play-caller who had kept Underwood developing, had taken the Missouri OC job. Kyle Whittingham was hired away from Utah's 21-year program to run Michigan, and brought Jason Beck and Jay Hill with him.

Bryce Underwood is going to play his sophomore year for his third head coach.

That sentence is the entire story. The most important quarterback recruit Michigan has signed in twenty years is being asked to learn a third offense in three years, while playing for a head coach whose entire career was built on a Mountain West system that is not what Underwood was recruited to run. Whittingham is sixty-six years old. He left Utah because he could not get the program back to the playoff after the realignment. He arrived at Michigan because Michigan is Michigan, but the conditions that made him a great Utah coach, schematic stability, talent that valued program over offer sheet, a defensive infrastructure that he built over two decades, do not exist in Ann Arbor.

The Curry parallel here is the inverse. Michigan didn't hire the right kind of résumé candidate. They hired the only one they could get who would say yes after the Moore firing. That is how the Bill Curry hires actually get made; not as a confident choice, but as the choice the search produces when the better candidates have already said no. Whittingham is the placeholder hire dressed up as a marquee one. He is going to win 8 games, possibly 9, with a roster that should win 10 or 11, and Bryce Underwood is going to transfer before he is a senior.

3. Clemson: the program that solved a problem that no longer exists

For fifteen years, Dabo Swinney's roster construction philosophy was simple and effective: recruit better high-school players than your opponents, develop them longer than your opponents would, refuse to engage with the transfer portal, and let the cumulative effect of having more experienced players than anybody else carry you into the playoff every year. It worked. Clemson made the playoff six times in seven seasons.

The model died sometime around 2022, and Swinney has been refusing to admit it since. The problem isn't that Clemson can't recruit anymore; they still pull a top-15 class every year. The problem is that the kids they recruit get tampered with by the time they're sophomores and the program's no-portal policy means the talent that walks out the door cannot be replaced by talent that walks in.

In 2026 the consequences are finally visible on the field. Cade Klubnik is gone to the seventh round of the NFL Draft. Christopher Vizzina takes over as QB1 with a single season of meaningful tape. Nine Clemson players were drafted in 2026, tying the program record set in 2016, a year that produced a national title, and Swinney is replacing all of them from a high-school pipeline that has produced exactly one offseason-of-the-year performer since 2022. The roster grades into the high #50s nationally. The schedule is a soft ACC slate that should produce 9 or 10 wins by reputation alone.

The Curry parallel is the most ironic: a program that built its identity on stubborn rejection of the modern game and is now paying the cost of having been right too early. Clemson is going to win 8 games in a year when half its ACC opponents win 10. They are going to be the team people talk about as evidence that Dabo's model is broken, when the actual evidence has been on the field since 2023.

2. Tennessee: the wrong coach kept, the right coach lost

Here is the question Tennessee fans have been quietly asking themselves all spring: would they rather have Alex Golesh than Josh Heupel?

It is a fair question. Golesh was Heupel's offensive coordinator in 2021 and 2022; the two years that turned Tennessee from "Pruitt aftermath" into "credible SEC contender." He left for the USF head-coaching job in 2023, made USF a Group of Five program nobody wanted to play, took the Auburn job in November 2025, and is currently being treated by the rest of the SEC as the most dangerous first-year coach in the conference. He brought his offensive coordinator and his starting quarterback with him. The Auburn job is going to be his within two years. The next ten years of his career are going to be a steady climb.

The man Tennessee kept, meanwhile, has plateaued. Heupel's tempo offense is now exactly the offense that the rest of the SEC has spent four years building defenses against. Joey Halzle is in his fourth year as the offensive coordinator and the system has stopped innovating. Tim Banks was fired after the defense regressed from a Broyles Award-finalist 2024 to one of the worst SEC defenses in 2025. Jim Knowles arrives from Penn State, where he had a one-year stop after Ohio State, to install a third defensive scheme in three years.

The starting quarterback situation is unsettled. Arion Carter withdrew from the NFL Draft and reversed out of the transfer portal to come back for his senior year, which is the most positive single development of the offseason in Knoxville; and which is also a sign of how thin the rest of the roster is, because the player who came back is a linebacker, not a quarterback.

Heupel is on the hot seat. The contract extension he signed in 2023 has a buyout that would make a firing painful, and Tennessee has been historically allergic to paying for two head coaches at once, but the trajectory is going down. The man who built the offensive identity left and is winning at Auburn. The man who kept the chair is going 8-4 in a year when Tennessee fans were promised 10-2.

The Curry parallel is the cruelest one: Tennessee hired the safe choice instead of the visionary, and now has to watch the visionary build a contender at the in-conference rival they once beat 52-49 in Knoxville. By 2028, the question won't be "did Tennessee make the right call." It will be "how did they not see it coming."

1. Alabama: the actual Bill Curry hire

Kalen DeBoer was hired in January 2024 because he had a national-championship-game appearance on his résumé, an offensive scheme that Nick Saban personally endorsed, and the right kind of bearing for a program that had decided it needed a credible successor to the greatest coach in college football history.

That sentence is the same sentence Alabama used to describe Bill Curry in December 1986, with the names changed. DeBoer is Bill Curry. Different decade, different sport in some respects, identical hire.

The case for DeBoer in 2024 was that he had taken Washington from 4-8 to a national title game in two years and would presumably apply the same template at Alabama. The case against him, which nobody made loudly enough at the time, was that he had done it with a roster he didn't recruit and an offensive system that depended on a specific kind of quarterback Alabama no longer had. Jalen Milroe, the 2024 starter, was the closest Alabama could come to a Penix-type player, and it wasn't very close. The result was an 11-3 first year that looked respectable on paper and felt empty in the building.

The second year did not improve. Alabama went 9-4. They lost to Auburn for the first time since 2019. They missed the College Football Playoff for the second straight season, the first back-to-back miss for the program in the playoff era. Ryan Grubb, the OC who followed DeBoer from Seattle, has had two years to install his version of the Air Raid at Alabama and the offensive numbers are league-average. Ty Simpson, the 2025 starter, was a fourth-round NFL Draft pick, productive enough to get drafted, not transformative enough to win the games Alabama needed him to win. He's gone now, and the 2026 quarterback room is a competition between Austin Mack and Keelon Russell that nobody outside the building has been able to handicap with confidence.

The roster is no longer top-ten nationally. The recruiting classes are slipping; still top-10, no longer top-3. The portal acquisitions have not moved the needle. And the schedule, as always in the SEC, is going to produce three or four games that a 9-3 program should not lose and that DeBoer's Alabama is going to find ways to lose anyway.

The Curry hire produces exactly one possible ending, and Alabama is two years from it. Bill Curry left Tuscaloosa after three seasons with a 26-26 record, having never beaten Auburn, having never won the SEC, having presided over the program's first sustained dip in nearly two decades. DeBoer is on pace to match that record exactly through three years. The buyout is steep. The fanbase is patient by national standards. But there is a version of December 2026 in which Alabama is 8-4, has lost to Auburn for the second straight year, has missed the playoff for the third straight year, and is having the conversation it spent thirty years promising itself it would never have to have again.

Kalen DeBoer is Bill Curry. The data is what it is.

What these five programs have in common

The common thread is not bad coaching. Whittingham, Fisch, Heupel, DeBoer, and Swinney are all real head coaches with real track records. The common thread is that each of these programs made a hire, or a refusal to hire, that prioritized the safe résumé over the dangerous identity.

Washington wanted a steady hand. Michigan wanted a name. Tennessee wanted continuity. Alabama wanted dignity. Clemson wanted to prove itself right.

What they all needed was a coach who could win their conference in 2026, and what they all got was a coach who was going to make 9-3 the new ceiling at a program that used to think 11-1 was the floor.

The five programs in free fall are not failing because their tradition has run out. They are failing because they made the Bill Curry hire, the one that looked like a national contender on paper and a slow decline in practice, and the bill is finally coming due.

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Predictions are computed from a roster-weighted modified RPI across the projected schedule. See the predictions page for full 2026 rankings.