It’s early yet this season but trends have developed across college football, and fans are beginning to figure out which coordinators to boo and which play-callers to cheer this fall.
From the in-season demotion of Ohio State’s Kerry Coombs after an eye-brow raising lack of adjustments in a home loss to Oregon, to the celebration of rising stars at Arkansas and Ole Miss, and surprise stories like that of Fresno State’s Ryan Grubb, the sport never fails to be entertaining.
Chaos may be engulfing the sport (25 ranked teams have lost games through four weeks) but we are not short on season-defining performances by coordinators. We’re here to make sense of the good and the bad in college football and what it means for those coaches as they try to build their careers and, for some, near the end.
We examined the landscape, watched dozens of games and talked to even more sources over the first four weeks of the season and narrowed the list to 15 coordinators — the 10 best and the five worst (or most disappointing, if you will) performances of the 2021 season so far.
We’ll get the difficult part out of the way first before discussing the best of the best as we approach the halfway mark of the season.
