Halloween is still four days away, and college football's athletic directors have already started handing out pink slips like full-size candy bars.
In the span of five days, three Power 4 programs fired their head coaches. Maryland moved on from Mike Locksley on Wednesday, Oct. 21. NC State dumped Dave Doeren on Saturday, Oct. 24, the day after a loss at Stanford. Baylor followed on Sunday, Oct. 25, cutting ties with Dave Aranda less than 24 hours after a one-point loss to Kansas.
That's one opening each in the Big Ten, ACC and Big 12, per Sporting News, before a single November snap. And if the buyout figures reported by CBS Sports and Yahoo hold, those schools have collectively signed up to pay well north of $30 million to coaches who no longer work there.
Welcome to the 2026-27 coaching carousel. It didn't wait for the leaves to finish falling.
Baylor pulls the plug on a 40-40 coach
Aranda's exit is the freshest and, in some ways, the most telling.
Baylor fell to 4-3 with a 25-24 loss to Kansas on Saturday, its second straight Big 12 loss, per Sporting News. On Sunday, the school made it official. Athletic director Doug McNamee's statement leaned hard on respect, calling Aranda "a genuine and honorable person" and "a brilliant football mind," before landing on the line that matters: the school believes "a change in leadership is necessary at this time."
The math explains the rest. Aranda finishes 40-40 in Waco, per USA Today, and 26-32 in Big 12 play. His 2021 team went 12-2 and won the Sugar Bowl, and that season accounts for roughly a quarter of his career wins. Outside of it, the Bears posted four losing seasons, including 5-7 last fall.
That's the trap of the one magical year. It buys you time, and then it becomes the standard you're measured against forever.
Defensive coordinator Joe Klanderman takes over as interim coach. Baylor is private and doesn't release contracts, but Yahoo's Ross Dellenger reported Aranda's buyout at $12 million, per USA Today.
NC State fires the winningest coach it ever had
Doeren's firing hits differently, because Doeren was never the problem in the way bad coaches are the problem.
He spent 14 seasons in Raleigh, became the winningest coach in program history, and made the Wolfpack a perennial bowl team. But the 2026 team fell to 3-4 with a 31-28 loss at Stanford, and the school pulled the trigger the next day, per Sporting News and ESPN. CBS noted that preseason chatter about this being Doeren's last year had centered on possible retirement, not a firing.
Athletic director Boo Corrigan thanked Doeren for "always representing the university with pride," per ESPN. Then he wrote a check: CBS puts the buyout at about $10.3 million on a contract that ran through 2029, with a mitigation clause requiring Doeren to make reasonable efforts to find another job.
Todd Goebbel now runs the program as interim coach, according to AP. The early names floating around Raleigh are fascinating. CBS flagged former Wolfpack quarterback Philip Rivers as one to watch, and the 247Sports affiliate PackPower put James Madison's Billy Napier, who has the Dukes at 7-1 in his first season there, on its board.
Rivers to NC State would be the kind of hire that either looks like genius or becomes a documentary. There is no middle.
Maryland lit the fuse
Locksley's dismissal got the whole thing rolling. Maryland moved on after a 2-5 start that included losses to Rutgers, Virginia Tech and UCLA, per CBS. He leaves at 39-54, and CBS reported the school owes him around $9.75 million with no offset if he takes another job.
The brutal stat from Sporting News: Maryland was 2-20 in conference play after the Big Ten expanded to 18 teams. That's not a slump. That's a structural problem, and it's the real story of a mid-tier Big Ten job in the super-conference era. The revenue is great. The schedule is a meat grinder.
CBS listed Wake Forest's Jake Dickert, New Mexico's Jason Eck and Memphis' Charles Huff among the potential candidates. Sports Illustrated's Maryland site has already pitched Doeren himself as a fit for College Park, which would be the most 2026 thing imaginable: one fired coach replacing another within a week.
Why everyone is moving so early
Firing coaches in October used to be a rare, almost embarrassing thing. Now it's a strategy.
The logic is simple. The transfer portal opens once, starting Jan. 2, 2027, and USA Today reported this week that the player market is already running at full speed regardless of the official calendar. A school that waits until December to hire a coach is a school whose new coach shows up to an empty roster and a depleted collective. A school that moves in October gets a head start on candidates, donors and, crucially, the players it wants to keep.
There's also the reality that buyouts are part of the price of doing business now. Front Office Sports tallied these three schools' obligations at more than $30 million combined. That's a lot of money to spend on not having a coach, and none of these three programs is close to the sport's financial top tier. It tells you how desperate the middle class of the Power 4 feels about falling further behind.
The carousel is just getting started
Three jobs are open. History says that number won't stay at three. Every Saturday from here on is an audition, and every ugly loss tightens a hot seat somewhere else.
The question for Baylor, NC State and Maryland isn't just who they hire. It's whether they can find someone who can win in a sport where revenue sharing and portal access have flattened the field, where an unranked team can knock off a top-two team three weeks in a row, and where being solid for a decade, as Doeren was, is no longer enough to keep your job.
The ride is spinning. Hold on to something.
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