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Marler Monday: Predicting the next head coach for each opening

Nov 3, 2025 | 2:11 PM

Credit: Steve Roberts-Imagn Images

By Chris Marler

Yet another premiere job has opened in the college football world. Auburn head coach Hugh Freeze was fired on Sunday morning. With a second Tigers job being available, let’s predict the best fits for every SEC opening as of today. 

Auburn – Kenny Dillingham 

This cycle is unique for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is that teams are fighting an uphill battle with a handful of the best candidates they want to pursue. Coaches like Brent Key, Jeff Brohm, and Kenny Dillingham are all being mentioned regularly for big openings. All three of those guys are coaching at their alma maters and inherently more inclined to stay put instead of leave even if it is for a bigger opening. 

Dillingham would be a great fit for Auburn for a number of reasons. He is already familiar with the school after serving as offensive coordinator there in 2019 under Gus Malzahn. He’s also an offensive minded coach which is something this program and its fans would desperately love to see after the failed experiment with Hugh Freeze. 

Florida – James Franklin 

Fans are going to scoff at James Franklin’s name because of his well documented inability to win the big game. That’s fair to an extent considering he went 4-21 against top ten teams. That’s one of the worst records in the AP Poll era (dating back to 1936). That’s clearly bad, but that also means he went 100-24 in the other 124 games of his tenure. That’s good for a .806 winning percentage.  

My biggest pushback for Franklin detractors is that the argument about the top ten opponent’s record is fine, but most teams that are currently looking for a head coach aren’t necessarily racking up top ten wins either. The other pushback I would give is that it’s the same coach that was able to turn around Vanderbilt and Penn State. Franklin was able to turn Vanderbilt into a nine win team multiple times for the first time in program history. He was also able to dig Penn State out of the ashes of what that program was after Joe Paterno. 

Arkansas – Bobby Petrino 

Arkansas is not going to make a splashy hire for their next coach. More so, they are not going to break the bank to make said hire. By hiring Petrino, they are scoring in a few different areas. One, they can cling to some nostalgia with the hire which the fanbase will love. Those two seasons in 2010 and 2011 where they won double digit games and finished in the top five once are not only the best memories most Razorbacks have in their lifetime, but it’s also the reason they are painstakingly delusional to think those days are going to return. 

LSU – Eli Drinkwitz 

Fans may think Drinkwitz is a nerd, a dork, and of course the twin of Rugrat from Wolf of Wallstreet. Fine. Just make sure after you get the low hanging fruit jokes about his appearance, you include that he has won 21 games in his last two seasons at Missouri including the last SEC team to beat Ohio State. 

He’s also signed back-to-back top 20 recruiting classes and the No. 6 ranked transfer portal class a season ago. Again, he did that at Missouri. 

The bonus part of hiring a guy like Drinkwitz is that he’s a very good offensive minded coach that has had a player finish in the top four in the SEC in rushing yards in four of the last five years. That includes the SEC leader twice during that span. That would be a welcome change to the current LSU offense. And, the cherry on top is that he has Beau Pribula on his current roster and former blue chip recruit Matt Zollers in his current quarterback room. It’s not unrealistic to think at least one of those, if not both, would come to Baton Rouge giving an immediate answer to the question of who the Tigers will have at QB next year. 

LSU Choice No. 2 – Jon Sumrall 

I would also love John Sumrall if for no other reason than what he said after Tulane beat Northwestern earlier this year. For anyone that missed it, the Green Wave were preparing to play a Power Four opponent from the Big Ten earlier this season on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Leading up to the game, he requested if Tulane could wear the same uniforms they wore 20 years ago in their first game back, and Northwestern said no. 

Sumrall’s response was not only a win, but he had this to say after. 

“That’s their prerogative, but when you show disrespect to the city of New Orleans that’s what’s going to happen to you,” Sumrall said postgame. “You’re going to run into a team like this. They had a chip on their shoulder because I wanted to wear the exact same uniform that that team wore 20 years ago. Request got denied. We might have used that for a little bit of motivation to represent the city. So, don’t disrespect New Orleans ever.”

Chris Marler

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