The Big 12 football head coaching landscape will look quite different next season with Arizona’s Brent Brenna, Arizona State’s Kenny Dillingham, Utah’s Kyle Whittingham and Colorado’s Deion Sanders all joining the conference. Additionally, former Tulane head coach Willie Fritz is now at Houston.
Not including Texas’ Steve Sarkisian and Oklahoma’s Brent Venables, who are both headed to the SEC, the Big 12 still had an impressive group of head coaches last season. Kansas’ Lance Leipold earned himself an extension, Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy produced another 10-win season and Kansas State’s Chris Kleiman has the Wildcats thriving.
On Monday, On3’s Jesse Simonton released a spring ranking of the 16 Big 12 football head coaches, and Coach Prime slotted in at No. 12. While Sanders has yet to produce a winning season at the Power Four level, ranking him No. 12 seems low based on the promising trajectory of Colorado’s program. Sanders was even ranked below Baylor’s Dave Aranda (No. 11), who may be on the hot seat following last season’s three-win campaign.
After inheriting a one-win CU team in 2022, Sanders attacked the transfer portal hard last offseason and quadrupled that win total during his first fall in Boulder.
Here’s some of what Simonton wrote on Coach Prime:
The Buffs went 4-8 in Coach Prime’s first season in Boulder — a legitimate success story for a team that went 1-11 and lost its last four games by an average of six touchdowns in 2022.
However, the idea that Sanders is on some fast track to a big, blue-blood job is premature. Sanders doesn’t appear interested in doing what to takes to sustain a longterm rebuild at CU. He’s continued to mostly ignore prep recruiting in favor of hammering the portal. He reshuffled a staff, that on paper, was much more impressive last season.
Whittingham led Simonton’s list, followed by Leipold, Gundy and Kleiman in that order.
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