I've been thinking a lot lately about the chaos behind the scenes in college football — the constant staff turnover, the player movement, the pressure, the speed. And the conclusion I keep returning to is simple:

College football isn't a "department" inside a university.
It's a project. A never-ending one.

A department implies stability: long-term employees, institutional memory, clear reporting lines, onboarding, steady progression. None of that really exists anymore. Instead, you have a rolling, high-intensity project with fixed roles, fluid people, and weekly public evaluations.

And I say all this as someone who loves college football. It is my all-time favourite sport. Nothing else comes close to the stakes. Every Saturday is a test not just for teams but for individuals trying to earn their future. These players aren't just athletes — they're students walking around campus with the same people who fill the stadium on weekends. Every week they're trying out for the NFL and performing in front of classmates who will see them in lectures on Monday.

It's raw, emotional, vulnerable, brilliant.
There's nothing like it.

But loving it doesn't mean ignoring what it has become.

The coaching carousel proves the old model is gone

If college football ever resembled a stable academic department, this season's coaching carousel made a mockery of that idea.

By early December, 17 FBS teams had fired their head coach. Seven more lost their coach to another programme, leaving them scrambling. Coordinators, analysts, position coaches and recruiting directors continued to churn beneath them.

No normal "department" can function when 20–25% of its most senior leaders change hands in a single season.

But a project can — because projects are built for turnover.

College football as a long-running project

Look at the ecosystem through project-management language:

  • The Head Coach is the Project Lead
  • The Athletic Director is the Project Sponsor
  • Boosters and NIL collectives are external stakeholders
  • Players and assistants are contributors
  • The deliverables are wins, TV revenue, recruiting classes and playoff appearances

And the project never ends. It loops endlessly:

Season > Portal > Recruiting > Winter Install > Spring > Summer > Season

Every element of the project's structure resets annually.
The only constant is the cycle.

The roles are stable — the people aren't

Every major programme still needs the same things every year: an OC, a DC, a strength staff, a recruiting operation, analysts and QCs, position coaches, an NIL strategy team.

Those roles are stable. The people in them are not.

This season alone saw UCLA fire its coach three weeks in and reboot the entire project mid-stream. LSU fired Brian Kelly, poached Lane Kiffin, and set off a chain reaction through Ole Miss, then through USF, then onwards. Auburn fired Hugh Freeze and took Alex Golesh, forcing USF to reboot immediately. Florida moved on from Billy Napier and hired Jon Sumrall, forcing Tulane into its own reset.

It's less like "staff reorganisation" and more like project staffing across interlinked projects — all competing for the same talent pool.

The real continuity isn't people — it's systems

In this world of constant churn, the only thing that can actually endure is a system: a culture system, a scheme system, a recruiting system, a development system, an information system, an NIL system.

Programmes like Georgia or Ohio State stay strong because their systems persist even when their staff change.

Programmes that collapse the moment a head coach leaves? They weren't building a system — they were building around a personality.

In project language: they invested in the project lead, not the project architecture.

Administrators aren't running departments — they're managing portfolios

Athletic Directors today operate more like portfolio managers than traditional administrators. They must time firings around buyout cliffs, manage NIL ecosystems they don't directly control, balance this season's win demands with next season's roster stability, navigate an expanded Playoff where dozens of teams suddenly expect to reach the top 12, and contain the financial and cultural risks of instability.

It's ruthless, fluid, and often impossible.

No wonder the carousel spins faster each year.

The human cost of a project that never ends

When you see college football as a project, its intensity begins to make sense.

The project never finishes. The evaluation cycles are public and weekly. The contributors are constantly changing. The stakeholders are demanding, emotional and powerful. The budget is volatile. The timeline is fixed. The deliverables can change overnight.

Even in February — traditionally the sport's quietest stretch — coaches aren't truly resting. After bowl season and signing day, there is a brief lull: no on-campus recruiting, less travel, fewer practices. But behind the scenes they're still reviewing film, reorganising staff, resetting recruiting boards, planning installations, meeting boosters, restructuring NIL strategy and preparing for spring.

It's not a break.
It's a slightly calmer phase of the project.

So what has college football actually become?

Not a traditional department with long-term employees.

A high-velocity project with a permanent mission and an impermanent cast.

The programmes that survive this reality are the ones that assume churn rather than continuity. The ones that invest in infrastructure rather than personality. The ones that build systems strong enough to outlast any single coach or player.

Because this is the truth of modern college football: it's only stable at the brand level. Everything underneath is constantly shifting.

And maybe that's what makes it so compelling. The drama never rests because the project never ends. The stakes feel higher because the ground is always moving. The emotion runs deeper because everyone involved — players, coaches, fans — knows how quickly it can all change.

It's chaotic. It's brutal. It's often unfair to the people inside the machine.

And I still love it more than any other sport.