Culture
Which college football coaches have the hottest seats at the midseason mark?
It’s the midpoint of the college football season and usually, the coaching carousel is spinning much faster. It’s spinning slower this year for a few reasons. First, the past two seasons had much more turnover than initially expected; second, this is the first year of the 12-team College Football Playoff, which is extending the potential waiting time on some search options.
Things could get active at the Group of 5 level soon, though. Here’s our midseason assessment after talking to numerous industry sources about the FBS coaching landscape.
AAC
Mike Houston, East Carolina: 3-3 record this season
Before getting the ECU job, Houston went 37-6 at James Madison and won an FCS national title. He led the Pirates to two bowl games in his first four seasons but went 2-10 last year. His team just got whupped by 31 at Charlotte, now a rival program, and has lost by far its best player, cornerback Shavon Revel, to a season-ending knee injury. ECU still has Army and Navy, both Top 25 teams, plus 5-1 North Texas left. Tulsa, FAU and Temple are all very winnable. Getting to six wins might buy him more time, but his team could use a few wins down the stretch. Temperature check: Warm.
Mike Bloomgren, Rice: 2-4
This is a tough job. The former Stanford assistant got the Owls into a bowl game in his fifth year. Last season was his best: a 6-7 record that included snapping a seven-game losing streak to Houston. The Owls got off to a 1-4 start but just notched a nice, close win against UTSA for their first win against an FBS opponent. Getting bowl eligible looks doubtful, especially with only UAB seemingly looking like a likely win — and that one is on the road. Temperature check: A little warm.
Stan Drayton, Temple: 1-5
It’s been tough for Drayton to get much traction so far. The Owls are 2-16 in AAC play. The program wasn’t in great shape when Drayton took over for Rod Carey, whose teams only won two of his last 15 AAC games before he was fired. The Owls could really use a win at home against struggling Tulsa this weekend to get a little momentum going. Temperature check: Getting warmer.
Trent Dilfer, UAB: 1-5
The former NFL quarterback-turned-TV analyst had a lot of success building a powerhouse high school program in Nashville before getting the Blazers job over then-offensive coordinator Bryant Vincent, who not so coincidentally has done terrific in his debut season as the head man at the University of Louisiana-Monroe. That dynamic isn’t helping the situation for the first-time college coach. Vincent’s team blew out UAB 32-6 in early September. Dilfer went 4-8 last year and the Blazers are really struggling this year. Aside from a win over FCS Alcorn in the opener, this has been rough. They hung around against Arkansas and gave the Hogs a game, but the rest of the slate has been blowouts. They have home games against Tulsa, UConn and Rice. They need to win at least one of two of those to show some progress to quiet some of the critics since this was a fairly high-profile, outside-the-box hire. Temperature check: Getting hot.
Dilfer was a splashy, leap-of-faith hire for UAB, but the Blazers have struggled so far under his tenure. Photo: Wesley Hitt / Getty
ACC
Mack Brown, North Carolina: 3-4
The Tar Heels has been pretty good in Brown’s second stint with the program. In his second season back, they finished No. 18. The Tar Heels have won 17 games the past two seasons but it feels like the program has fallen off quite a bit this year. They’ve lost four in a row, including giving up 70 to JMU at home. The bright side: three of their remaining five opponents have losing records. Getting to six wins isn’t out of the question but there’s been increasing chatter that it might be time for a change from the 73-year-old Brown. Temperature check: Getting a lot warmer.
Big 12
Dave Aranda, Baylor: 2-4
The wild roller coaster ride that has been Aranda’s tenure in Waco, Texas has struggled to ramp back up. He went 2-7 in his first season and then, after overhauling his offensive staff, led Baylor to a 12-2 season, finishing No. 5. Since then, the Bears are 11-20. Baylor almost made a coaching change last winter but showed more patience with Aranda. There were more staff moves made that included Aranda taking over the defense this season. But after some good early signs, that side of the ball is struggling again. The issue has been that Aranda hasn’t recruited well enough or close to the level that Matt Rhule did. Aside from this weekend’s game at Texas Tech, none of the next five opponents have winning records. Temperature check: Hot.
GO DEEPER
Khan: Can Dave Aranda come back from Baylor’s collapse at Colorado?
Big Ten
Mike Locksley, Maryland: 3-3
A fast start has cooled quickly, with two double-digit losses including a dismal home showing where the Terrapins lost by 27 to a middling Northwestern team. Worse still, they’ll probably be underdogs in each of their last six games. A rebuilt O-line has struggled mightily, as has the secondary. Word out of College Park is that Locksley, who is so well-respected locally, has built up so much goodwill in his time there, especially having posted back-to-back eight-win seasons while in the much tougher side of the Big Ten and that’ll afford him a mulligan this year. In the previous 40 years, the Terps had only one stretch of three consecutive winning seasons until Locksley did it from 2021-2023. Temperature check: Lukewarm.
Ryan Walters, Purdue: 1-5
The former Colorado defensive back did outstanding work as Illinois’ defensive coordinator before getting this job. The Purdue offense sputtered in his debut season, managing 17 points or less six times in a 4-8 year. Walters fired OC Graham Harrell early this season and Purdue’s woes have continued. A 49-0 win over FCS Indiana State is the lone victory, but they did show signs of life, almost knocking off No. 23 Illinois on the road last weekend, 50-49, with freshman QB Ryan Browne in his first start. Four of their remaining six games are against top-16 teams. The other two teams are .500 Northwestern and at Michigan. Can the Boilers notch at least one win to show some progress? Two years isn’t close to enough time, so I’d be very surprised if the Boilers made a move. After all, this is a program that hasn’t finished in the Top 25 once in the past 20 years and only had four winning seasons in the past 16 years. Temperature check: Getting a little warm.
Conference USA
Sonny Cumbie, Louisiana Tech: 2-4
He went 6-18 in his first two years. The Bulldogs lost their first three games against FBS teams this season. They hammered a bad MTSU team for their first FBS win of the season last week but weren’t able to build off of that. They lost in double-overtime to New Mexico State. Next up is another woeful team, UTEP. I thought 5-7 looked like where they were headed, but that was before losing to NMSU. Temperature check: Getting hotter.
I think Cumbie can buy himself another year with five wins. Photo: Jaylynn Nash / Imagn Images
MAC
Mike Neu, Ball State: 2-4
A former star QB for the Cardinals, Neu actually led Ball State to a Top 25 season in 2020, when the Cardinals finished No. 23. Neu followed that up with another bowl trip. They’ve tailed off some in the past two years and are off to a shaky start. They escaped with a two-point win against a hapless Kent State team on the road for their first FBS win. With the way their schedule sets up, getting more than three wins seems like a reach. He’s been the head coach for nine years and he’s the only one in school history that ever produced a Top 25 season, although Pete Lembo and Brady Hoke each did have double-digit win seasons. Still, this is a very tough place to win at. Temperature check: Warm.
Joe Moorhead, Akron: 1-6
One of the game’s better offensive minds has struggled to get any momentum here. He had back-to-back 2-10 seasons to start and looks like he might be headed to another one. Beyond Kent State, they won’t play another team with a losing record this season. Temperature check: Pretty warm.
Scot Loeffler, Bowling Green: 2-4
He’s coming off of his best season of his first five years, when the Falcons went 7-6. They are off to a slow start this fall but they’ve had three losses by a touchdown or less, including against two ranked teams on the road — Penn State and Texas A&M. I think they’re good enough to rally for six wins but even if they don’t, it’s hard to think they can expect better than what they’ve had from Loeffler. Temperature check: Sort of warm.
Kenni Burns, Kent State: 0-6
He took over for Sean Lewis, who left to become an OC at Colorado. Lewis led Kent State to its first bowl win and had two seven-win seasons at a place that’s only had three winning seasons since 1987. Burns, a former Minnesota running back coach, won one game in his first season, and is still looking for his first win this season. Losing to FCS St. Francis still stings. Can they knock off Akron in late November to get a win? I think it’s pretty poor form to hire someone and only give him two seasons, but if there is only one win or less in each of Burns’ first two years, it wouldn’t be surprising if the school got itchy. Temperature check: Getting warm.
Mountain West
Tim Skipper, Fresno State: 3-3
A former Bulldogs middle linebacker, Skipper is a well-respected part of the Fresno family and stepped up after Jeff Tedford stepped down for health reasons. Fresno State got off to a 3-1 start before losing the past two games. The Bulldogs have a decent shot to become a bowl team. If Fresno can go on a big run in the second half of the season, maybe Skipper can keep this job. Temperature check: Warm.
Nate Dreiling, Utah State: 1-5
The 33-year-old interim is still looking for his first FBS win. They pounded FCS Robert Morris in the opener and were then blasted in their next five games. Temperature check: They’ll be starting over this winter.
SEC
Sam Pittman, Arkansas: 4-2
After going 4-8 last season, Pittman’s seat was hot coming into this year, but he might be coaching his way to another. The Razorbacks won at Auburn and have a nice win against Tennessee their last time out. They still have 1-5 Mississippi State ahead and 2-3 Louisiana Tech. They may also be capable of knocking off LSU with the Tigers coming off the comeback win against Ole Miss last week. Barring a collapse, I think he’ll earn more time, unless the school is convinced it has a big upgrade waiting in the wings. Temperature check: Hot but cooling off a bit.
Billy Napier, Florida: 3-3
Florida doesn’t have a lot of patience with football coaches. The Gators fired Dan Mullen, who’d won 29 games in his first three seasons but got the axe after going 5-6. Jim McElwain won 19 games in his first two seasons and then went 3-4 and got fired. Will Muschamp got four years. Ron Zook didn’t even get three. Napier went 11-14 his first two years after an impressive run at Louisiana. This season has been a mixed bag. The Gators got pounded by Miami in the opener in The Swamp but the team is still battling for Napier. That’s been a big plus, in addition to the tricky timeline now with CFP candidates potentially in play.
There’s been a ton of dysfunction around the university, all the way up to the university president fleeing.
The good news: the Gators thumped Mississippi State in Starkville, Miss., beat UCF by double-digits and almost upset Tennessee in Knoxville before losing in overtime. They have four top-20 opponents left, including two in the top five, vs. Georgia and at Texas. The only team with a losing record remaining is their road trip to 1-5 FSU. They just lost starting QB Graham Mertz for the rest of the season. Can true freshman DJ Lagway spark a strong second half to get Florida to 6-6? If they win this weekend against Kentucky, don’t rule it out. Temperature check: Toasty.
GO DEEPER
Billy Napier beware: Florida has not historically been patient in rebuilds
Sun Belt
Shawn Clark, Appalachian State: 2-4
The former App State offensive lineman is well thought of in the Mountaineer community and he has three seasons with at least nine wins in his first four years. This year has been messy. They’ve lost three in a row, all by double digits and by giving up a ton of points. Just getting to five wins (the game against Liberty was canceled last month) looks dicey. And Appalachian State is not used to losing. Temperature check: Getting warm.
Butch Jones, Arkansas State: 3-3
Under Jones, the Red Wolves have gone from two wins to three wins to six and bowl game last year. I think they should get bowl eligible again. Their next two games are against Southern Miss and Troy, both 1-5 teams. They also have two games against two-win teams, so 6-6 feels like the floor, with seven wins seemingly realistic.
Temperature check: A little warm.
Will Hall, Southern Miss: 1-5
The son of a Mississippi high school legend, Hall, a very successful Division II coach, seemed like an excellent choice when he got this job four years ago. After a solid season season where the Golden Eagles went 7-6 and won a bowl game, they have backslid quite a bit. They went 3-9 last year and are really struggling now. All five losses have been by double-digits. They still have to go to JMU and Texas State. The final two games of the season are against two-win South Alabama and one-win Troy on the road. Temperature check: Very hot.
(Top illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Adam Davis, James Gilbert, Grant Halverson / Getty)
In prehistoric northern Europe, peatlands — areas of waterlogged soil rich with decaying plant matter — were considered spiritual sites. Since then, swords, jewelry and even human bodies have been found fossilized in their sludgy depths. More recently, however, many of these bogs have been depleted by overharvesting, neglect and development. But as awareness of their important role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere grows, more wetlands are being restored, while also serving as unlikely creative inspiration. Here’s how bogs are showing up in the culture.
Fashion
At fall 2026 Paris Fashion Week, several houses — including Louis Vuitton (above left) and Hermès — staged shows amid mossy sets featuring spongy green structures and mounds of vegetation. And the Danish fashion brand Solitude Studios is distressing its eerie, grungy looks (above right) by submerging them in a local peat bog.
Contemporary Art
For her exhibition at California’s San José Museum of Art, on view through October, the Chalon Nation artist Christine Howard Sandoval is presenting sculptures, drawings and plant-dyed works (above) exploring how the state’s wetlands were once sites of Indigenous resistance and community. This month, at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley, the conceptual artist Anicka Yi will unveil an outdoor installation featuring six-foot-tall transparent columns holding algae-rich ecosystems cultivated from nearby pond water and soil.
Architecture and Design
The Bog Bothy (above), a mobile design project by the Dublin-based architecture practice 12th Field in collaboration with the Irish Architecture Foundation, was inspired by the makeshift huts once used by peat cutters who harvested the material for fuel. After debuting in the Irish Midlands last year, it’ll tour the region again this summer. In Edinburgh, the designer Oisín Gallagher is making doorstops from subfossilized bog-oak scraps carbon-dated to 3300 B.C.
Fine Dining
At La Grenouillère on France’s north coast, the chef Alexandre Gauthier reflects the restaurant’s reedy, frog-filled river valley landscape with dishes like a “marsh bubble” of herbs encased in hardened sugar. This spring, Aponiente — the chef Ángel León’s restaurant inside a 19th-century tidal mill on Spain’s Bay of Cádiz — added an outdoor dining area on a pier above the neighboring marshland, serving local sea grasses and salt marsh flowers alongside seafood (above) from the estuary.
Literature
The Irish British writer Maggie O’Farrell’s forthcoming novel, “Land,” about an Irish cartographer and his son surveying the island in 1865 after the Great Famine, depicts haunting encounters with the verdant landscape, including its plentiful oozing bogs.
SELLING OPPORTUNITY: The Story of Mary Kay, by Mary Lisa Gavenas
Mary Kay, the cosmetics company whose multilevel marketing included sales parties and whose biggest earners were awarded pink Cadillacs, was really in the business of selling second chances. Or, at least, that’s what Mary Lisa Gavenas argues in “Selling Opportunity,” a dual biography of the brand and the woman behind it.
Mary Kathlyn Wagner, who would become Mary Kay Ash, “the most famous saleswoman in the world” and “maybe the most famous ever,” in Gavenas’s extravagant words, was born in 1918 to a poor family and raised mostly in Houston. Although a good student, she eloped at 16 with a slightly older boy. The young couple had two babies in quick succession.
Mary Kay’s creation was a combination of timing and good luck. Door-to-door sales was a thriving industry — but, traditionally, a man’s world: Lugging heavy samples was not considered feminine, and entering the homes of strangers, unsafe. But things began to change during the Great Depression, Gavenas suggests, thanks to a convergence of factors — financial pressures and the rise of the aspirational prosperity gospel espoused by Dale Carnegie’s self-help manuals.
At the same time, female-run beauty lines like Annie Turnbo Malone’s Poro and Madam C.J. Walker’s were finding great success in Black communities. And, coincidentally or otherwise, the California Perfume Company changed its name to Avon Products in 1939.
Ash began by selling books door to door, moving on to Stanley Home Products in the 1940s. She was talented, but direct sales was a rough gig. Every party to show off wares was supposed to beget two more bookings; these led to sales that resulted in new recruits. But there was no real security or stability: no salary, no medical benefits, no vacations. “Stop selling and you would end up right back where you started. Or worse,” the author writes.
Gavenas, a onetime beauty editor who wrote “Color Stories,” takes her time unspooling Mary Kay’s tale, with a great deal of evident research. We learn about direct sales, women’s rights and Texas history.
But, be warned: Readers must really enjoy both this woman and this world to take pleasure in “Selling Opportunity.” Mary Kay the person keeps marrying, getting divorced or widowed and working her way through various sales jobs (it’s hard to keep track of the myriad companies and last names). Gavenas seems to leave no detail out. Thus, the 1963 founding of the eponymous beauty company doesn’t come until almost 200 pages in.
Beauty by Mary Kay included a Cleansing Cream, a Magic Masque and a Nite Cream (which containined ammoniated mercury, later banned by the F.D.A.). The full line of products — which was how Mary Kay strongly encouraged customers to buy them — ran to a steep $175 in today’s money. (To fail to acquire the whole set, Ash said, was “like giving you my recipe for chocolate cake but leaving out an important ingredient.”)
Potential clients attended gatherings at acquaintances’ homes — no undignified doorbell-ringing here — where they received a mini facial, then an application of cosmetics like foundation, lip color and cream rouge — and a wig. The company made $198,514 in sales its first year.
Although Ash may have seemed a pioneer, in many ways Mary Kay was a traditionalist company, whose philosophy was “God first, family second, career third.” Saleswomen, official literature dictated, were working to provide themselves with treats rather than necessities so as not to threaten their breadwinner husbands.
And yet, they were also encouraged to sell sell sell. Golden Goblet pendants were awarded for major orders. After the company started using custom pink Peterbilt trucks for shipping, it began commissioning those Cadillacs for top consultants. (Mary Kay preferred gifts to cash bonuses, lest women save the money to spend on practical things rather than the licensed frivolities.) The Cadillacs, always driven on company leases, would become industry legend and part of American pop culture lore. “Never to be run-down, repainted or resold, the cars would double as shining pink advertisements for her selling opportunity,” Gavenas writes.
The woman herself was iconic, too. While Ash was a product of the Depression, she was also undeniably over-the-top. She wore white suits with leopard trim, lived in a custom Frank L. Meier house and brought her poodle to the office.
Mary Kay went public in 1968, making her the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange. By the 1990s, the Mary Kay headquarters near Dallas was almost 600,000 square feet. They commissioned a hagiographic company biopic; there was a Mary Kay consultant Barbie; they were making $1 billion in wholesale. When she died, in 2001, Ash was worth $98 million.
And yet, Gavenas cites that at the company’s height, in 1992, sales reps made on average just $2,400 per year.
Instead of so much time in the pink fantasia of Mary Kay, it would have been nice for a few detours showing how infrequently the opportunities the company sold were truly realized.
SELLING OPPORTUNITY: The Story of Mary Kay | By Mary Lisa Gavenas | Viking | 435 pp. | $35
We often think of the past as if it were another world — and in some ways, it is. The politics, religion and social customs of other eras can be vastly different from our own. But one thing historians and historical fiction writers alike often notice is the constancy of human emotion. The righteous anger of a customer complaining about a Mesopotamian copper merchant in 1750 B.C. feels familiar. Tributes to beloved household pets from ancient Romans and Egyptians make us smile. And we are captivated by stories of love, betrayal and sacrifice from Homer to Shakespeare and beyond.
In literature, letters, tablets and even on coins, we find overwhelming evidence that people in the past felt the same emotions we do. Love, hate, fear, grief, joy: These feelings were as much a part of their lives as they are of our own. And they resonate especially acutely in the bond between mother and child. Here are eight historical novels that explore the meaning of motherhood across the centuries.
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