Watchlords

An easy way to be wrong is to insist that something has never happened before in the century-and-a-half history of college football, a sport with hundreds of teams and almost no centralization that would let you check everything. But I have spent some time thinking about it, and I’ve talked it through with plenty of peers who have followed and covered the sport for a long time, and I am pretty sure this is the correct view of Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley leaving to take over USC: Nothing like this hire has ever happened in the history of college football.

By which I mean: No head coach has ever left a job like Riley’s at Oklahoma to be in charge of another college program. Of course, coaches leave jobs all the time for a range of reasons. Usually, it’s because they get fired. But sometimes they are hired upward—a Power Five conference coach taking an NFL gig, another coach from a less rich conference moving up to replace him, an assistant becoming a head coach, and on and on. From time to time, a coach leaves a prestigious national brand for another one, but in those cases, there’s usually a catch about why.

https://slate.com/culture/2021/11/linco ... uster.html