Which college football coaches are on the hot seat?

Stand back, please. This is the carousel of college football coaches, and it never, ever stops.

By Joe Raymond, AP

Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly is on the hot seat this season, according to columnist Mike Lopresti.

By Joe Raymond, AP

Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly is on the hot seat this season, according to columnist Mike Lopresti.

They come, they go. Sometimes, they come back again. More than one of every five FBS programs has a new head coach this season; 28 of 124 schools. That's a 22.6 turnover percentage, the highest in the sport in 25 years. It is an impatient world out there.

Most of the new hires were assistants last season, a few were head coaches somewhere else, five came from the television booth. All say they intend to stay awhile in their new gigs. Most won't.

Some things are forever changing in college football. Bowl sponsors, quarterbacks, Oregon uniforms. But one item never goes out of style.

Hot seats.

Here are 10 men who begin the season with various degrees of urgency, for various reasons.

•Derek Dooley, Tennessee. He's 11-14 in two years and went 1-7 in the SEC last season. He could plead extenuating circumstances because of injuries, but what fan base in the SEC listens much to that? Better to wax optimistically. "There's a nice mood on our team,'' he said in the preseason, "that you're not going to have Tennessee to kick around anymore.''

•Joker Phillips, Kentucky. Consider his plight. He's coaching at a basketball school in a football conference. The fans might be too distracted worrying about who the next Wildcat point guard will be to get that upset about Phillips' 11-14 record after two years. But he can't be losing 38-8 to Vanderbilt again.

•Mike Riley, Oregon State. The trouble is not only going 5-7 and 3-9 the past two years, it's location. Down the road, Chip Kelly and Oregon are on fire. Riley has had some nice years in Corvallis, but nobody struggles with short-term memory more than college football fans.

•Jeff Tedford, California. Nothing wrong with the 79-48 overall record, but the most recent numbers have not been comforting, nor has the muscle flexed across the bay by Stanford. A good start would be nice, but not easy. Not with September trips to Ohio State and USC.

•Mack Brown, Texas. He has a national championship and a bunch of victories, but the Longhorns went 5-7 two years ago, and the 8-5 record last season included poundings by Oklahoma and Baylor. Texas has a low pain tolerance for mediocrity. Brown accepts that challenge and speaks of a speedy return to the elite. "If you didn't think that,'' he said, "you shouldn't be at Texas.''

•Frank Spaziani, Boston College. The Eagles had trouble scoring last season - it's never a good sign when you manage one field goal at Central Florida - and missed a bowl game for the first time in 13 years with a 4-8 record. He wouldn't want anything close to a rerun.

•Randy Edsall, Maryland. The poster coach for how quickly fate can turn on a man. Just 20 months ago, he had Connecticut in the Fiesta Bowl and was a hot name. Then he went to Maryland and suffered through a 2-10 cataclysm. Now his name is not nearly as hot as his seat.

•Will Muschamp, Florida. Maybe he just needs time to reload the Gators, after a 7-6 first post-Urban Meyer season. But here's the problem. The SEC gives a coach lots of money, lots of attention and lots of talented players. What it doesn't give is lots of time.

•Brian Kelly, Notre Dame. The 16-10 record in two seasons was an OK appetizer, but now the Irish faithful are famished for the main course, when Notre Dame can once more sit at the big people's table in college football. Given the brutal schedule, that'll be a challenge for Kelly, who has promised a more hands-on coach.

"There was nothing wrong with our schemes. There was nothing wrong with what we were teaching them,'' he said of last season. "What was wrong was we weren't winning games that I thought we should, and so sometimes you've got to look at yourself.

"That means you've got to push the distractions away and focus on why you're here, and that is I want to coach my guys.''

The promise to do better.

That is the music that always plays, as the carousel goes round and round.

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