Coaching Hot Seat 2011: Rick Neuheisel and the Coaches Most Likely to Get Canned

It is never any fun to trash someone’s livelihood but after last night’s game against Arizona, UCLA head coach Rick Neuheisel will without a doubt lose his job.

Losing to a 1-5 team by 36 and having your team get into a bench-clearing brawl tends to do that.

But he isn’t the only coach on the hot seat. Mike Locksley, Mike Stoops and Bob Toledo were all fired midseason, and there may be more before the season ends. Here are five of those coaches.

Rick Neuheisel

As stated in the intro, there is next to no chance Neuheisel keeps his job for next season. In four seasons at UCLA, he is 18-25 in the Pac-12, even though he has some of the most fertile recruiting grounds in the country with the selling point of living in Los Angeles.

He brought in some of the top classes in the country during the first few years but, as demonstrated last night, he can’t coach them up.

Someone will pick him up whether it’s as head coach or a coordinator, but there’s just no way he will be at UCLA next season.

Houston Nutt

Ole Miss was a good football team when Nutt arrived four years ago, and they are no longer the bottom feeder of the SEC. Every season has seen the number of wins go down and he has become a notorious over-signer.

Fans cannot be happy that many of the biggest players on the team are transfers and that he was forced to suspend some of his other stars like Brandon Bolden last week.

In the ruthless SEC West, Mississippi can either make a change or become irrelevant. They’ll choose the former.

Neil Callaway

Most people don’t know the head coach at UAB, but those who do will have to learn a new name very soon. In five years at the school, Callaway is 15-39 and they are in Conference USA.

Their entire livelihood was Joe Webb at quarterback doing everything on offense, and even then they couldn’t make it to a bowl game.

With the Mountain West-Conference USA merger widening the chances to get a BCS bid, the Blazers will be getting a new coach.

Turner Gill

Gill is now in his second season at Kansas and he is 5-13, and continues to embarrass itself on defense which ranks dead last in the country in yards and points allowed per game with a whopping 565 yards and 49 points.

The offense isn’t terrible and Jordan Webb could mature into one of the better Big 12 quarterbacks, but obvious changes have to be made on defense. Co-defensive coordinators Vic Shealy and Buddy Wyatt are in their first year, so they’ll likely be given more time but Gill’s time is running out quickly.

If he isn’t fired at the end of this season, he will be next season if his team continues to have such poor records.