For the first time in a while, no B1G coach should enter the year on the hot seat

A lot can happen in seven months.

Scandals can be discovered, athletic directors can leave and coaches can say or do things that they shouldn’t. It’s college football. It’s a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately business, and until 2017 kicks off, nothing is a guarantee.

But it’s looking like there’s not going to be a single B1G coach on the hot seat entering 2017.

Crazy, right? What will we talk about if we can’t call for a coach’s job a year in advance? Hot seat chatter is what makes the college football world go ’round, at least in August.

In B1G country, we’ve been blessed with that kind of preseason talk for a while. It’ll be weird NOT to have hot seat chatter entering a season.

The key to point out there is “entering” a season. That means no B1G coach should need to surpass his team’s preseason expectations to have a job in 2017. If Mike Riley wins five games at Nebraska, has another assistant get arrested and finally reaches his breaking point, yes, he could theoretically be gone.

You can make up any wild scenario and say that would result in the firing of coach X. But the reality is, no B1G coach should enter the year with his future up in the air.

It’s been a while since that happened.

To be clear, part of this is subjective. That’s the case with most hot seat talk. Unless an athletic director comes out and says, “Coach X will be gone unless we win eight games,” you don’t really know how hot that seat is.

If you search Coach X’s name with “hot seat” and a bunch of national articles come up, there’s usually at least some truth to that.

So with that in mind, let’s focus on the current decade of B1G coaches on the hot seat. I dug up every case of a B1G coach who entered the season with his job in jeopardy from the start of the 2010 season.

Here’s what I found:

2010 — Ron Zook (Illinois), Bill Lynch (Indiana), Mark Dantonio (Michigan State), Rich Rodriguez (Michigan), Tim Brewster (Minnesota)
2011 — Zook (lllinois)
2012 — Danny Hope (Purdue)
2013 — Kirk Ferentz (Iowa)
2014 — Bo Pelini (Nebraska), Brady Hoke (Michigan)
2015 — Randy Edsall (Maryland), Kyle Flood (Rutgers), Tim Beckman (Illinois), Kevin Wilson (Indiana), Ferentz (Iowa)
2016 — Darrell Hazell (Purdue), Tracy Claeys (Minnesota)

Of the 17 appearances on that list, 12 of those coaches were fired (Beckman was included because Illinois was less than a week away from its season opener). Borderline cases like James Franklin’s weren’t included among the hot seat candidates because his AD publicly declared his long-term job security after a 2-2 start.

Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and stick with the sure-fire hot-seat candidates.

That means that each of the last seven seasons, a B1G coach was fighting for his job entering the year. The last time the B1G was in this situation was 2009, when all was right with the conference.

Except it wasn’t.

If you’ll recall, the B1G went 1-6 in the 2008-09 bowl season. The likes of Brewster, Lynch, Rodriguez and Zook were all employed by their respective schools, but they were a year away from being on the hot seat. None of those teams started in the preseason top 25, either.

But while the B1G is once again coming off a lackluster bowl season, 2017 has a different feel to it with its current group of coaches.

Everyone talks about how good the top B1G coaches are. Urban Meyer, Jim Harbaugh, Mark Dantonio and now James Franklin make up the best top four coaches of any conference in America.

What’s new is the quality of coach for the marginal B1G teams. Illinois went out and landed Lovie Smith. Minnesota grabbed arguably the No. 2 available coach on the market in PJ Fleck. And though the jury is still out on DJ Durkin, Chris Ash and Jeff Brohm, all three feel more like young, nuance coaches than the typical middle-aged MAC coaches that take over programs like that.

What does this all mean? On the field, it might not mean anything. There’s no guarantee that stable coaches produce better overall play across the B1G. But if you saw how the short-leash approach impacted the SEC in 2016, one would argue how important stability at the head coaching position is.

The area that it should help the most with is recruiting. The B1G’s 2017 and 2018 classes should both see a nice uptick because as Fleck reminded us — more often than not — recruits commit to coaches, not schools. The last thing they want to happen is for the coach that recruited them to get fired right after they step on campus.

The B1G should have a relatively down year in that department. The conference might not even have to worry about coaches leaving for “better” jobs. Dantonio, Ferentz, Riley, Paul Chryst and Pat Fitzgerald certainly don’t fit that mold. And with that B1G TV money rolling in, it might not make sense for them to leave.

With a better bowl season, we would’ve been talking about this being the golden era of B1G coaches. It still could be.

The only question is how long it’ll last.