Cincinnati Was Named After a Man Who Refused to Stay in Power. Five Straight Coaches Did Not Get the Message.
The Pyrrhic Victory March has spent its first four entries on a structural feature shared by the National Football League, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball: each of those leagues hands its best young talent to its worst team, and in each league a meaningless win late in a lost season costs the franchise something it could not have lost any other way. College football has no draft. It has no anti-tanking lottery. It has no central mechanism for redistributing talent from haves to have-nots. The Pyrrhic-victory shape, accordingly, has to wear a different costume. In the college game it does, and the costume is a labor-market problem rather than a draft-order problem. The thing that bigger programs poach from smaller ones is not the next number-one pick. It is the head coach.
The 2009 Bearcats: The Win That Cost Them Brian Kelly
Brian Kelly arrived at Cincinnati in 2007 from Central Michigan. By the end of his third season, in 2009, the Bearcats had gone 12–0 in the regular season — the first undefeated mark in school history — won their second consecutive Big East title, and accepted a bid to the Allstate Sugar Bowl against the University of Florida. They had played their way into the BCS conversation, finished fourth in the BCS standings, and were a credible argument for inclusion in the national championship game. They were, by every available measure, the program their administration had been building toward.
On December 10, 2009 — eight days before the Heisman ceremony, twenty-two days before the Sugar Bowl — Kelly accepted the head coaching position at the University of Notre Dame and resigned from Cincinnati. Offensive coordinator Jeff Quinn coached the Bearcats in the Sugar Bowl on January 1, 2010. They lost to Florida 51–24. The next season, with Butch Jones inherited from Central Michigan to replace Kelly, Cincinnati finished 4–8. The program would not return to a New Year’s Six bowl until Luke Fickell took them there in 2020 — a decade later. The cost of the 12–0 was paid in the labor market. Cincinnati became attractive to a bigger employer at the exact moment its own coach became the most valuable asset in the building. The win produced the loss directly.
The 2021 Bearcats: A Decade Later, the Same Play
Luke Fickell, hired in December 2016 after eight years as Ohio State’s defensive coordinator and interim head coach, did at Cincinnati exactly what Kelly had done a decade earlier. After a 4–8 rebuilding first season in 2017, his program ascended steadily — 11 wins in 2018, 11 in 2019, a 9–1 pandemic-shortened 2020 with a Peach Bowl appearance, and a 13–0 regular season in 2021 that produced the first College Football Playoff appearance by a non-Power-Five program. The Bearcats lost the Cotton Bowl semifinal to Alabama 27–6. After a 9–4 follow-up in 2022, Fickell accepted the head coaching position at the University of Wisconsin on November 27, 2022, three days before his Bearcats played their final game of the regular season. Cincinnati went 3–9 the following year. The math, the program, and the press release all rhymed.
Why CFB’s Pyrrhic Victories Look Like Coaching Carousels
The structural argument the first four parts of this series have built is that the cost of a meaningful win in a lost season is set by how the league redistributes talent at the bottom of the standings. In the NFL, the worst record guarantees the best young player at his position. In the NHL, NBA, and MLB, the worst record produces a probabilistic claim on the best young player, with a draft lottery interposed. The cost of winning, in each case, is the slot that produces the next franchise piece. College football, lacking a draft entirely, produces no such cost at the bottom. What it produces instead is a different kind of vulnerability at the top. The most valuable asset of a successful college program is not its next recruit; it is the coach who recruited him. The labor market for college coaches is extraordinarily liquid — a top-tier hire can be completed in seventy-two hours, contracts are routinely broken with buyouts that the new employer absorbs, and no equivalent of the draft sits in the way to make the transaction harder. The mid-major or rising program that succeeds, by succeeding, signals to the next-tier program above it that the coach is the asset to acquire. Cincinnati is not the only example. It is the case where the pattern repeats most visibly within a single program.
| Coach | Cincinnati Tenure | Best Cincinnati Season | Next Job |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mark Dantonio | 2004–2006 | 8–5 (2006) | Michigan State (2007–2019) |
| Brian Kelly | 2007–2009 | 12–0 (2009 regular) | Notre Dame (2010–2021); LSU (2022–) |
| Butch Jones | 2010–2012 | 10–3 (2011, 2012) | Tennessee (2013–2017) |
| Tommy Tuberville | 2013–2016 | 9–4 (2014) | U.S. Senate (2021–) |
| Luke Fickell | 2017–2022 | 13–0 (2021 regular) | Wisconsin (2023–) |
The Cincinnatus Inversion
What makes the Cincinnati case useful for the series rather than merely sad for its fans is the historical inversion at its center. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus is, in Roman political memory, the man who is celebrated precisely because he gave up the power he had earned. Livy presents him as the moral foundation of republican virtue: the dictator who serves out his term and returns to the plow. The American city named for him — the city that called itself, in its early decades, the “Queen of the West” partly in homage to the Society’s republican ideals — built a football program over the past two decades whose every head coach has done the opposite of Cincinnatus. Each of them, having won at Cincinnati, took the offer that the winning produced. The fault is not in any individual coach’s choice. Each one acted exactly as a labor-market participant should act in his own interest. The fault is in the structural mismatch: a program named after the man who refused to leave keeps hiring men whom winning makes impossible to keep.
The March Ahead
Cincinnati is the cleanest version of the CFB-Pyrrhic shape, but it is not the only one. Chris Petersen’s Boise State (2006–2013) is the same story compressed: a non-Power Five program ascended into the top ten, the coach left for Washington, the program was never quite the same. Gary Patterson’s TCU (2000–2021) is the long-form version: the coach stayed for two decades and the program eventually outgrew its conference, jumping from the Mountain West to the Big East to the Big 12, each jump a structural acknowledgment that success had made the smaller home unsustainable. Lincoln Riley’s Oklahoma (2017–2021) is the modern variant: a program at the very top, a coach who left voluntarily for USC, and a program that has spent the years since trying to recapture the level it lost in transit. The shape is everywhere in college football, and it follows the same logic. Winning makes a program attractive. Attractive programs lose what makes them attractive.
Part VI, the capstone of this series, returns to where it began. The 2011 Indianapolis Colts went 2–14 and selected Andrew Luck with the first overall pick of the 2012 NFL Draft. They had lost Peyton Manning to a neck surgery before the season, did not replace him meaningfully, and accepted the season for what the standings said it had to be. The Colts’ 2011 is the case the rest of the series has been circling: the league in which losing on purpose works most cleanly, the franchise that did it, and the prize they received for refusing to chase wins they were never going to convert. When the system rewards losing, sometimes losing is the right play. The Colts proved it. The capstone closes the argument.
A note on the data: Cincinnati head-coaching tenures and post-Cincinnati positions are from school athletic department records and Wikipedia’s Cincinnati Bearcats football coaching history; the 2009 Sugar Bowl result is from the Allstate Sugar Bowl official records (Cincinnati 24, Florida 51, January 1, 2010); Brian Kelly’s December 10, 2009 resignation for the Notre Dame position and Luke Fickell’s November 27, 2022 acceptance of the Wisconsin position are documented in the standard ESPN, AP, and beat-writer reporting from those dates. Cincinnatus’s 458 BC dictatorship is from Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Book 3, Chapters 26–29.
