Cincinnati Was Named After a Man Who Refused to Stay in Power. Five Straight Coaches Did Not Get the Message.
The first four parts looked at the pro leagues. Each one hands its best young talent to its worst team. So a meaningless win late in a lost season costs the franchise a draft pick.
College football has no draft. No lottery. No way to move talent from the rich to the poor. So the same trap wears a different costume here.
What bigger programs take 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 came to Cincinnati in 2007 from Central Michigan. By his third season the Bearcats went 12–0.
It was the first unbeaten regular season the school ever had. They won a second straight Big East title and earned a Sugar Bowl bid against Florida.
They finished fourth in the BCS standings. They had a real case for the title game. They were, by every measure, the program the school had been building toward.
On December 10, 2009 — eight days before the Heisman ceremony, 22 days before the Sugar Bowl — Kelly took the Notre Dame job and resigned.
His offensive coordinator coached the Sugar Bowl. Florida won 51–24. The next season Cincinnati went 4–8. They would not reach another New Year’s Six bowl for a decade.
The cost of going 12–0 came due in the job market. Cincinnati looked good to a bigger employer at the exact moment its own coach became the most valuable thing in the building. The win produced the loss directly.
The 2021 Bearcats: A Decade Later, the Same Play
Luke Fickell was hired in December 2016 and did the same thing a decade later.
After a 4–8 first season he climbed steadily: 11 wins, 11 more, then a 9–1 pandemic year. In 2021 the Bearcats went 13–0 and became the first team outside the Power Five to make the College Football Playoff. Alabama beat them 27–6 in the Cotton Bowl.
On November 27, 2022 — three days before his team’s last regular-season game — Fickell took the Wisconsin job. Cincinnati went 3–9 the next year.
The math, the program and the press release all rhymed.
Why CFB’s Pyrrhic Victories Look Like Coaching Carousels
In the pro leagues, a late win costs you a draft slot. The worst record buys the best young player. So winning games you do not need costs you the next star.
College football has no such cost at the bottom. It has a different weakness at the top.
The best thing a good college program owns is not its next recruit. It is the coach who got him.
And that market moves fast. A top hire can be done in 72 hours. Contracts get broken, and the new employer pays the buyout. No draft sits in the way.
So a rising program, just by winning, tells the tier above it exactly which coach to buy.
| 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 Cincinnati useful here, rather than just sad, is the irony at the center of it.
Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus is remembered for one thing: he gave up power he had earned. Rome made him dictator in 458 BC to rescue a trapped army. Sixteen days later he won, resigned, and went back to his farm.
Livy made him the model of Roman virtue. After the Revolution, an officers’ club took his name, seeing George Washington the same way. The city took its name from that club.
And the football program in that city has spent two decades doing the exact opposite. Five coaches, five bigger offers, five departures.
The March Ahead
Cincinnati is the clearest case, not the only one.
Chris Petersen at Boise State is the compressed version. A small program climbed into the top ten, the coach left for Washington, and it was never quite the same.
Gary Patterson at TCU is the long version. He stayed two decades and the program outgrew its league, moving up each time success made the smaller home too small.
Lincoln Riley at Oklahoma is the modern one. A program at the very top. A coach who left for USC anyway. Years spent trying to get back what walked out the door.
The shape is everywhere, and the logic never changes. Winning makes a program attractive. Attractive programs lose what makes them attractive.
Part VI closes the series where it started. The 2011 Indianapolis Colts went 2–14 and took Andrew Luck first overall.
They had lost Peyton Manning to neck surgery. They did not really replace him. They took the season for what it was.
That is the case this whole series has been circling. The league where losing on purpose works most cleanly. The team that did it. And the prize they got 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.
A note on the data. Coaching tenures come from Cincinnati athletics records. The Sugar Bowl result is from the Allstate Sugar Bowl records: Florida 51, Cincinnati 24, January 1, 2010. Kelly’s resignation on December 10, 2009 and Fickell’s move on November 27, 2022 are documented in ESPN, AP and beat reporting from those dates. Cincinnatus’s dictatorship is from Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Book 3.
