Bedlam football: New coaches await

Twenty-three major-college football programs changed coaches since last season. None are in the Big 12, or at least won’t be in 2011. Colorado fired Dan Hawkins and hired Jon Embree, but Embree is now the Pac-10′s problem.

And yet, both the Sooners and Cowboys will face two new head coaches each.

Both teams play Tulsa, where Bill Blankenship takes over from Todd Graham, who went to Pitt. OU also plays Ball State, where Pete Lembo replaces the fired Stan Parrish. OSU also plays Louisiana-Lafayette, where Mark Hudspeth replaces the fired Ricky Bustle.

West Virginia Athletic Director Oliver Luck, left, and head football coach Dana Holgorsen, right, wait for the start of a press conference to announce the resignation of Bill Stewart and the appointment of Holgorsen as head coach in Morgantown, W.Va. on Friday, June 10, 2011. (AP Photo/David Smith)

It’s too bad Parrish got fired at Ball State. He went 6-19 in two seasons, so it’s not surprising. But Parrish is a coaching lifer. He was head coach at Kansas State 1986-88. He was KSU’s coach just before Bill Snyder; Parrish went 2-30-1 in three years at K-State and lost to OU 56-10, 59-10 and 70-24.

It’s rare for a league to make no coaching changes — and the Big 12 wouldn’t be on the list had Colorado not jumped league.

The last two years, the Big East has taken coaching changes to an extreme. This season, Dana Holgorsen has replaced Bill Stewart at West Virginia; Graham has replaced Dave Wannstedt at Pitt, unless you count Michael Haywood, who held the job for two weeks before a domestic abuse allegation cost him his new job; and Paul Pasqualoni has replaced Randy Edsall at Connecticut. The Big East also had three coaching changes a year ago (Skip Holtz in at South Florida, Butch Jones in at Cincinnati and Charlie Strong in at Louisville). That makes Syracuse’s Doug Marrone, with two years on the job, the No. 2-ranking Big East coach, behind only Rutgers’ Greg Schiano.