The Ohio State Buckeyes clearly were one of the best teams in the nation this year, and logical deduction suggests that they would have had a chance to play for the BCS National Championship this year had they not been banned from the postseason. They weren’t always the prettiest team in the world, but they did post an undefeated season, and in all likelihood, they’ll be the only team left in major college football after the bowl games to be unblemished.
However, with all of that comes a tough task for Head Coach Urban Meyer. Keeping his coaching staff together has been, and will continue to be tough as the weeks go by and the coaching carousel continues to turn.
At this point, we would make our college football picks on the fact that Luke Fickell will get his name called a few times for some of the job openings across the country. Fickell was the interim coach of the Buckeyes in 2011, and he did a solid job with the club, leading it to a respectable 6-6 record and a loss in the Gator Bowl to the Florida Gators.
Fickell played at Ohio State and has coached there since 2002, but the time is coming that he might want to move on. We already know that there are several coaching vacancies, and a newly opened job such as the one at Louisiana Tech or Arkansas State might be intriguing to Fickell. With a defensive mindset and a team that has always been ranked highly in just about every defensive category, it’s a wonder why we haven’t heard Fickell’s name bantered about more for some of the job openings across the country.
However, what will happen with this trickledown effect, is that some of the smaller schools are going to lose their coaches to the big boys that fired their coaches this year. That’s when the small schools will take their chances on someone like Fickell.
As much as Meyer would love to keep his staff together, it’s not something that is a given by any stretch of the imagination, especially with Fickell.
