What’s the soonest a coach has been fired in a college football season in the last decade?

Nebraska head coach Scott Frost entered Saturday’s Week 0 opener against Northwestern in Ireland as one of the biggest hot seat candidates heading into the 2022 college football season and will walk out with his seat on fire. The Cornhuskers gave up a pair of 11-point leads in a 31-28 loss and many have begun wondering if the Cornhusker brass will pull the plug and fire the prodigal son of the program before they even touch back down in the United States.

Over the last decade, we’ve seen programs axe their head coaches earlier and earlier in efforts to get a head start on finding their replacements. With factors like recruiting and the transfer portal being a high-stakes game, athletic directors can’t afford to wait around when things are going downhill.

Within the last decade, the earliest a head coach has been fired for non-scandal reasons is Clay Helton at USC in 2021. After losing to Stanford in Week 2, Helton was promptly fired on September 13 as the first in-season firing of the season. This could be attributed to the Trojan brass wanting to move on from Helton well before the 2021 season and finally got the chance to do so after an embarrassing loss to a rival. In fact, Helton was fired so early in the year that he was able to land the vacant Georgia Southern job before the end of the season.

We’ll see if Frost, or any other head coach, is shown the door before the calendar flips to October this year.