When will the seats heat up for the Big Ten’s newest football coaches?

This Saturday, Curt Cignetti and Indiana will face Kyle Whittingham’s Michigan in the first year of what Wolverine fans hope will be a fruitful tenure for their new head coach.

By retaining Bryce Underwood, who’s now been benched, and bringing along a host of players with him, expectations were high entering the season in Ann Arbor. Michigan came in at No. 16 in the AP preseason top 25 before immediately falling out of the rankings after what should have been a loss to Western Michigan.

Whittingham wasn’t the only new Big Ten coach coming into 2026 with high expectations though. Just two spots below Michigan in that preseason poll was Penn State, a team that now sits at 3-4 after Matt Campbell’s group has lost four straight and remains winless in Big Ten play.

At this point, people around the sport have begun to accept what a unicorn Curt Cignetti was. While Indiana’s rapid ascent has probably cost some coaches their jobs, ADs and fanbases alike seemingly have come to accept that their rebuild won’t be as fast as Indiana’s.

At the same time, there seems to be a growing awareness among college administrators that winning football games can be extremely profitable for universities, forcing some schools to take risks to move themselves out of the sport’s middle tier. Mike Locksley being fired mid-October is not the kind of thing that would have happened before the portal, NIL, and Cignetti.

So what will Campbell and Whittingham need to do in the immediate future to avoid a similar fate?

Penn State currently has no ranked opponents left on the schedule, meaning Campbell will need to start winning sooner than later to avoid an even more uncomfortable offseason. Washington and/or Minnesota would be good wins for them as things stand, but below what the AP voters expected for this group coming into the year.

Sitting at a relatively respectable 4-2, Whittingham could lose to Indiana and still have possibly multiple shots at a signature win with both UCLA and Ohio State on the schedule. Winning The Game will always buy a Michigan coach good will with the fanbase, so having that built in as the last game of the regular season is a good escape hatch for Whittingham should things get ugly before then. We’ve seen weirder things happen before there.

Speaking of UCLA, at 6-0 with a former James Madison man at the helm, the Bruins are the closest thing to the ‘next Indiana’ that we might see in the sport. Their path to landing Bob Chesney might also give us an idea of how short the leash is for Whittingham and Campbell.

After Chip Kelly left, UCLA hired one of his assistants, DeShaun Foster, signing him to a five year deal worth $3 million per season. His first season got off to a bad start, but he got the team to rally and win four of their last six to finish 5-7 in 2024.

Foster was given a chance to improve on year one, but not much of one. He started 0-3 in 2025 and was promptly relieved of his duties before getting halfway through September.

Now that Indiana and UCLA have been able to jumpstart their programs, how long will Penn State and Michigan – two teams with much more storied histories – allow their programs to stall out? Probably not too long.

There’s always a bit of guesswork involved in the preseason AP Poll, but the fact that Penn State, Michigan, and LSU, to name a few, were ranked in their first year with new coaches speaks to the reality of how quickly programs can turn things around.

Between the transfer portal and the ability to pay for top talent out of the high school ranks, both coaches should be able to fill guys that fit their scheme and can perform at the highest level. As Cignetti has demonstrated, one transfer class has the potential to change the culture of even the losingest programs.

With the resources and tradition that the two programs have, there’s really no reason outside of coaching that either team would still be underachieving, say three years from now. If that’s the case for either program, I’d expect a coaching search to start up.

It might not be completely fair, as there are things that can go wrong beyond their control, but that’s the reality of college football coaching in 2026.