Willie Taggart, several Pac-12 coaches named among worst coaching hires in past decade

Arizona tabbing Sumlin as head coach seemed fairly low risk at the time. He had a solid if completely average six years at Texas A&M, posting a winning record in each season. He was fired simply because he was never able to take the Aggies to that next level, as 8-4 became the standard. Given the Wildcats’ standing around this time, hiring Sumlin was a fairly positive move that generally received praise. So it is fairly shocking he drove the program into the ground. Over three years, Sumlin amassed a 9-20 record, with five of those wins coming in his first season at the helm.

Simply put, Lake was not ready to be a head coach. A Washington man through-and-through, he was hired as defensive backs coach in 2014 on Chris Petersen’s inaugural staff with the Huskies. Lake eventually ascended to co-defensive coordinator in 2016 and took on sole defensive play-calling responsibilities ahead of the 2018 season. When Petersen stepped down at the end of the 2019 season, Lake was hand-picked internally as his successor. Lake faced plenty of complications in 2020, as the entire season was muddled by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Huskies still found some success and won the Pac-12 North with a 3-1 record. But with lofty expectations and one of the Pac-12’s most talented rosters entering 2021, Washington fell flat on its face. The Huskies lost to Montana in the first game of the season and followed that up with a 21-point loss to Michigan a week later. He was suspended without pay in November after shoving a player during a loss to Oregon and was fired six days later.

Helton was named USC’s interim head coach in 2015 when the Trojans fired Steve Sarkisian after just five games. Helton led USC to a 5-4 record, which included an appearance in the Pac-12 Championship and a Holiday Bowl berth. That led to the university removing the interim tag. Helton got off to an excellent start, winning 21 games in his first two full seasons as head coach, including triumphs in the 2017 Rose Bowl and the 2017 Pac-12 Championship. The wheels fell off in 2018 when USC posted a 5-7 record. The program never seemed to fully recover from that, though it did well enough in 2019 and 2020, and Helton was fired just two games into the 2021 season. Morale was incredibly low following his firing and the Trojans were trending toward dangerous territory before pulling off an absolute coup and poaching Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley, who has completely changed perceptions for the positive.

Taggart had an interesting pedigree when Florida State brought him on. He spent just one season with Oregon beforehand, leading the Ducks to a 7-5 record. Prior to that, he coached at Western Kentucky (2010-12) and South Florida (2013-16) and had just a 40-45 record in his time with those two. He did build South Florida from a 2-10 team in 2013 to a 10-2 showing in his final year with the program, steadily building it up into a real competitor. He inherited a relatively talented Seminoles roster that was in stable condition after firing coach Jimbo Fisher but was promptly fired after winning just nine games in two seasons. Some seem to think that Florida State may have been too quick to move on, compounded by the fact that Taggart’s firing brought with it a near-$18 million buyout.