Coaches With A Lot To Prove this NCAA Football Odds Season

Posted by Alex Murphy on Thursday,July 9, 2015 2:22, EDT in

Just like players, every year presents college football coaches with an opportunity to impress or perform well in the College Football betting season. When you are a first year coach, the pressure to do well goes a notch higher, with nearly everyone watching all your moves, as the management, players and fans put high hopes and expectations on you. For one reason or the other, the following first year coaches will be facing such a predicament in 2015.

Analyzing the Coaches With A Lot To Prove this NCAA Football Odds Season

Jim Harbaugh, Michigan

I bet you expected to see the former San Francisco 49ers head coach on this list, so we might as well get it over with by listing him here. Having proven himself with the Niners in the murky waters of the NFL (specifically in the top-heavy NFC West), helping Michigan to improve in the Big 10 should certainly be within the realms of great possibility. Even so, with barely much talent to work with in his first year, and the need to tailor his high-level coaching strategies to fit the not-so-broad scope of college football betting, Harbaugh will probably need more than a year to acclimatize to the new run-of-things in Ann Arbor.

Mike Riley, Nebraska

After his remarkable stint at Oregon State, Riley takes a step higher to head-coach Nebraska, a team that is very hungry for immediate success. For a man with a pedigree of winning at least 9 games in all his seven seasons in Lincoln (three of those being 10-win seasons), handling high expectations should not be a problem to him. Nevertheless, Riley’s coaching résumé doesn’t have a conference title, something the Cornhuskers (who are eyeing the Big Ten title) want so badly in 2015. To prove his worth, Riley will thus need to step up his game, especially considering the crazy nature of competition in the Big Ten, which includes the likes of Ohio State, Michigan State, Wisconsin and Harbaugh’s Michigan.

Jim McElwain, Florida

Looking at his career, it is safe to say that Jim McElwain’s new job as the head coach in Florida is the biggest and toughest job in his life as a coach. Serving successfully as the head coach in Colorado State was impressive. Also, being the offensive coordinator for the Tide (and leading them to a pair of national titles) was certainly commendable, but in getting the job with Gators, McElwain has a whole lot of expectations that come with unreal pressure. You doubt that, ask Will Muschamp why he was fired by the Gators at the end of the 2014 season. As a breather on his part, McElwain is a great offensive maestro, hence helping Florida’s offense should be within his comfort zone. But more than just improvements in the offense, the Gators will need to do better defensively. Besides leading the nation in forcing turnovers last season, the Gators struggled in other aspects like defending the run. Fortunately for McElwain, the SEC East is not that tough, so a couple of improvements on both sides of the ball will probably be enough to catapult them to relevancy in and title-contention in the division.