The 2024 season will see the start of a new era in SEC football with the addition of the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners. In an offseason marked by significant coaching changes in college football, particularly in the SEC, it’s intriguing to speculate about which head coaches might move up to the top of the hierarchy for the upcoming season and beyond.
The 2024 SEC football head coach rankings are official.
The famed longstanding former Alabama Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban will be replaced, and the best SEC head coaches will be vying for that position. Earlier this offseason, after almost 20 years as Alabama’s head coach, Nick Saban announced his retirement. Kalen DeBoer, a former head coach of the Washington Huskies, took over as head coach.
In terms of head coach status, the SEC is among the college football’s strongest power conferences. In 2024, more than a dozen head coaches from the SEC might be ranked in the top 25 or 30 of the power conferences.
The inclusion of Oklahoma’s Brent Venables and Texas’ Steve Sarkisian introduces still another level of intricacy to the analysis of the SEC’s top head coach rankings and depth in 2024.
This is a list of all SEC head coaches as of the start of the 2024 college football season.
16. Vanderbilt’s Clark Lea
One could argue that the Vanderbilt Commodores head coach is the hardest in the Power Five conference in college football. In addition to facing the nation’s top collegiate programmes every Saturday in the fall, the head coach of Vanderbilt does not have the NIL funding necessary to compete with the other SEC schools.
At Vanderbilt, Clark Lea is in his fourth year as head coach. Since he assumed leadership at Vandy, Lea has encountered difficult circumstances. Two of his three years in Nashville have seen him have seasons with ten or more losses. Vandy’s defence, which gave up around 36 points per game the previous season, was among the weakest in the Power Five.
At Vanderbilt, defence was supposed to be Lea’s speciality, but thus far, throughout his time, it hasn’t materialised.
15. Mississippi State’s Jeff Lebby
This offseason, Jeff Lebby, the former offensive coordinator for Oklahoma, was hired by the Mississippi State Bulldogs as their next head coach. Lebby’s first experience leading a college team will come from this. Lebby travels from Oklahoma with his air raid offensive system in tow.
With Lebby calling plays, the Sooners were third in the country in total offence (507.0 yards per game) and fourth in points per game (41.7).
14. The South Carolinan Shane Beamer
Before the 2023 season began, head coach Shane Beamer of the South Carolina Gamecocks appeared to be on the rise. In 2022, South Carolina had a strong campaign, winning eight games and placing 23rd in the AP Poll.
However, South Carolina regressed in 2023, winning just five games as a result of a challenging schedule and accumulating injuries the previous year.
The question is whether Beamer and the Gamecocks, who lost more than half of their starting lineup from the previous season this offseason, can contend in 2024 with another difficult SEC schedule.
