The Auburn Tigers, Georgia Bulldogs, Texas Longhorns, Vanderbilt Commodores, and LSU Tigers were all predicted to keep their head coaches by the year 2030. That was The Athletic's Ralph Russo's prediction, anyway.
Of course, Auburn and LSU just hired Alex Golesh and Lane Kiffin this past offseason, while Kirby Smart has been at UGA since 2016, Steve Sarkisian has been at Texas since 2021, and Clark Lea has been at Vanderbilt since 2021.
Does that mean these five teams will be the SEC's best over the next half decade? Well, not necessarily, though it's a safe bet that the big-spending Dawgs, Longhorns, and Bayou Bengals will be.
Alex Golesh will stay at Auburn if he goes about coaching the right way
When it comes to Auburn, Golesh doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. All he has to do is what Bryan Harsin and Hugh Freeze couldn't: keep control of his program and not let AU become a national punchline.
Because of the buyout money still owed to Harsin and Freeze, the former of which will subside soon but the latter of which will be disbursed over the next few years, there shouldn't, and probably won't, be a push to get Golesh out the door immediately. Even if he struggles.
If Auburn could show discipline and gut it out through an underwhelming season or two, Golesh could have a similar trajectory to Missouri Tigers head coach Eli Drinkwitz. Mizzou is a factor now, but it took some bumps in the road to get there in CoMo.
Whereas Harsin and Freeze seemed like guys trying to collect a paycheck and do the bare minimum -- Harsin on the recruiting trail and Freeze by the time his golf game became more important than game-planning on the gridiron -- Golesh looks like he's going to build this program up the right way.
After being burned by two men fueled by their own egos, AU now has a quiet family man who wants to win. Will that mean they'll win big right away? No. As long as the program is being cared for the right way, there's no need to picture yet another firing on the Plains before 2030.