There are a few ways to calculate the Pac-12’s potential drop in prestige as a result of the league’s shortened 2020 season, which resulted in the conference’s absence from a fourth straight College Football Playoff. One of them is to parse through CBS Sports’ annual rankings of all power conference football coaches (plus Notre Dame) and see what impact the abbreviated campaign had on the stock of Pac-12 coaches.
Of the league’s 11 returning coaches, seven of them dropped in the 2021 overall ranking, and a couple of the drops are hard to explain. USC’s Clay Helton fell seven spots after a 5-1 season, and Stanford’s David Shaw dropped five spots after a 4-2 campaign that ended with four straight road victories.
So who are the top coaches in the Pac-12 these days? There was just one coaching change in the conference with Jedd Fisch taking over for Kevin Sumlin at Arizona, but there was plenty of movement within the league ranking. Here’s how our panel of college football writers from CBS Sports and 247Sports saw it this offseason.
Complete Power Five coach rankings: 1-25 | 26-65
2021 PAC-12 COACH RANKINGS
