Paul Finebaum insists that one historic college football program 'ran off a good coach'

SEC Nation person Paul Finebaum | Maria Lysaker-Imagn Images

The 2025 college football season nearly went a few weeks without a head coach being fired. But on Sunday, following the Week 13 slate of regular season games, California pulled the plug on head coach Justin Wilcox. With so many coaches now being replaced, ESPN personality Paul Finebaum revealed that there's one program that he believes fired a pretty good coach.

Finebaum joined SportsCenter host Matt Barrie on the Matt Barrie Show Sunday morning to recap a weekend full of games plus discuss the whirlwind of news around Ole Miss head coach Lane Kiffin. As the men went back and forth over the open LSU and Florida jobs that are pursuing Kiffin, Paul Finebaum made sure to point out that he believes Florida, not LSU, is actually the wiser choice of job for a guy like Kiffin, in his estimation.

"Now, the conventional wisdom as of Sunday morning is LSU," Finebaum said, speaking on a preference between the Tigers and Gators. "I will disagree. I think Florida right now is riper because the fact that Florida looked so bad last night, to me, makes that job a little bit easier than LSU, who who ran out a pretty good coach."

Interesting... so, Paul Finebaum believes, after all, that Brian Kelly is a pretty solid football coach, but LSU still ran him out. That may be true — while Kelly obviously has a track record of success, and won plenty of games in Baton Rouge, he wasn't excelling at the requisite level to keep the Bayou's hungry fans satisfied. Florida's recently dismissed coach, on the other hand, wasn't getting the job done at all.

Tigers Head Coach Brian Kelly, LSU | SCOTT CLAUSE / USATODAY Network / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

"I don’t think Billy Napier — he may be a good coach somewhere, but he wasn’t a good coach at Florida," Finebaum noted. "I mean, Kelly was good, maybe not great, but LSU had everything on its shelf this year to win a title and they just couldn’t get it done. So, I would gravitate toward Florida a little bit."

Essentially, Finebaum paints that LSU fired Brian Kelly for winning quite a few more games than Billy Napier ever did. Plus, he's not sure there's much of a talent gap between the two programs, if one at all, based on how both clubs disappointed expectations in 2025.

"I would argue, too, I don’t know that LSU was as roster-stacked as people thought as the season went on," added Finebaum. "I know they spent some money, the offense never really took off under Garrett Nussmeier. There was never really a running game, and so, I know a lot of people thought that about LSU."

Both schools are in the thick of the mud in terms of a coaching search, dancing side by side in glass rooms in the red light district in Amsterdam vying for the attention of a man wearing the Ole Miss Rebels visor.