Hello, friends. I wrote some form of SEC Power Rankings across various now-defunct websites for the last 15 or so seasons, but last year’s expansion to 16 teams felt like a breaking point for me. This new format – rather than ranking teams into a nice, tidy list – will split the schools into four sections of varying size and quality. Sometimes that will be actual team ability, most of the time it will be something adjacent. This week, we’re talking about reunions.

We finally have our first official SEC head coach opening since Nick Saban retired, with Arkansas and Sam Pittman “mutually” agreeing to part ways. Because nothing in this conference can be devoid of mess, the interim in Fayetteville who will take the reins on Saturday will be, you guessed it, Bobby Petrino.

Getting back together with an ex is generally a bad idea, especially when the previous breakup came about because of an incident involving a motorcycle and an intra-office affair, but Petrino has essentially been given seven games to audition for the permanent job. It would take an unlikely turnaround for the conference’s most disappointing team so far to make that a reality, but that there’s even a chance speaks to the oddness of the situation. That Petrino did the exact same thing at Louisville a few years ago, and it super did not work out despite having Lamar Jackson, makes the possibility even stranger.

In the modern era of college football, no SEC team has had a head coach return for a second tenure of any notable duration (you find certain one-off events like when Bob Stoops coached a bowl game in 2021, things of that nature). You will, however, find plenty of examples of assistants and former players who returned with ahem mixed results.

So let’s talk about some reunions and how well they worked. As always, these quads aren’t ordered as actual Power Rankings, but rather how well each team fits into the Jigsaw game we’ve created with the tiers.

Four coaches of equal historical importance.

The standard of the category. Literally invented “Mama called” for generations of coaches who needed to explain away a return home (and a massive pay raise) when changing jobs.

Won the Heisman as a quarterback, then won Florida’s first national title as head coach. A storybook career that’s every major school has tried to recreate at some point or another, and that’s before we get to his litany of brilliant insults lobbed at conference rivals.

The only mitigating factor in this ranking is Spurrier’s return from the NFL in 2004, when he wound up at South Carolina instead of back in Gainesville. Reportedly, Florida AD Jeremy Foley asked for Spurrier’s resume when he expressed interest in the open job, at which point the HBC told Foley to “go look in the school trophy case,” which kind of proves the tier placement for us.

Underratedly, Georgia has only had five head coaches since JFK was president. It went by with little fanfare, but it would be tough to argue that Kirby hasn’t already surpassed Vince Dooley as the best of the bunch. He had a pretty good playing career in Athens, and quickly became one of Nick Saban’s topp assistants, which led to a roughly ten year period of Georgia fans wanting him to take the head job once Mark Richt “retired”. As you’ll see in later tiers, these types of hirings almost never work out this well.

Look, this isn’t even a poor man’s version of the paragraph above, it’s a man with no concept of money or possessions’ idea of it. Lea, who barely played as a fullback for two 2-10 teams under Bobby Johnson, currently sports a 21-34 record as head coach on West End.

And yet, if this season finishes the way it’s already tracking, I’m going to be pretty adamant that his tenure has already surpassed James Franklin’s by making the Commodores relevant in a way the school hasn’t been since before the Great Depression.

Oops.

Fulmer should have been in the tier above, and up until former UT AD John Currie infuriated the Volunteer fanbase by attempting to hire Greg Schiano he certainly was right there. It takes a lot for college football to reach the radar of the New York Post, but Fulmer’s role in upending the power balance of the Tennessee Athletid Department in 2017 did just that.

Funnily enough, this wasn’t even the first time Fulmer’s name was associated with the coup term in Knoxville, with plenty of stories that his ascension to the head job came through less-than-tidy means and led to a lifelong grudge from Johnny Majors.

Return of the prodigal son, to varying results.

Literally hired as a human alumni shield in the wake of the Hugh Freeze firing, Luke actually performed pretty admirably despite NCAA sanctions and a depleted roster. The current Ole Miss boom period likely never happens without his stabilizing presence, but we also can’t heap too too much praise on coaches with a losing record at their alma mater (unless they’re Clark Lea, obviously).

Hand up, I still don’t understand why this hire didn’t work. Odom, one of the most respected defensive players in Tiger history, took over after a massively successful Gary Pinkel run that saw Missouri win the SEC East two years running and he just faceplanted. A sanction-lagued 4-8 campaign gave way to three basically .500 seasons amd that was it.

Odom has since found plenty of success as a DC at Arkansas, then as a head coach at UNLV before taking the Purdue job this offseason, and Mizzou has become a pretty solid program under Eli Drinkwitz, which makes this messy marriage even more perplexing.

Sulmin served as Assistant Head Coach for the Aggies under the legendary R.C. Slocum before dialing in his Air Raid bonafides at Oklahoma and Houston. In 2012, he took the head job in College Station where he unleashed Johnny Manziel on the SEC en route to an 11-2 record and endless possibilities. His Aggie teams were never truly bad after that, but he struggled to find a footing and reportedly had a tough time managing the politics of Texas high school recruiting – leading to infamously bad decisions like benching Kyler Murray for Kyle Allen.

Remember this? There was no way the Tom herman hire wasn’t going to work out for the Longhorns. Then, it didn’t. College football is weird sometimes like that.

#ComePlayWRForTheJoker

Holtz actually did a lot to bring the Gamecocks into the modern era of college football (and promptly saddled the program with NCAA sanctions before retiring again), but that might say more about the history of the program than him.

A truly mixed bag.

It’s a pretty tough look when the guy who was a Heisman runner-up, and coached the offense and quarterbacks during an incredibly successful run for the program, is let go with hard enough feelings that he essentially removes himself from the conversation as a potential candidate for an upcoming head coaching search.

Brent Venables has the Sooners on a bright enough path this season that it likely doesn’t matter, but it would have been really interesting to see if Heupel would have really turned the Sooners down this offseason.

Not many coaches have two separate tenures running a defense at a school like Mississippi State and can claim with a straight face that they were both successful. Diaz has had one of the truly most fascinating careers in college football, bounding between a well-respected defensive mind and also someone who had his job at Miami hired out from under him while he was still out on the recruiting trail.

I’m a pretty staunch defender that Bobo’s first tenure as OC in Athens was a remarkably good one – Aaron Murray set plenty of SEC records while he called plays – and he has a pretty decent career under center for the Bulldogs, but the results since returning under former teammate Kirby Smart have certainly been up and down.

Bobo has been such a lightning rod for the Georgia fanbase that including Georgia in this list twice felt almost necessary. Anytime a playcaller is well-known enough to inspire a phrase that so concisely expresses intergenerational frustration and videos like this, you’re going to have to do something special to change minds. Give this one an incomplete so far, but it’s not looking like that’ll be the case this year for Bobo and the Bulldogs.

Somehow the least entertaining of all Coach Boom’s stops, his return to Auburn did give us this wonderful lasting memory.

It’s hard to sum up just how wild the single season of Gus Malzahn’s tenure as OC at his alma mater truly was. The Shutdown Fullcast NIL Collective($) did a wonderful episode on the tragic history of Arkansas football that goes into great detail about the perfect marriage that wasn’t, and this AL.com story gets into a lot of the feelings around the fallout. This very much should’ve been one of the coolest stories in college football during a huge shift in how the game was played at major schools, and it just didn’t happen.

First tenure: Maybe the best DC in the sport, never finished worse than third in total defense despite brutal schedules, won a national title and earned a high-profile head coaching job.

Second tenure: Defense couldn’t defend counter runs, got Ed Orgeron fired just 16 games after he put together the best team in college football history.