Which college football head coach is in the most early dire trouble in 2024?

Being the head coach of a major college football program may seem like a glamorous job, but it's not without its pitfalls either. Even coaches of smaller or FCS programs face a lot of scrutiny, but when you are leading one of the traditional national powers it becomes even more troublesome.

With Week 2 of the 2024 season approaching, we already see some coaches who have landed on the hot seat list, but of that group, there are a few whose circumstances are even more dire with only a fraction of the season having been played.

You'll probably hear some rattlings about wanting to replace Deion Sanders, Pat Narduzzi, Brent Pry., or even Brian Kelly. But for now, those coaches are relatively safe and still have time to right the ship and save their paychecks.

However, these next coaches should probably polish their resumes, scan the real estate sections, and prepare for holiday dinners at home or in the broadcast booth.

You can comfortably add Dabo to this list not because the Tigers lost a Week 1 contest to Georgia (as most teams do) but because of how and why Clemson lost that game.

Swinney's refusal to embrace the new reality of college football -- namely the transfer portal and NIL money -- has cost his program valuable recruits, as well as potential players that could have filled needs via the portal.

Swinney's quote, “Most of the guys in the portal aren’t good enough to play for us” is coming back to haunt him in a big way.

After watching the Tigers' massive struggles on offense against an admittedly stacked Georgia defense, many fans expressed frustration with Swinney's stubbornness, pontificating that Clemson's offense could have-should have been just as stacked had they utilized the transfer portal.

Things are bad at Clemson, and if the struggles continue it wouldn't be surprising to hear one of those "mutually agreed to part ways" statements coming from the Clemson administrators during the season, or to even see Dabo pull a Steve Spurrier and decide to just hang it up before Thanksgiving.

After spending the better part of the offseason continuing to gripe about being left out of last year's College Football Playoff, things went from bad to worse in less than two weeks for Mike Norvell and the Seminoles.

Norvell's team is now 0-2 on the season after dropping games to Georgia Tech in Dublin, Ireland and Boston College at home in Doak Campbell Stadium. It's beginning to look more and more like the team that Georgia demolished 63-3 in the Orange Bowl actually is the team that FSU is sending on the field this year.

Mike Norvell had a rough start to his tenure at FSU, and it took him a few seasons to regroup and win back the locker room. After an undefeated regular season and ACC Championship in 2023 it seemed like mission accomplished.

But now it's beginning to look like Norvell was the beneficiary of a generational quarterback -- Jordan Travis -- and the issues that plagued the Seminoles prior to Travis stepping in as the starting quarterback have not been solved, but were merely masked.

FSU is now all but out of the playoff conversation. Nothing short of an ACC title will get them back in it, and if things aren't turned around in the next few weeks Norvell will not survive the winter in Tallahassee. The one thing that could be his saving grace is his massive buyout amount.

Florida head coach Billy Napier was already at the top of the hot seat list before the season even began, and a 41-17 Week 1 bludgeoning by rival Miami just made matters worse.

Florida not only didn't look like they had improved from a horrid 5-7 season, they looked like they had actually gotten worse. In every facet of the game, the Gators looked inept and poorly coached.

Unlike other coaches on this list, the performance of his team doesn't point to a lack of talent. Napier has actually done a decent job recruiting and using the portal. However, putting those pieces together as a cohesive unit on the field has been another story.

To compound the issues of poor play, Napier has another problem nipping at his heels. There was a uniform auction that was supposed to benefit the Gators NIL collective that is now becoming an item of financial scrutiny.

There may be no coach in the nation who is more likely to be fired sooner rather than later than Billy Napier. The gap between the haves and have-nots in the SEC is continuing the grow, and Florida isn't used to being in the latter.