UNDATED (AP) — Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh is The Associated Press college football coach of the year after leading the Wolverines to their first Big Ten title in 17 years and a berth in the College Football Playoff.
Harbaugh is the first Michigan coach to win the AP Coach of the Year Award, and the first from the Big Ten since Penn State’s Joe Paterno in 2005. He received 22 of 53 first-place votes and 103 points from a panel of AP Top 25 voters to finish ahead of Cincinnati’s Luke Fickell.
Also around college football:
— Virginia has hired longtime Clemson offensive coordinator Tony Elliott as their new head football coach. Elliott will replace Bronco Mendenhall, who stunned the school last week by announcing he is stepping down after Virginia’s bowl game.
— Duke is turning to Texas A&M defensive coordinator Mike Elko to turn around its program after a two-year slide and a winless ACC record. The move ends a nearly two-week process to hire the replacement for David Cutcliffe.
— Nevada has hired Oregon co-defensive coordinator Ken Wilson as the Wolf Pack’s new head coach. Wilson will take over the program after Jay Norvell accepted the head coaching job this week at Colorado State. Wilson served as an assistant at Nevada for 19 years, most recently as associate head coach in 2012.
— Former Cleveland Browns and Oakland Raiders head coach Hue Jackson is taking over as the coach of Grambling’s storied football program. Jackson spent this season as offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Tennessee State. He fills the vacancy created when Grambling fired eighth-year coach Broderick Fobbs last month.
— Iowa running back Tyler Goodson is leaving school early for the NFL draft, saying he won’t play in the Hawkeyes’ bowl game. Goodson led Iowa in rushing the last three seasons and had 1,151 yards this year.
— The fake slide Pittsburgh quarterback Kenny Pickett used to help clear his path for a long touchdown run in the ACC championship game is now against the rules, effective immediately. National coordinator of officials Steve Shaw has instructed officials to blow a play dead at the spot where a ball carrier fakes a slide to cause defenders to back off from making a tackle. Shaw said in an email to The Associated Press that there was concern quarterbacks might be rehearsing fake slides for use in postseason games.
— A study shows the racial gap in graduation rates for this year’s bowl teams in college football has shrunk. The study by from The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at Central Florida reported that the overall Graduation Success Rate for bowl-bound teams had increased to 81.3%, up from 78% for 2020. Yet the racial gap fell as the average GSR for Black athletes rose from 73.4% in 2020 to 78% this year while white athletes remained steady at 89.7%.
