Minds were blown across the college sports landscape Tuesday when Louisiana Tech announced Tyler Summitt as its new women's basketball coach. Summitt is the son of ultra-legendary Tennessee women's coach Pat Summitt. He is 23 years old.
We're sure Summitt will do a great job. He served as an assistant at Marquette for two years, worked under Cuonzo Martin and Bruce Pearl with the Volunteers' men's team while a student at Tennessee, and, obviously, learned the game under one of the best coaches in the history of women's basketball.
Still, 23 is just unfathomably young.
It got us wondering, what's the youngest possible age one could obtain an FBS head coaching job? Is there a set of circumstances that would lead a school to hire a coach in his mid-20's?
We think so. Granted, we'll have to take several broad jumps from reality, but we'll get there.
Andrew Luck is 24 years old. He won't turn 25 until September 12. Let's say Luck suffers a horrific shoulder injury in off-season workouts (trust us, we're knocking an entire national forest's worth of wood here), something not even Dr. James Andrews can fix. His career instantly and tragically finished, Luck decides he wants to get into coaching to stay in the game of football. He decides to return to his alma mater, where Stanford magically has an opening for a quarterbacks coach.
Already a half-decade ahead on the coaching ladder, Luck wows everyone in Palo Alto at how quickly he adapts to coaching. Players believe in him, recruits flock to him, and his fellow coaches trust him. Shaw believes in Luck so completely that, by 2015, Luck takes over Shaw's share of play calling and the Stanford offense immediately improves.
After Stanford wins the 2015 College Football Playoff, the New England Patriots make David Shaw an offer he simply can't refuse. After a combination of Cardinal assistants following Shaw to the NFL, taking promotions elsewhere in college football and other FBS head coaches receiving golden handcuffs tying them to their current jobs, momentum begins to build to name Luck as head coach. Kirk Herbstreit appears on SportsCenter touting Luck's candidacy . Stanford students and alumni demand to keep the job in the family.
And on January 18, 2016, four months past his 26th birthday, Andrew Luck is named the head coach at Leland Stanford Junior University. "We know he's young, but we also know this is the guy to lead Stanford football to the future," athletics director Bernard Muir says. "He's got the leadership ability and the best football mind I've ever seen."
Admittedly, it's fantasy. But that's the most realistic scenario we could see that would allow the youngest possible candidate an head job in FBS.
Anybody got anything better?