We started our national conversation on Monday by talking about which conference will be the best from top-to-bottom and now we shift gears to focus on a list that nobody wants to be a part of.

The college coaching profession has no shortage of highs and lows as one minute you can be hoisting a trophy from your biggest rivalry game or conference championship game to the next moment where you are out of work and looking for a new landing spot (and as a head coach, you generally have a healthy buy-out attached to that).

Every year before the season starts, we always seem to be fixated on the coaches who have to "win or else" and talk of the coaching carousel is a 365-day-a-year passion for so many.

Florida State, Ole Miss, Baylor, Boston College, Michigan State and Rutgers were just a few jobs that came open this offseason and have new coaches in place. There are more than a few programs that could have openings in 2021 if something does not turn around in a hurry. We make our picks for who we think is on the hottest of hot seats.

Kevin Noon: I won't rattle off a bunch of potential coaches who could be on this list outside of our early mention of Clay Helton at USC, not to take any thunder away from Griffin's pick that will be coming in a minute.

It just really feels as if there are a lot of coaches in the Pac-12 that are in a bad spot and honestly I don't feel that anyone is in a worse spot than Kevin Sumlin at Arizona. Sure, everyone is expecting Helton to get USC to where the Trojans were once at and that expectation may make things seem to be worse, but at least Helton seems to have found some recruiting success in having his team in the top-five of the national recruiting rankings according to Rivals.com.

At the time of writing this, Arizona was not even in the top-65 teams, meaning that the Wildcats were in the bottom half of all Division I-FBS teams. And to make matters worse, the Wildcats have not been able to keep much, if any, in-state talent home over the past couple of cycles.

Arizona State is nowhere to be found in terms of the top-10 players in the state of Arizona and with only one of the top-10 still uncommitted (and likely heading to Arizona State), it is a bad look for the Wildcats.

So what about on the field?

Arizona is 9-15 under Sumlin, 6-12 in a Pac-12 that is not exactly the most competitive Power Five league in college football.

While at Texas A&M, Sumlin was good for at least seven wins in all of his six seasons with the Aggies even though the bloom started to come off the rose with a 7-5 season in his final year (Sumlin left before the bowl game) and eventual move to the Pac-12.

Sumlin still has a solid overall record as a head coach with a 95-58 mark between Houston, TAMU and Arizona but going into year-three with no real success to speak of and all the talk of being a great recruiter with the "swagcopter" that he used to tout while recruiting for the Aggies... well, that has all come to a crash landing and barring some sort of major run in the Pac-12 South, 2020 really could be Sumlin's final year with the Wildcats.

Griffin Strom: If you're looking for a hot seat among high-profile head coaching jobs in college football, look no further than Austin, Texas, where former Ohio State offensive coordinator Tom Herman's perch may soon be pronged by a pair of proverbial longhorns if another year turns sour.

Long gone are the days of Vince Young, Colt McCoy and national title contention in Texas, where former head coach Mack Brown led a streak of nine straight with double-digit wins through the 2000s.

Herman's first year in Austin, a 7-6 season in 2017, was barely an improvement on the preceding Charlie Strong era, but the program took a big step forward in 2018. Herman and swashbuckling quarterback Sam Ehlinger defied expectations to go 10-4, and even entered the fourth quarter of the Big 12 Championship tied 27-all with Kyler Murray and the Sooners before an eventual loss.

A season-ending win against No. 6 Georgia in the Sugar Bowl parlayed the Longhorns into a preseason No. 10 ranking with Ehlinger back in 2019. One-score losses to LSU and Oklahoma were excusable midway through the year, but Texas then dropped to unranked TCU, unranked Iowa State and No. 13 Baylor in three out of four weeks –– a stretch that may end up being the beginning of the end for Herman if things don't turn around in 2020.

Recruiting hasn't been Herman's downfall, as his 2018 and '19 classes were each ranked No. 4 in the nation, but he'll need those groups to produce at a high level if he's to earn himself a few more years worth of leash in Austin.

Herman's results have been better than Strong's, but the outcome of the Longhorns' 2020 campaign could very well determined if he's given the ax in similarly short order.