The nature of the coaching carousel in college football often results in coaches taking jobs at multiple schools in the same conference during their careers. And while that can be slightly awkward, it’s now engrained in the culture of college football and is virtually unavoidable unless you’re a member of the fraternity of elite coaches who has no desire to leave his current job.

As for the other 99 percent of coaches in college football, landing at two schools in the same conference is almost unavoidable. Will Muschamp was a coordinator at two SEC schools (LSU and Auburn) before taking on the head coaching duties at a third SEC school (Florida), only to return to his former school as a coordinator this offseason.

David Cutcliffe was a longtime assistant to Phillip Fulmer at Tennessee who took over as head coach at Ole Miss in the late-90s and early-2000s, only to return to Tennessee as a coordinator before moving on to Duke.

Ed Orgeron is another former Ole Miss head coach who now serves as the defensive line coach at LSU. Lane Kiffin coached the Vols for a season and now serves as offensive coordinator at Alabama, one of Tennessee’s biggest football rivals.

The examples are numerous. But all those examples feature a coach who was an assistant at one school but a head man at another. The logic makes sense. Take Cutcliffe for example: he landed on Ole Miss’ radar due to how often the Rebels faced the Vols and were exposed to Cutcliffe’s coaching. Thus, when the Ole Miss job opened up in 1998, the Rebs turned to Cutcliffe, a coach they were familiar with and whom they trusted.

And because it was Cutcliffe’s first shot as a head coach, there was an implicit understanding that this was an opportunity he simply couldn’t pass up and that there was no lack of loyalty to UT.

But what about the men who served as head coaches at multiple SEC programs since 2000? These men were the CEOs of two competing entities in a 15-year span. That is somewhat awkward, and the careers of the four men who fit this mold all followed similar paths.

The two iconic examples of this career path are Nick Saban and Steve Spurrier. These two men have an extremely similar career path, with a coaching stint in the NFL separating their two SEC tenures. Saban coached at LSU from 2000-04, winning at least eight games all five seasons including the 2001 SEC title and the 2003 BCS national championship.

He was more or less a bust as head coach of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins in 2005-06, closing that chapter of his career with a 15-17 record. And when he left the NFL to return to college, he rejoined the SEC at one of LSU’s biggest in-conference rivals, the Alabama Crimson Tide.

By now we’re all familiar with Saban’s run at Alabama: national titles in 2009, 2011 and 2012, another SEC title in 2014 (remember, despite winning the national title in 2011 it was LSU and Les Miles who won the SEC crown that year) and seven straight 10-plus-win seasons. If anything he was more successful at Alabama than LSU, and there is still a faction of the LSU fan base that remains bitter over how Saban’s career unfolded.

Spurrier was one of college football’s great coaches at Florida in the 1990s, winning the 1996 national title and five more SEC titles. In 12 seasons as head coach at UF, his Gators never won fewer than nine games in a season. After a failed stint with the NFL’s Washington Redskins (12-20 in two seasons from 2002-03), he returned to the South Carolina Gamecocks and turned that program into what it is today.

The Gamecocks lacked football history, especially since joining the SEC, but Spurrier has now posted winning seasons in all 10 of his years in Columbia, including three straight 11-win seasons from 2011-13 and the 2010 SEC East crown.

For those two men, the NFL is what ignited a change of scenery in the SEC, and although neither coach succeeded in the pros they both were among the nation’s best coaches at both stops in the SEC. Spurrier is 6-4 against his former school, while Saban is 6-3 against the Tigers; even those records are nearly identical.

But there are even less ceremonious ways to leave one SEC school for another in such a short span. Houston Nutt coached the Arkansas Razorbacks for 10 seasons from 1998-2007, and upon being fired took over as the head coach at SEC West rival Ole Miss just weeks later. Nutt was 75-48 as head coach at Arkansas, winning at least nine games four times. He wasn’t on track to reach the Hall of Fame, but he was a consistent head coach who reached eight bowl games in 10 years.

At Ole Miss, however, he posted a losing record in four years as head coach, culminating with a disastrous 2-10 season in 2011. He was 6-18 in his final two seasons combined, undoing consecutive nine-win seasons to begin his tenure. At this point, there are fans of both programs who remain bitter toward Nutt, and some think his direct leap from one SEC school to another ultimately resulted in Nutt’s demise.

Tommy Tuberville is another SEC coach who falls in the same grouping as Nutt. He coached at Ole Miss from 1995-98, posting three winning seasons in that time despite taking over a program facing severe NCAA sanctions. He was the 1997 SEC Coach of the Year and was adamant about his commitment to Ole Miss.

But two days after his “they’ll have to carry me out of here in a pine box” statement, Tuberville left, likely in a car or on a plane, to take over as head coach at Auburn, where he coached for 10 seasons from 1999-2008.

Unlike Nutt, he was actually more successful at Auburn than at Ole Miss, but the Rebels were more successful with Cutliffe as their next coach as well, reducing the bitterness between the two parties to a certain extent.

There are dozens of motivating factors in the coaching profession — location, salary, program history, quality of fan base, recruiting ties and conference affiliation, to name a few — that all play a role in a coaching deciding where to accept a job.

Sometimes this means coaches must double-dip in the same conference. It can be awkward, but if the SEC has taught us anything it’s that it’s also rather common.