Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Home » News » Columns » A Coaching Carousel Gone Mad

A Coaching Carousel Gone Mad

football on field with a pile of money

no description

Imagine the creepiest carousel movie scene you’ve seen, something that Stephen King would  dream up complete with crazed cackling clowns crawling from the darkness. That is the  coaching carousel of 2021. 

Each day is stranger than the next. It started with Ed Orgeron, just 20 months removed from a national title season, getting fired at LSU and continued with successful coaches walking away from Oklahoma and Notre Dame and a slew of eye-popping, 10-year contracts. At this point the only thing that would surprise anyone would be Nick Saban leaving Alabama for Notre Dame. 

So how do we make sense of all this? 

It starts with financially leveraged university athletic departments that are now more beholden  to outside money and influence than they’ve ever been. Exhibit A occurred last year when a coach at a major school was fired after boosters came forward essentially demanding to be  allowed to pay a $20 million buyout to fire a coach.

And why are they more beholden to the outside money when schools are supposedly awash in  cash? They aren’t awash in cash. COVID-19 dented low cash reserve levels that some schools had going into the pandemic. Borrowing for facilities has reached levels that are unsustainable to  building up long-term cash reserves. Many schools don’t have the money on hand needed to pay the buyouts on the contracts they signed.

Boosters spend time reading and believing recruiting site hype. They’re convinced that the next  recruiting class is always the one that will turn fortune’s tides forever. And with the early signing  period in December that coaches asked for, it created an accelerated timetable to fire and hire  coaches.  

With all those factors, any booster walking through the door with an eight-figure check can  essentially buy his or her way into leadership decisions being made. 

And that explains the shuffling of chairs on the deck of the SS Coaching Carousel that may be  headed for an iceberg. Already in the last decade over a half a billion dollars has been wasted  on buyouts. (That’s enough to send over 16,500 in-state students to Penn State). 

Generally, boosters are fans lacking extensive knowledge about who can coach and who can’t.  Many administrators at major college athletic departments are not football experts either. So  they rely on things they read or see in the media or they hire consultants or search firms. They  buy into “conventional wisdom” or the reputational status of well-known coaches.  

The boosters at USC want a big name? Throw a humongous pile of cash at Lincoln Riley. LSU  didn’t get Riley so they back up the Brinks truck of cash and get Brian Kelly. Where will Notre  Dame and Oklahoma go? Influential fans probably have a list of candidates generally consisting of big-name established coaches they’ve heard of. 

And other schools, afraid of losing their guy, get leveraged into one-sided contracts. A school’s  fear of change and the resulting booster criticism for “allowing” their coach to leave get  exploited. Consequently, college coaching salaries are racing past NFL salaries.

Agents are playing chess while athletic directors are playing checkers because those ADs want to  keep the boosters happy and keep their jobs. And the agents see change on the horizon, so they  lock up 10-year contracts.

There are two big problems with 10-year contracts. First, they shift the balance of power. A  university president with a five-year deal looks at a coach’s contract that is five years longer than  their own contracts. They see coaches who can buy out their contracts for pennies on the dollar  to leave for another job. And then they see that to fire that same coach they’d need to pay $40 or  $50 million dollars or more. In football when you rush the quarterback “losing contain” means  allowing the quarterback out on the perimeter to do whatever he wants to do. Universities have  lost contain on the coaching market. 

The second problem with the 10-year contracts is that seismic change is coming to college sports  in the very near future. Revenue sharing is a very real possibility, which could suddenly create a  massive jump in the money they have to give to players. If the head coach’s salary is locked up, it  becomes untouchable if universities are forced to find money needed to give to players. 

Certainly, you can’t fault coaches and agents for asking for the moon. But you can fault a group  of university leaders who’ve lost the will to call an agent’s bluff or withstand criticism should  their coach leave. 

There are a lot of excellent coaches, many that most people have never heard about. But the outside  influence prefers what is known versus the unknown. That is why the major new hires this year have been predominantly white and predominantly head coaches from other schools. 

Everyone thinks that their school must have a coach with head coaching experience at the major  college level. But let’s turn back the hands of time and illustrate some hires that wouldn’t have  happened in this environment. Bo Schembechler from Miami (Ohio) to Michigan, Jim Tressel  from Youngstown State to Ohio State, Paul Bryant from career assistant coach to head coach at Maryland, Joe Paterno from assistant to head coach at Penn State, Lloyd Carr from assistant to head coach at Michigan and even Lincoln Riley from assistant to head coach at Oklahoma or  Ryan Day from assistant to head coach at Ohio State.  

How did those hires work out? Those coaches had a 77.8% winning percentage racking up a  combined for 1,242 wins at the jobs they jumped to with 11 national titles and 73 conference-level  championships. 

Will Notre Dame defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman have a shot at the head coaching job?  Some argue that he’s never been a head coach. But people who really know football and know  Marcus might tell you that he is absolutely ready. That, after all, is how Lincoln Riley and Ryan  Day ascended to two of the biggest jobs in college football. They’ve both done well as head  coaches. Pat Narduzzi went from a coordinator role at Michigan State to head coach at Pitt and has the Panthers in their second ACC title game in four years. 

But back to booster involvement, by the very nature of the financial pressures that athletic  departments have brought upon themselves, they are more susceptible to influence than ever.  And these boosters become de facto team owners. If a head coach knows that boosters foot the  bill for his contract, there may come a time down the road where a booster suggests that the  coach plays one player over another, or recruits a player in spite of character issues.

The days when a prominent coach once told boosters “We want your money but not your 2  cents” are probably becoming a relic of the past. 

You can argue that the marketplace is what it is. You can argue that these coaches are somehow worth all the cash. But with the massive outside influence on universities, there are ominous signs on the horizon. 

This massive spending on one men’s sport creates big Title IX imbalances when it comes to  gender equity in athletics. And as football coaches leverage schools for more spending, there is another more serious leverage point coming. 

With the NCAA eliminating standardized test scores for freshmen eligibility, it may not be long  before the required course work and enforcement of eligibility falls to conferences and schools  as the NCAA starts to decentralize. Coaches may start leveraging admissions requirements as  conditions to stay. 

Think I’m crazy? Just a few years ago one head coach leveraged his school into admitting his entire recruiting class based on the average SAT scores and GPA of the entire recruiting class  rather than as individuals. That allowed recruiting classes to contain a number of players that  fell below the school’s standards. 

The current coaching carousel resembles Disney’s old “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” more than it does  the cheery sunny carousel of our youth. And anyone with an understanding of college football’s  past will surely understand that a lack of principled university leadership carries the risk of repeating the mistakes and excesses of the past.