The openings have been filled but college football's coaching carousel might still be turning
With New Mexico and Fresno State filling their open jobs on Tuesday, the coaching carousel for 2019 is now finished. Or is it?
NFL head coaches have already been fired in Washington and Carolina, with a handful more openings expected at the end of the regular season. With NFL teams finding it harder and harder to identify winning head coaches from within their own ranks of assistants, interest in college coaches has ticked up in recent years. And this year should be no different, leaving the door open for one or two more dominoes to fall in college football.
When that time comes, no coach in the country will be subject to more speculation than Baylor’s Matt Rhule. The NFL’s interest in Rhule has been no secret, going back all the way to his time at Temple. Rhule, in fact, got in an interview with the Indianapolis Colts after going 1-11 in his first season at Baylor — so just imagine what kind of commodity he is now after leading the Bears to an 11-2 record and a berth in the Sugar Bowl.
If there’s one potential job that concerns Baylor officials, it’s the New York Giants, an organization Rhule knows well having grown up in New York City and working for as an assistant offensive line coach in 2012.
Though there’s always going to be speculation linking Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley with various NFL jobs (including the Dallas Cowboys) and Stanford’s David Shaw to a number of openings, Rhule replacing Pat Shurmur in New York is the only college-to-NFL possibility right now that feels somewhat realistic.
But it's also not a slam dunk that Rhule would even take the job if offered, according to two people familiar with his thinking. Those people, who spoke to Paste BN Sports on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on his behalf, believe Rhule truly values what he has built at Baylor and believes he’s gotten the program to a place where it will continue competing at the top of the Big 12. (Anyone who watched freshman quarterback Jacob Zeno come off the bench and throw two absolute darts for touchdowns in the championship game against Oklahoma would also be buying Baylor’s stock well into the future.)
Though Rhule is undeniably intrigued by the NFL, the question is whether the timing is right for him and his family, which has enjoyed the lifestyle in Waco. Rhule is also well aware of how the media microscope in a place like New York might affect those close to him. Should the Giants fire Shurmur and target Rhule, it will be interesting to see if the pull of that challenge outweighs his comfort with what he's built at Baylor.
While that’s one big issue still to play out, we’ve already learned a lot from the college coaching world over the last few weeks. Here are five observations from a fairly subdued carousel:
1. Schools that fired their coaches generally found a disappointing candidate pool.
There was perhaps no better illustration of how absurd these searches can become than the scene in Boone, N.C., following the Sun Belt title game. As then-Appalachian State coach Eli Drinkwitz declared conversations with Arkansas as “fake news,” the reality was that a delegation from Arkansas had already landed in Boone to try to get the upper hand in a tug-of-war with Missouri, both of which had grown desperate to end their meandering searches.
And all of this over someone who had coasted to a 12-1 record in his only season as a head coach, having taken over a program that was loaded with talent from Scott Satterfield.
In a sane environment, giving the 36-year old Drinkwitz a $4 million a year contract just five years removed from being the tight ends coach at Boise State, would be considered a complete reach by Missouri and a non-starter in a negotiation.
But Missouri, like many schools these days, was caught in between overvaluing the attractiveness of its job on the market and only coming to reality so late that it had to overpay for a completely unknown quantity like Drinkwitz, who by the way, has never recruited SEC-level players.
It also highlighted the frustration many athletics directors have these days at meddling from their trustees. According to a person with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the search details were supposed to be private, Missouri’s Jim Sterk initially had targeted Arkansas State’s Blake Anderson, only to get pushback from the Board of Curators led by Jon Sundvold, a legendary former Missouri basketball player. The idea that Anderson wasn't a big enough name for some influential Missouri donors, only to discover that Drinkwitz was their last, best option tells you everything you need to know about how rudderless some of these searches are.
2. The December signing day has completely changed the coaching search game.
In the second half of the Conference USA championship game, the Ole Miss social media team was sending out train memes on Twitter, teasing its forthcoming announcement that it had hired Lane Kiffin — i.e., the “Lane Train” — from Florida Atlantic. As Memphis closed in on an American Athletic Conference championship the same afternoon, Florida State announced it would be introducing its new coach the following day without naming Mike Norvell, whom everyone already knew had taken the job.
This is not a positive development for college football, but it is the new normal now with the early National Signing Day in mid-December as opposed to February. Unless schools are prepared to basically punt on a recruiting class, which can set a program back significantly, they need a coach in place so that they can spend at least a week out on the road visiting recruits and on campus hosting prospects before kids start making their final decisions.
Though some powerbrokers like SEC commissioner Greg Sankey foresaw this as a consequence of the early signing date and aren't happy with how it has played out, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said last week he remains in favor of the policy because it is athlete-friendly.
There’s certainly something to be said for giving recruits an opportunity to go ahead and end their recruitment if they know where they want to go. At the same time, is it really helping the environment when coaches like Norvell or Kiffin have to interview for and accept new jobs before their seasons are done?
And for a school like Arkansas, which reached a lot of dead ends in its search before settling on Georgia offensive line coach Sam Pittman, it might have been better to hit the reset button and take some time. But because of recruiting, Arkansas just couldn’t afford to do that.
3. Money was a huge factor in searches.
The most persistent absurd rumor of the coaching carousel was former Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops being involved with Florida State, which didn’t really die among a segment of Seminoles fans until multiple news outlets started reporting the school’s agreement with Norvell.
Whatever conversations happened between Florida State and Stoops came very early in the process and never really went anywhere. Though most of that was likely due to Stoops just not being interested in coming back to college coaching right now, it’s also true that Florida State wasn’t financially in position to offer a mega contract that might get the attention of someone like Stoops.
Whether it was USC deciding to keep Clay Helton rather than pay upward of $20 million worth of buyouts or Florida State deciding not to break the bank after committing to Willie Taggart’s $18 million buyout, money drove a lot of the coaching decisions this cycle. Even Arkansas, which swirled with rumors about Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones pitching in millions for a coach, ended up going cheap with Pittman.
Though athletic departments have spent wildly on coaching salaries in recent years, leading rank-and-file fans to believe there’s an endless supply to spend, the reality is that it’s not monopoly money. It has to come from somewhere. And when schools are forced to budget for these massive buyout payments, it’s not easy to just turn around and offer someone else $7 or $8 million a year.
4. Speaking of Arkansas ...
The Razorbacks ran away with the award for most lampooned coaching search within the college athletics community. The reaction from athletics director Hunter Yurachek’s colleagues over the last 10 days after hiring Pittman has been equal parts sympathy and bewilderment, as it’s hard to find anyone in college football who believes this will work. Though Pittman is a strong recruiter and terrific offensive line coach who did well to land former Missouri coach Barry Odom as his defensive coordinator, Yurachek didn’t have a very good plan in place, wasted too much time interviewing candidates he wasn’t going to hire (like Deion Sanders, of all people) and got played by Lane Kiffin, whose agent Jimmy Sexton was able to use the interest from Arkansas as motivation for Ole Miss to quickly get a deal done.
After that happened, Yurachek was caught flat footed and had started to grow comfortable with the idea of promoting interim coach Barry Lunney, Jr. But once that got nixed — like Missouri, there was plenty of trustee input at Arkansas — and Drinkwitz declined Arkansas’ offer, there were very few candidates left that Arkansas was sure would say yes.
One of them was Pittman, who had campaigned for the job from the very beginning but had fallen completely off the radar toward the end of the search. Then within a matter of hours on Dec. 8, Pittman went from outside the candidate pool to the head coach — a metaphorical throwing up of the hands on the part of Yurachek.
Now, Arkansas has no choice but to give Pittman some time. It seems unlikely it will work, but with the Razorbacks’ roster in such bad shape right now, changing coaches every two or three years won’t be the answer.
5. Next year’s carousel should be more interesting
Unless there’s an NFL departure or an unexpected retirement, only 17 programs will have new head coaches next season, and many of them were smaller jobs like UNLV, Old Dominion, New Mexico and UTSA. Plus, with Rutgers bringing back Greg Schiano, Florida Atlantic grabbing recently fired Willie Taggart, Colorado State doing the same with Steve Addazio and both Memphis and Appalachian State promoting internally, there just wasn’t a lot of movement this year.
That should change in 2020. Once again, Clay Helton will start the year on the hot seat at Southern Cal. Tom Herman wore thin at Texas this year and will face significant pressure to win coming off a 7-5 season. Other coaches who will need bounce-back seasons or face potential unemployment next year: Michigan State’s Mark Dantonio, N.C. State’s Dave Doeren, Miami’s Manny Diaz, Arizona’s Kevin Sumlin, Vanderbilt’s Derek Mason, South Carolina’s Will Muschamp and Mississippi State’s Joe Moorhead.