Some coaches are retiring these days, but a lot of coaches are being fired, which brings up the subject of purposefully changing coaches. Let’s say a few things about the matter.
*
Smart people keep backup lists for everything important.
You know the ones, like when you’re dating and just in case your girlfriend kicks you to the curb, and when you have a cordial family gathering and you need someone to attend, you call a certain one, but if you’re going out to a ball game and a party afterwards, you call the other one.
Or when you’re a manager and you have a team of employees, knowing that the good ones will try to move on, so you keep a list of names in the drawer that might be willing and able to step into Good Employee X’s position when they leave?
Until you’re locked into something special — marriage, Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan with the Chicago Bulls, whatever — smart folks keep replacement lists in the event the time comes when you are forced to make an immediate change.
We’re entering into that time of year when everyone that is underachieving is pointing their spears at the guy with the headset, no matter how long he’s been there.
Miami voluntarily let go of Al Golden. Other schools, such as USC (both of them) and Illinois, have had no choice.
In the coming weeks, schools that are underachieving by the standards of the fan base will start to seep out of the woodwork. They could be a Georgia or an Indiana, or someone else.
For programs seriously looking at changing head coaches, the devil you know is often better than the devil you don’t. The early 2000s country song escapes me, but part of the chorus is about when you’re tethered to someone, you want to be single, and when you’re single, the inverse is true.
I mean, that’s a lot of country songs, but one of them was pretty blunt about it.
At any rate, firing on impulse is a bad idea unless you find egregious error in the process, like your driver is at a weigh station guzzling Jack Daniels.
The good athletic directors don’t fire without knowing with decent certainty who is interested, and sometimes more importantly, who isn’t. If you’re Miami and you fire Golden simply because of 58-0 or you’re North Texas and you get housed by Portland State so you fire Dan McCarney, you’re probably not thinking crystal clear unless there’s something else you have in mind, and it may as well be processed earlier than expected.
Miami clearly doesn’t, not if former players go all “faux Algonquin Round Table” trying to give input on something they have no earthly guarantee they’re allowed to do.
Worse yet is the “search firm,” which amounts to something near or over six figures being doled out to allow someone to do the AD’s and staff’s jobs on someone else’s dime.
That will forever be like the cashier at McDonald’s saying, “Hey, I’m going to hire someone to run the register for me, and you’re paying for it. Cool?”
The only plausible use for a search firm is if it’s cost-effective and is just a bet-hedging situation. As in, “We know the guy we want is interested, but he has a contract and a job so it’s no guarantee we get him, and in the event we don’t, someone else needs to go get me my list I should already have.”
Then, there is also an example of an AD not doing his homework ahead of time, not knowing which girl is good for Christmas dinner with the family versus bar hopping on Halloween.
When you’re not winning the amount of games you want to win, the knee-jerk reaction seems like the best one. The reality is that, unless you’ve done your homework, you’re going into an abyss you cannot recover from, at least anytime soon.
*
Follow TSS on Twitter @TheStudentSect
