College football is a dirty business.
The big munch on the small, who munch on the tiny, who in turn munch on the scraps. That’s how it’s always been and always will be, and that goes triply so when it comes to college football coaches.
Virginia Tech announced over the weekend that Memphis coach Justin Fuente would take over for Frank Beamer in Blacksburg. It is, by all accounts, a fantastic hire. Fuente led the Tigers for four years and authored a dramatic turnaround on the field.
Memphis won five games combined in the three years before Fuente took over. In his first two years of work inside the Liberty Bowl, Fuente piloted the Tigers to seven combined wins before really turning it up the last two years. In 2014, he led the Tigers to a conference title and their first 10-win season since 1938, and he won nine games this season, including a win over Ole Miss.
For Virginia Tech to pick up one of the hottest coaching prospects in the country is a win for all involved on the Virginia Tech side. However, on the Memphis side it was a different story.
There is no “woe are the little guys” here. By now, every good Group of Five school must know that its coach is a target for programs with bigger budgets. That’s the reality of 21st-century football, but the fact that the news broke on Saturday while Memphis was playing its final regular season game is inexcusable.
The first tweets strongly connecting Fuente to Virginia Tech started trickling out just before 2 p.m. Eastern on Saturday while Memphis was in the middle of its season finale with SMU. Why did that information come out when it did? The school pragmatically handled the information release at the time by saying that nothing was official. That’s the professional way to go about it, but it doesn’t change the fact that the information leaked out too soon. What would have changed if the news had been held off for a few hours to at least let Memphis get out of its own locker room? Imagine being a parent of a Memphis player, watching your son play on ESPN, and see on the bottom line that his coach was leaving midgame.
The hiring and firing of college football coaches is a nightmarish business — just ask the folks at LSU after an interesting last few weeks. Ask West Virginia, which almost lost Rich Rodriguez to Alabama in 2006, only to lose him to Michigan a year later. The one common thread in those deals was that all of them took place on days other than game day. Memphis wasn’t as lucky.
Justin Fuente came out ahead, but his players deserved better.
