Running commentary on college football firings and hirings.
I’ll continue adding thoughts below on 2018’s college football coaching changes throughout hiring-and-firing season. A list of completed FBS changes is here.
11/28
How good is the Louisville job?
With North Carolina filled, Louisville is seemingly the top job open on the market.
But how good of a job is it?
Apparently, it wasn’t good enough for native son Jeff Brohm, who elected to stay at Purdue. With another good season, Brohm could jump to an elite job, as opposed to a good one.
Still, Louisville is a pretty sweet gig, as long as the people cutting the checks have their expectations in check.
Since joining the ACC, Louisville has gone 21-19 in ACC play. The league has proven to be a much tougher one than the Big East/CUSA/AAC, in which Bobby Petrino went 24-6, and Charlie Strong went 20-9.
Louisville has had peaks and valleys, going 7-1 in the ACC in 2016 with Lamar Jackson, and 0-8 in 2018, prompting the end of Petrino’s second stint in Louisville.
From a potential standpoint, it is likely tied for third in the division with N.C. State, behind Clemson and Florida State.
The division puts a ceiling on the job. Despite the ability to get just about any player in academically, its in-conference recruiting finishes rank 9th, 7th, 7th, 6th, and 7th.
Louisville has established connections in Florida and Georgia, with numerous players from those states having had success in the program. That helps when trying to pull a kid from Miami or Atlanta.
But the job seems harder in some ways from a recruiting standpoint, now that Tennessee, N.C. State, and Kentucky are all on the recruiting upswing.
If Louisville expects its coach to be about a win better per year in the league in the next five years in the ACC, going, say, 25-15 or better, instead of 21-19, that seems like a good, but reachable goal.
But if Louisville power players are expecting top-15 type performances, like it achieved with Lamar Jackson in 2016 and 2017, then its not that attractive of a job.
I’d like to see Louisville go after Scott Satterfield, who did an excellent job making Appalachian State into one of the best Group of 5 teams in the nation. I’ve been impressed by his talent evaluation.
11/27
Auburn is a top-15 job. Gus Malzahn has averaged better than top-15 results.
Since being hired in 2013, Gus Malzahn has finished 18th, 10th, 13th, 24th, 3rd, and 5th in S&P+. That is an average finish of 12th.
Auburn is not a top-10 job. It is likely somewhere in the teens, behind the obvious programs like USC, Texas, Oklahoma, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Clemson, Florida State, Alabama, LSU, Georgia, and Florida.
He is delivering exactly the results Auburn fans should expect, both on the field, and in recruiting. Auburn is one of just 13 Blue-Chip Ratio (BCR) teams.
I am not claiming that Auburn fans are crazy to believe someone else could do better, but if they think a new coach is likely to finish better than Malzahn, well, that would be foolish.
For as long as Nick Saban is in Tuscaloosa, Auburn is going to have a Saban problem. It’s like being the Jets, Dolphins, or Bills in the AFC East while the Patriots have Bill Belichek and Tom Brady.
11/26
North Carolina’s hire of Mack Brown is puzzling
UNC was floundering, going 2-16 in its last ACC league games. N.C. State is recruiting well. And given the happenings at division rivals Miami, Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech, now was a great time to strike. But I can’t understand the Brown hire.
Brown is one of the most drastic underachievers relative to talent level and expectations over the last decade. In his final four seasons at Texas, he went just 18-17 in Big 12 play, despite having by far the best recruited talent. His best finish in that time was a tie for second. The Longhorns were frequently noncompetitive, soft, and disorganized.
Brown’s press conferences were full of excuses for the entitlement culture he enabled, which Charlie Strong tried to fix, but Strong ended up cutting too much talent off the roster to weed out the bad apples.
Brown’s work as an announcer since 2013 has been routinely mocked as not displaying a mastery of tactics, for an unwillingness to criticize seemingly any coaching decision, and for being painfully conservative.
Making sense of the Lovie Smith extension.
Lovie Smith, just 9-27 at Illinois, got a contract extension. On its face, this seems like a rather ridiculous move.
But as long as there isn’t a significant increase to the already substantial buyout, what is the harm in giving Smith a lot of leeway to try to turn around a program as horrible as Illinois?
Smith has shown some improvement in his time at Illinois. And he is doing a solid job of recruiting, by Illinois standards. He has some solid recruiters on staff, like former NFL DB Donnie Abraham.
The extension should help him some with recruiting in that it will curtail some questions recruits might have about how long he might be at Illinois.
In an increasingly tough division, why not give Smith a while to turn this around? It’s likely a better idea than what Illinois has done recently, featuring four coaches in seven seasons.
Sometimes, a change is best even if it means a downgrade in coach, or program
But all of what I just wrote is something an athletic director cannot say to his booster base.
Because keeping donors relies on the sale of hope. And Kingsbury was no longer inspiring to anyone who believes TTU should always be better than TCU, Baylor, Oklahoma State, West Virginia, etc.
And boosters don’t like supporting things that don’t appear to be on the upswing. Boosters are often successful business people. They want the flashy thing with the chance to hit it big. Very few want to face the reality that a school like Texas Tech should consider making a decent bowl a fair accomplishment, something Kingsbury probably would’ve done for the fourth time in seven years, perhaps even with an upset of Oklahoma, if not for Bowman’s injury.
And so athletic directors put out statements like this. They have to keep hope churning to keep donations flowing.