2017 NCAA Coaching Carousel Thread

Not a surprise that Kugler is gone. UTEP was not just 0-5. They were about as ugly as 0-5 gets. They got blown out by New Mexico State, traditionally one of the worst FBS programs in the country and they lost by 14 to both Rice and Army.

There's no getting around the fact that this will be a tough job for whoever takes it. In hindsight, it feels like Mike Price did a really nice job there, and he only got the team to two bowl games in his nine seasons, although having three 5-7 seasons mixed in there feels like a genuine achievement.

On another note, I can't imagine Butch Jones is going to last the whole season. This is going to be a critical hire for Tennessee, and seems like it would behoove them to get a jump on what looks like it's going to be a very active (and high profile) coaching carousel this coming offseason.

 

Oh, and hey, speaking of Mike Price, UTEP has named him their interim head coach.

LINK

 

I don't know if Chip Kelly is a hot commodity anymore. The NFL exposed the simplicity of his offense and tempo isn't that big a deal in college now.

If I were a big time university, Kelly would be a desperation hire if good candidates would not take the job.

 

The Coach O buyout is absurd. Who did LSU think was going to trip over themselves to bring in Coach O? I doubt he'd be that attractive to the NFL because recruiting is such a big part of his appeal. And if he really gets it going at LSU, that's a top-notch program that can afford to continually raise his salary, keep improving facilities, and keep him happy.

To piggy-back on the Chip Kelly conversation, I'll be very interested to see how he fares when he inevitably gets back in the college game. On the one hand, I see the point about him not quite being the hot commodity he was at his peak at Oregon. Offensive football in college has caught up to what he was doing at Oregon, and it's not as if he's a known recruiting ace. His Oregon teams, in fact, far exceeded expectations relative to their recruiting rankings.

But on the other hand, bright football minds are bright football minds, and perhaps that previous viewpoint underestimates his ability to adapt what he did at Oregon to today's college game to keep him one step ahead of defenses.

 

That buyout is particularly hard to swallow when you consider that, if they decide to move on from Coach O, even after next season, for example, they're obviously going to go after a big name who will undoubtedly have a big buyout figure attached. If it plays out this way, you could easily see a scenario where LSU ends up paying something in the range of $20 million or more just for the right to have someone else coach their team and before said new coach has even been paid a dime. LSU athletics turned a profit of $55 million dollars for the 2015-2016 academic year according to this piece from The Advocate, but that would still be a looooot of money.

 

There may be an undisclosed reason he did that.

 

Georgia Southern has fired Tyson Summers. This was inevitable; it was just a matter of it they pulled the plug during the season or waited until after the season.

GSU is kind of a strange program. They were an FCS power for a long time, and they actually probably could have made the move to FBS long before they did. They had some success early on in FBS under Willie Fritz (who has proven to be one heck of a coach with his success at three DI stops- SHSU, GSU, and Tulane), but the Summers hire was just disastrous.

They went from a bowl game in Fritz's last year to 5-7 last year to 0-6 to start this season, including a loss this week to previously winless UMass. Even then, it seems like a quick hook for a guy with a reasonably good resume (and crucially, really deep ties to Georgia high school football- his dad was a coach in the state), but this is one of those proud programs (some might say unreasonably so) that just simply won't put up with any backsliding.

The next hire will be interesting. The program is deeply tied to option football. As a matter of fact, part of Summers's introductory press conference was spent describing the type of offense he would run, as much to assure the fanbase that they would be playing "Georgia Southern football" as much as anything else.

This is where Paul Johnson made his name as a head coach, and Jeff Monken (now at Army) had a stint as head coach as well. And while Fritz didn't run a true triple option, if you're familiar with what he did at SHSU, you know that he runs a ton of option concepts, just generally out of the shotgun. Typically, it's been an expectation that GSU will run the option, and while that's somewhat limiting during the search, it has usually paid dividends for the program. I would expect to see former GSU assistants, Ken Niumatalolo disciples, and Paul Johnson disciples at the top of their list.

Here's a pretty good rundown on the situation from SB Nation- LINK

 

EDIT: Seems like a matter of when, not if, both sides move on.



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Maybe I'm crazy, but I have to wonder if we've reached a critical mass as far as contract buyouts go.

It really feels like buyouts have ballooned over the better part of the last decade, and for coaches like Nick Saban or Jimbo Fisher, sure, it makes some sense. But now it seems like every new P5 hire gets a prohibitive buyout in his contract, and in most cases, it seems like it does little but backfire.

If there's one thing we've learned of late in college coaching, it's that buyouts never seem to serve as a deterrent when a program wants to poach a coach from another program. They'll find the money, especially if we're talking SEC. Sure, the buyout allows the school to recoup some money for losing their successful coach, and that's nice when it works out that way, but far more often, the buyout seems to just serve as a roadblock for getting the coach fired, and that's how you end up with Florida twisting themselves into a pretzel to try to figure out a way to turn the death threats situation into a "with cause" fireable offense.