Welp, stay tuned on the Tennessee front. The backlash, understandably, has been constant all day, much of it from Tennessee politicians and people who have nothing to do with football, and now you've got many of the influential college football voices chiming in that that the two sides should just walk away. I'm betting on Tennessee being back in the market for a head coach by tomorrow.
I think some of the guys on the previous page are vastly overrating the appeal of coaching at Rice. Or maybe I'm wrong, but why would any of those guys mentioned take that job? The downsides for any well respected DI coordinator there far outweigh the upsides.
Coaches talk to other programs all the time, just not directly. Agents take away these harsh technicalities, and the coach can claim that he never told his agent to talk to someone else, and that the agent was simply looking out for his client.
Greg Schiano officially out of running to be next head coach at Tennessee. LOL of all the dramatic things.
For sure, and I assume a lot of this was going on between ASU and Sumlin. In a situation straight out of Ferris Bueller, one guy on CFB Reddit even mentioned that his aunt works in the athletic department at ASU and mentioned that the AD there, Ray Anderson, and Sumlin are the type of buddies who chat on the phone regularly. That seems highly unlikely, if for no other reason than both are extremely busy individuals who also have family lives, but the fact that even some percentage of college football followers think it could be legit tells you that it's just assumed that there is all kinds of back-channeling going on.
Rice is not a great job, in fact it isn’t a very good head coaching gig. If the goal for someone like Orlando is to coach at a top 15-20 program; then he is better staying as DC at a school like UT. If UT wins and the defense is solid; he is likely to get interviews and a job offer from a program like UH at worst or a solid to very good top conference program to be a head coach. If he goes to Rice he has to rebuild the program and win and likely get an offer from a UH/Arizona St. level program and then rebuild that program before getting a potential shot at an elite program or top conference. Some guys are so desperate to be a head coach that they will take a job at Rice; but my understanding is Orlando’s interest in the UH job was only mild. If that is the case, Orlando should have no interest in Rice.
I'm totally with you, particularly as far as Todd Orlando is concerned. I think it's bonkers to think he'd consider going to Rice. If he were to become a head coach at a G5 program, it's going to be something at the level of UH, Memphis, UCF, or USF. Otherwise, he's ticketed for P5 head coaching vacancies. Rice is a place where they have to think outside the box and find a rising star that other programs might not be looking at yet. I think about what a program like UTSA did. They took a chance on Frank Wilson, who was a position coach at LSU, and that's worked out pretty well, at least initially. I know they may be inclined to go a different route since this is the route they took to get Bailiff, but I think a reluctance to hire head coaches from the FCS level is a huge market inefficiency in college coaching. Sure it happens from time to time (Willie Fritz from SHSU to Georgia Southern, for example) but not as often as I feel it should. I just think that could be another way for a lower-level FBS program to nab a rising star before he becomes a household name.
I've never seen anything like the Tennessee situation today, and I honestly think it's going to be one of those seminal moments that we're discussing for decades to come. It would be both exhilarating and exhausting to be a Tennessee beat writer today. News came across not long ago that Mississippi has pulled the interim tag off of Matt Luke and made him the permanent head coach. In future news, the University of Mississippi has announced that they've parted ways with head coach Matt Luke after three seasons. It's not that Luke didn't earn the gig. I kind of expected the Rebels to crater this season with everything going on around them, and he did a nice job kind of holding things together. But hiring the interim guy who took over after the coach left in haste almost never works.
On Schiano, the craziness is the way the fanbase went after him. They wrong on The Rock that he covered up child molestation at Penn State. I mean he got SMEARED here.
Dang didn't even think of that given Arizona States offenses and his coaching tree. Guy is an unbelievable evaluator of OCs then.
They have recruiting difficulties that will never change, they can get a small school guy like Todd G, maybe an Applewhite, their last coach came from SWT, if I'm not mistaken.
It's unreal that they allowed the fan base to make this decision. Tenn needs to realize they aren't the marquee program they once were. They're not on the short list for the top candidates. Schiano is a good coach (aside from what he did in the NFL). What a mess they've created. This will have a trickle down effect.
Search firms are hit or miss like any hire would be but think one would've sniffed this out in this case. Don't think the extent could've been predicted but the fact that Curry is reportedly shocked at the backlash is pretty telling he didn't do his homework. And it looks like this isn't the first coaching hire that Curry has botched. He tried to orchestrate a backdoor coach in waiting at K-State even though Snyder had in his contract that he'd have input on who took over. The deal, which actually had a contract in place, fell through so Curry as AD, has now gone 0-2.
Jason Witten said he'd quit the Cowboys to coach at Tennessee. I'd love to see that train wreck happen. For the Cowboys and Tennessee.
