2020-21 CFB Coaching Carousel

At least at Cal you can fall back on the academics and budget excuses. Also they never should’ve fired Tedford.

 

What was hurting Tedford was the losing, coupled with the Academic exceptions making news and the mounting debt the stadium rebuild was accumulating. They lucked out with the Wilcox hire, but I'm not sure the season ticket base has grown that much.

 

If you are a program in the same market as an NFL team I think you have to be a power within the conference before you see attendance jump. In an NFL market the fanbase for a mediocre program college football is basically a group of alums who enjoy the social ties and tailgating. A school has to become a consistent contender in their conference before the general sports fan buys tickets.

I went to Colorado. They remodeled the stadium and it has been a financial disaster. The school did not sell many extra tickets. I bet the same thing has happened at Cal after they built a new stadium.

 

I think Clark was trying to use the Auburn job as a way to get more money out of UAB.

 

I think the Harsin hire is a forbearer of the future of college football. Harsin ahs spent most of his career at Boise and is from the area. Historically coaches have tended to stay with the general geographic region or they had previously played or coached. But I wonder if Harsin, who could have found another job, looked at the money currently in the SEC and additional money the new television contract will provide and decided he really needed to be in the conference.

I think we saw the same thing when Mike Leach went to Mississippi State, which is probably the worst coaching job in the SEC (you will lose more at Vanderbilt but Vandy has more realistic expectations about the program). Leach decided that he could not turn down SEC money.

 

They're both bad. As @wicked said, at least Cal has the academics, plus it's in Berkeley and not Tucson. I think you can build a decent team at Cal more easily than U of A.

 

What's really hurting the low tier conference schools is the overall rep of the conference. Used to be being a Pac-12 school would be enough to swing a player - but you see more players leaving the region to play in other conferences. The top 10 recruiting classes (not including Oregon or SC) featured 11 players in the Pac-12 footprint.

 

For bang-to-expectations ratio, Arkansas has Mississippi State beat hands down. Half the state still thinks it's 1964.

 

If you don't think he is interested in an SEC job in his home state, you're not thinking straight. Otoh, he's been through the mill with board of trustee politics already. I kind of doubt he had any intent to take the AU job unless he got assurances he knew he was unlikely to get, and probably alienated them by asking for. I'd be willing to bet they wanted to retain Kevin Steele and he wanted to bring his current DC with him as well.

He'll probably come out with a contract extension and a couple of hundred thousand raise, but his public position has been to put the arm on the UAB fans to up their donations toward more facility upgrades, to include a grass practice field that was supposed to have already happened. Essentially he has said that if we want a big time program we need to provide bigger support.

He's not a saint and I'm not making him out to be, but he wasn't running the ultra familiar SEC playbook to help Jimmy Sexton extort more money.

 

Ok, Mississippi State is the 12th best job in the SEC, not the 13th.

 

I found the Auburn press release where they called Clark a liar to be extraordinary. Especially since Auburn is not denying that Napier and the school ahd serious discussions about the job.

 

In so many ways.