College football 2020 offseason thread

Seeing the Mighty Gopher on the schedule set this off.

 

It was a strange gamble because there would have been much more money had he stayed at UCF for even one more year with similar success, and there's no reason to think he wouldn't have continued to win 10-11 games at UCF in 2018 and 2019. It's a roster full of athletes that the AAC can't contend with. I think he could've demanded a boatload after 2019 on the market and would've had takers. Ole Miss would've paid out the ass for him. FSU probably would've tried, although they are struggling with finances and their administration can't do anything right. I could see USC being willing to sack Clay Helton to get him.

Nebraska gave him more money than UCF. I think UCF was willing to tear up the contract that paid him $2M for one that paid $3.5M and Nebraska came in with $5M. So yeah the money was more at Nebraska, but his value on the market would've been so greater if he did another year or two in Orlando instead of being a .400 coach in no-win situation like Nebraska.

 

Always better to take less and more years - with a buyout or whatever. Then you know if somebody wants you - they really want you. I think of someone like Chris Petersen, could have been a lifer at Boise, resisted the the first, second, third etc. offers and he got the UW job four years after the second Fiesta Bowl win and coming off an 8-4 season.
A lot of these coaches though are looking for the fast money and leave after one good year (which tells me they might not know how to sustain success). It's easy to pile up a recruiting class for a big push in year three or four with juniors and seniors - what happens next though is the job.

 

Alt take: local heroes want to coach their alma mater.

 

True enough that turning down the alma mater, you may not get a second bite. Frost probably could have been the HC at Oregon though. Even though its the Pac-12, Oregon might be the better gig now that they've started buying "recruiting guides" once again.

 

This is what I really value about Bill Clark. He has singlehandedly made the UAB job viable, because he saw the untapped potential and because UAB's frustrated fans finally had someone to coalesce around and the shutdown to fire them up. If Clark does not turn things around and instill hope in 2014, when the program was shut down it would have been dead and buried. Instead the fans/alumni/boosters had hope, and when Clark hung in there and fought for The Return everyone got behind him and worked to make it happen. What was one of the worst programs in D1 for twenty-five years, a team that provided many pieces of Watson Brown's NCAA record for football losses now has first class facilities, loyal fans, and moves to a state of the art new stadium next season.

He's been interviewed, and from what I understand had at least one offer from the low end of the SEC pecking order - and he didn't seriously consider it. He'll go once he's ready, after at least one season at Protective Field, and to an SEC team in the top half of the league when that time comes. I could be wrong, but he just keeps building a record of success in a job where coach's careers went to die. He's got it good here, he's well loved and respected, and he's built a pipeline into the Alabama high schools that didn't exist before, as well as firm JUCO ties. He's the top paid coach in the conference, or very close. There's no reason for him to take a job that isn't exactly what he wants, so he continues to sit tight and build.

He's not interested in the fast money for three or four years and a swift kick to the curb. He thinks longer term than that.

 

That's the thing with Frost. He went to Stanford and only left there because he struggled at QB and they wanted to move him to the secondary after two years. It's not like Frost was some kid that lived and died with the Huskers and walked on after high school only to eventually win Tom Osborne's heart.

 

Also the fact that the mighty Huskers rank below Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and often Northwestern in the Big Ten West hierarchy over the past 3-5 years.

Quite whining about playing Ohio State and Penn State. They can't even win in their own division.

 

Notre Dame-Wake Forest is off. Seven Irish players test positive for virus. Bruce Feldman reported this on Twitter.

 

But we get the one everyone's been waiting for: Troy at BYU!

 

It's always sad, too, when those guys get the job and it doesn't work out. I think of Matt Luke at Ole Miss as a recent example, a guy who not only played there but had family that played there, and then he somehow spent most of his coaching career there through multiple staffs. He steps up after the Hugh Freeze fiasco, lands a dream job, then gets whacked a year later and now he can never go home again. I know that's the deal when you become a coach, you're hired to be fired whether it's two years later or 10, but it's still sad.

 

Warren Sapp was rumored to have already been hired as one of Deion's assistants at Jackson State. Deion denied the report, and then Sapp tweeted this out later on. Jackson State fans swarmed on him. The thread is pretty good.