Who are the worst college football hires of the last 30 years?

Kirby Smart at Georgia, if the blog mensas and Finebaum have their way.

 

With the way Bama's defense is playing, I don't think that happens. It's Muschamp or bust.

 

I thought his OC stint at Michigan came after he fell on his sword (and Brian Kelly brought in). Could've sworn he did a year as special teams and then was Carr's OC for the last two years or so of his tenure.

We still had the old stuff at Kelly-Shorts Stadium (yes, the stadium was named for BK before he even arrived), so it was just three yards and a cloud of sighs, really, because those three yards were gained on 3rd-and-10.

And Dan Enos ain't exactly impressing the faithful in the MP right now either.

 

I am amazed that this thread has gotten to four pages without my Southern brethren mentioning Curley Hallman at LSU.

 

I was going to say the same thing on McClain. When word got to Hayden Fry that McClain suffered a heart attack and died, he couldn't speak he was in shock.

 

Actually, anyone at LSU between Bill Arnsparger and Nick Saban probably qualifies.

 

You know, Steak, bringing up LSU coaches from that era calls to mind one of the great tragic what-ifs in college football history, which is what would have happened if Bo Rein hadn't been killed in a plane crash not long after he was hired to replace Charlie McClendon. As I recall, they thought they had the right guy to take that program forward, and they really flailed around for a number of years afterward.

 

Considering that Zook recruited well enough at Florida that they won a title 2 years after he left, he cannot be considered a total disaster.

To me, Paul Hackett at USC is the worst one. Hackett stepped into a decent situation at Pitt and leads the program into a nosedive and then gets one of the most prestigious jobs in the country? There was no justifiable reason to hire him at USC. None.

 

I was going to ask if Price at Alabama would count since he never actually coached a game there.
I would add Gene Chizik at Iowa State.
And I'll add Bill Doba at WAZZU. Respect the man a great deal, but he proved true the old saying that if you're in your 60s and haven't been a head coach yet, there's probably a reason. Cougs were coming off back-to-back 10-win seasons and could have swung for the fences but instead put down a bunt.

 

Well, DiNardo ain't going to the Hall of Fame anytime soon, but he did win 9 games at LSU 3 years before Saban arrived (and 10 the year before that).

Just as Shula won 10 games 2 years before Saban arrived at Bama too. (You can look it up.)

Just a couple fun facts the next time the Saban fan club starts going on about his unbroken record of raising programs out of the ashes of hell.

Williams was a Corleone Family-style hire by the ruling cabal on the board of trustees, who wanted to make sure a "true-blooded Spartan" (i.e. a former player or staffer from the George Perles regime, because it was SOOO important to preserve his tradition of unbroken glorious victory) got the job after Saban bolted (there was a racial angle too but that was secondary).

When Williams imploded in complete disaster, the AD, former HOCKEY coach Ron Mason, decided to go outside the true-green family for the next coach. Smith's resume looked pretty good at the time, but he was sabotaged and back-stabbed by the true-green trustees from the day he arrived. After being sandbagged for a couple years, Smith just said "fuck it" and was fired for very good reason. While he was certainly "set up to fail," he exceeded even their wildest hopes in that regard.

 

In Price's defense, he was undefeated at Alabama. It's rollin', baby!

I agree on Doba. Nicest guy in the world, but he was the classic great coordinator/terrible head coach guy.

 

I'm not gonna slag on the choice of Faust. It was a little bit of a different world back then. Faust was featured as a coaching icon on 60 Minutes, back when that was a super big deal, before thousands of channels became available. You at least figure you're going to gain a super recruiter. Didn't work out, but it wasn't necessarily crazy talk to hire him.

Ones that come to mind:
--Woody Widenhofer at Vanderbilt. He had shown that he couldn't do anything with a Missouri program that at that time was a Vanderbilt-level-bad program.
--Larry Smith at Missouri. Was just playing out the string, and was lucky enough to have the father of Corby Jones on the staff. Once Corby left, the cupboard was bare, and it took Pinkel about 3-4 years before he had enough Division I-level athletes to be competitive.
--Al Groh at Virginia. A total downer of a personality at a program that needed someone enthusiastic to rebuild the thing.
--Johnny Majors the second time around at Pittsburgh. See Larry Smith, but without Corby Jones.
--Stan Parrish wherever he's been hired. A hard-ass who doesn't have the right to be. Does one even need both hands to count his career wins?