Leach had things going with a non-traditional offense, but it worked because we weren’t looking for the same players as our blue-blooded neighbor programs. His death was devastating on many levels, and under the circumstances, I believe promoting Arnet was the right decision. The wrong decision though was to let him make wholesale changes to staff and game plan. Under no other circumstances would ZA been hired for the position, so why was he given so much latitude? He wasn’t ready and should have had restrictions on his staff changes and game plan just like a new teen driver. I don’t know of many orgs that promote a young unproven manager and allows them to come in and change the entire approach overnight. It took Mullen 4 or 5 years to shape his team. Heck, I don’t think he ever offered or wanted a Dixon-type back, but he definitely used him successfully… because he knew gradual changes to offensive schemes are better than overnight 180s.
I think we are suffering the most from that terrible decision, and I’m not sure how we fix it in the age of NIL and Portal.
You can’t hire a guy and then dictate to him after the fact how he has to run his program schematically. That’s not something an AD or boosters can get involved with….they’re clueless in that regard.
If the decision was made to roll with Arnett due to lack of other options for continuity’s sake, then just let him keep the interim tag for all of 2023, put him on a 1-year deal for $3 million or whatever, and tell him the current staff is his to do as he wishes, but he’s not getting any more money for assistants. He can pay the new DC what he was making, pay an OC whatever the difference in his $3 million and Leach’s salary was (around $1-$1.5 million). Replace a position coach? You’re getting the next one for the same money, plus / minus buyout owed or paid by a school to MSU for hiring them away.
You do that, and you make it a very heavy gamble for him to break away from the Air Raid. He can do it if he wants, but he’s only got one shot to get it right with no buyout money at all if he gets it wrong. If he sticks with it w/Hollinghead or Spurrier Jr. calling plays, he lets them do their thing like Leach let him do his thing, and it still doesn’t work out perfectly on offense, then he’d likely not catch any hell if the defense was still performing. If we still simply made a bowl game (which we didn’t miss by much last year even as it were), he still gets some consideration for the HC gig in 2024.
But instead, he got a surprise 300% raise when his boss died, followed by the guarantee of getting $5 million if he got fired after a year….with no other strings attached. $8 million total….equal to 8 years of the salary at the current apex of his career. He 17s it all up? He still gets paid a shít ton. What incentive does he have to not do whatever the hell he wants?
He was a guy who wasn’t ready to be a HC at all….who was thrust into the role by things that had nothing to do with him. We should have treated it that way.
