The incestuous coaching carousel in the SEC is not attractive. Yes, it is a free country, and folks want to improve their lot in life and salary, but good grief, is there no room for ethics at all in SEC athletics? Players cannot transfer from one SEC school to another without a release from their current school and must sit out a year. Yet here we sit wondering if our coach of 1 tender year will be stolen away by the University of Florida leaving our program in a tenuous position at best. I fully expect Dan Mullen to have success at MSU and to be courted by bigger programs after 3 years, 4 max. But one season? Is there any ethical hand to play here? Foley, the AD at Florida, can go out and hire most any coach he wants anywhere in the USA. In doing so, he will hurt some program somewhere if he hires a currently employed college head coach. Does it have to be a fellow Southeastern Conference institution? Is it doubly egregious to do that in a situation where the coach has only been in his present position for one single season? Is it time for some sort of additional financial penalty on an SEC school that stabs a fellow SEC member in the back? I don't pretend to think that any of this behavior is illegal. I just wonder if it is in some way immoral. My gut tells me that it is certainly unethical. If Dan Mullen leaves us after 3 to 4 seasons to take over a bigger program, he will leave us in better shape than when he arrived, and if we still have a competent athletic director as we do now, MSU will be able to benefit from the improvement in our program to bring in another promising coach. If Dan Mullen were to leave in the next week or two for UF, our program will be in complete disarray, and won't have benefitted much at all from Dan Mullen. One might even say that we would be taking a step backward and would regret the day we hired Dan Mullen. Just really stinks that this is even a possibility let alone a probability that such behavior would occur within the conference.
Florida has the resources and prestige necessary to find a big time proven winner. I hope Foley does so. I hope he considers all the ramifications of his ultimate choice. If he pisses on our parade, I hope the SEC athletic directors do something to make such behavior a little more painful to the perpetrator. If nothing else, the buyout clause should be doubled and paid by the SEC school that decides to screw its sister.
Florida has the resources and prestige necessary to find a big time proven winner. I hope Foley does so. I hope he considers all the ramifications of his ultimate choice. If he pisses on our parade, I hope the SEC athletic directors do something to make such behavior a little more painful to the perpetrator. If nothing else, the buyout clause should be doubled and paid by the SEC school that decides to screw its sister.