I know it’s great to feel and say this, but realistically, who? And honestly, would they even come here?
Who's old enough to remember when...
- Thread starter 18IsTheMan
- Start date
I'm not going to take the time to search all the successful Head Coaches at a LOWER level FBS school. I know that Chadwell was making only $300,000/year at lower level FBS school Coastal Carolina before going to Liberty.
Do you think such a coach would turn down the opportunity to make anywhere from 10x to 20x their salary, especially after Steve Spurrier proved (3 Top 10 finishes) what can be accomplished at this university?
I agree with @USCBatgirl21. I'm just not sure we'd be very attractive for most young, successful, proven FBS head coaches. Most of them would know they stand to land bigger gigs.
Chadwell was an interesting situation, though. I was not particularly in favor of him at the time. In hindsight, it might have been worth a shot. It's odd, though, that at least half of SEC jobs opened up and he wasn't seemingly considered for any of them, not seriously at least. Has to be a reason for that.
We will only ever have a chance of finding sustained success if we follow the Clemson model. That is...just get lucky like they did with hiring Dabo.
On a side note, miss your posting during baseball season. Always had good input.....
18, my feeling is that if an offer was made to a young, successful proven FBS Head Coach, one of them would jump at the chance, not knowing if such an opportunity would ever come again. After all, Troy's Head Coach Jon Sumrall was just hired by Tulane....TULANE. At Troy, he was 23-4 in 2 seasons there, winning the Sun Belt conference both years, finishing 19th in the nation in his first season. And don't forget that Joe Morrison came from a lower level FBS school (New Mexico). Though Appalachian State was not a FBS school at the time, still, it was a minor league school and Sparky Woods jumped at the chance to come to SC.
Regarding Chadwell, let's see if a big program jumps at hiring him from Liberty after his predecessor at Liberty, scandal-tainted Hugh Freeze, was hired by Auburn. He has been at Liberty for only one season. Freeze was at Liberty 4 seasons. Chadwell has won at least 10 games in a season at each of his 4 Head Coaching jobs and moved up from there. He has produced 1 Top 10 team, 3 Top 15 teams and 2 Top 25 teams. I, for one, would not bet against him.
If Beamer fails, I hope we hire an offensive-minded Head Coach. Our 2 most successful Head Coaches, Joe Morrison (produced 2 Top 15 teams) and Steve Spurrier (3 Top 10 teams) had offense in their backgrounds. College football today is an OFFENSE game. That's why defensive guru Nick Saban evolved later in his career to emphasizing offense. What did we do after Spurrier retired? We hired Defensive Coordinator Will Muschamp who previously failed as a Head Coach. After that, we hired Shane Beamer, whose claim to fame is that he is Frank Beamer's boy; Shane's background is special teams, based on Frank's success with special teams. A big difference between Dabo and Shane is that Dabo is coaching an SEC-type program in the basketball-first ACC. Hiring a first-time Head Coach in the SEC, the toughest football conference in the nation, is like hiring someone who finished MBA school several years ago to run a Fortune 500 company. A similar situation to Beamer's is Arkansas hiring Sam Pittman. His butt right now is on the stove, with rumor being he will be fired by Halloween.
Are there young, successful, proven FBS Head Coaches to be hired? Yes. If our AD is not lazy, it can be done.
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WADR I think Freeze isn't the best example of someone jumping from a lower FBS school to P5 since he already had P5 experience. Auburn knows what they are getting (good and bad) with Freeze.
Honestly I see someone like Chadwell being as much of a gamble as hiring Shane. As @18IsTheMan points out, he wasn't seriously considered for some of the other P5 jobs that came open. It does beg the question why.
Yeah, Liberty was just a necessary rehab stop for Freeze. Off the topic, I question his prior success at Ole Miss, as it all basically hangs on 2 things: he was cheating like crazy and he managed to beat Saban 2x. Literally, 90% of his success is those 2 wins.
Neal Brown was also hired from Troy. In his 5th season at West Virginia, they finished at number 25 in the nation. I hope you all don't seriously think that Chadwell is the only successful Head Coach at a lower level FBS school.
I'm not arguing that looking at a successful FBS head coach from the mid-major levels is a bad strategy. Going to Tulane isn't comparable to going to the SEC, though.
No idea. But they are in the AAC. Even for us, SEC > AAC. Outside of Vandy, most any job in the SEC would be considered a better job than an AAC program.
I'm not arguing it's comparable. But either you or Uscbatgirl argued why would they come here. Seriously? Pass up an opportunity to make 10x to 20x their salary?
Well, I'm thinking of someone who would be desirable by other programs. It doesn't seem like Sumrall was on many teams' radar.
I have no doubts we could dip down and to the mid-major FBS level and hire a successful head coach.
Reality is, though, whether right or wrong, P5 schools primarily look at guys who have at least P5 coordinator experience. There some exceptions to that, like Beamer, Swinney and Pittman.
We don't KNOW Sumrall was not on other schools radar.
What we do know is that we hired Shane Beamer with either the thought that he was another Dabo, forgetting that Dabo is coaching in the ACC; OR we thought we were hiring a clone of Frank Beamer not realizing that Frank got his start as a Head Coach at Murray State producing 1 Top 10 team, 1 Top 15 team and 2 Top 20 teams. Is Shane Daddy's boy or Mama's boy? We don't know.
The reality is that Shane was not even a proven Offensive nor Defensive Coordinator. And right now, people are questioning whether he is over his head. Will he be joining Pittman on the hot seat after this coming season?
If we are really honest about it, the hiring authorities here got lazy, falling for former players pushing us to hire Beamer. We either have to laugh at that or cry about it.
Neither am I my friend. It is sad we hired proven Head Coaches in men's basketball, women's basketball, women's softball and men's baseball. But in the money sport of football, we settled for going the amateur route, not once, but twice. smh Why didn't we just hire Steve Spurrier's boy rather than Frank Beamer's boy? At l;east Steve won a national championship. How would have that gone over here? Difference between Shane and Steve jr.: Shane was recruiting in the early stage of Steve Spurrier's time here. Steve Jr was recruiting in the end of Steve Srs time here.
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I haven't seen many people asking this question. It just seems like a select few posters like yourself.
What question is that?
For the record, I'm pulling hard for Beamer. I'm too old to start over with a new Head Coach.
And maybe me and the other "select few posters" are asking the "question" that others are thinking.
I can't explain the Beamer hire.
We made 3 hires in a row that made perfect sense with Scott, Holtz and Spurrier. Scott was the top assistant at the top program in college football, so it was quite a coup for us to get him. Obviously, it didn't work out, but the hire made perfect sense. (Yes, I know some of our fans will claim they knew the inner workings and dynamics of FSU at that time, and knew Scott wasn't a good coach, but that's hogwash). Holtz and Spurrier obviously made sense at the times they were hired.
Muschamp...eh. I know the popular belief is that it was a stupid hire, and it proved to be so. However, I think Ray was grasping at straws. We were a garbage team starting a walk-on at QB and had just transformed a HOF coach and SEC legend into a mid-season quitter. I think we were viewed as career kryptonite by most viable candidates.
Beamer...it will other go down as a genius hire or an predictably stupid hire. Nothing in between.
Part of our issue is that we have never hired from a position of strength. We are always replacing coaches who failed. We got lucky with Holtz and then Holtz played a role in us getting SOS. But we're always looking for coaches to come in and turn things around. When is the last coach we ever hired who stepped into a good situation?
If we're in a good situation hopefully we are not looking to hire a coach.
Unless the big dogs start stealing our coaches the way they do our recruits.
This is my hope for Beamer and the case for giving him adequate time instead of the usual five-year coaching carousel.
I have previously argued we should just give him 10 years. What is there to lose?
What is there to lose? We'll definitely find out.
I'm pulling for Beamer. I don't want to start over with a new coach. The problem with Beamer is that we have no history on him to tell us he can get the job done. If we get an inkling that he can't, we will need to cut our losses. Why? If we keep him HOPING that he can get the job done, he might bury our program so deep that it may never be found in this league. There is a tried and true adage in the investment world: "HOPE is not an investment strategy".
If Beamer fails, I just want 2 things:
1. The hiring authorities here to study our past and learn from it. As has been said many times: those who fail to study and learn from history, are doomed to repeat it; and
2. Hire someone with an OFFENSIVE background (see our 2 most successful Head Coaches: Spurrier ...3 Top 10 teams and Morrison....2 Top 15 teams); college football has evolved to being an offensive game. Even defensive guru Nick Saban became more offensive-minded later in his career.
I don't think much, if anything. We have a 130+ year history of always regressing to our mean. I think we would see the same cycles of mediocrity punctuated by spurts of success or total failure play out over the course of a decade if we kept Beamer for that long.
Starting the season with 4 wins in the bank, if we can't go 2-6 in our other 8 games, should we cut bait after this season?
I hope you realize that if Beamer turns out to be a poor hire and we keep him for 10 years, we may be permanently put in Vanderbilt's class. I just don't think we can take that chance. I will repeat what I said before: we have never been a recruiting juggernaut. And we will never be. You have to be realistic about that. We will always be in a small state, sharing it with a national brand (Clemson), surrounded by traditional power house programs in the league. We will know in the next year or 2 whether Beamer has the coaching chops to overcome our recruiting disadvantages, It's not going to take 10 years to figure that out.
Ask me that same question at the end of this season and, I will definitely answer it.
And one thing to keep in mind: Beamer obviously made a poor hire for recruiting coordinator, for whatever reason(s). Did he do the same thing with on-field position coaches , with the Strength & Conditioning Coordinator? We will know more about that by the end of this season.
I don't think so. I think you could pretty much put anyone in at head coach and we would mostly always be a mediocre team. Odds are if we had kept Muschamp, we would have regressed to mediocrity.
It's what we do.
We have not always been mediocre. We hired 2 over-the-hill coaches (past their peak) who were near the end of their careers, but produced nationally-ranked teams. We hired another coach who produced nationally-ranked teams but, died.
I said mostly always mediocre.
As I noted in a different post above, our history is one of mediocrity punctuated with brief moments of success or failure. We have had some terrible years and some very good years, but we've never been either terrible or very good for a long time.
As I said just above, if we could have hired Holtz and Spurrier 10 years before we did..........................
The key is hiring coaches with that ability when they are fairly young. We all hope Beamer is the one. Our schedule gives us the chance to soon find out.
Beamer staked his career as a head coach on Loggains, White and Teasley. None whom had either prior experience or success coaching in their current capacities.
You are wrong about White but right about the other 2. White has had some pretty good defenses in his career, but not the past 2 seasons. He was in the mix for the UNC-Charlotte Head Coach job a couple of seasons ago.
I would add that Beamer sticking with our S&C Coordinator is also a gamble.
Got to go to an appointment. It has been a fun conversation. Let's all hope the season turns out to be fun.
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