The Myth of the Superstar Coach
Thoughts on the Impending Notre Dame Coaching Search
By Zach Powers
HikeND.com
11/16/09
Three and a half coaches later, and I’m not going to add my speculation to the already frothing pot of hearsay and hopes and hypotheses available on the internet. Notre Dame has hired four football coaches in the last thirteen years (only three of them actually coached a game), and the only thing I know is that I don’t know anything about a coach before he arrives on campus. Let me add to the list of people who don’t know anything: you, the Board of Trustees, Jack Swarbrick, television analysts, and anyone else who’s ever offered an opinion or exerted influence on the selection process. I would hope, though history would suggest it isn’t so, that Swarbrick and the other decision makers know slightly more than the nothing of the common fan. The issue I’m concerned with is not exactly who Notre Dame’s next coach will be, but the wrong and unfounded expectations many Fighting Irish faithful have about the “level” of success that a coach should have achieved prior to taking up residence in the Gug. Too many people out there are obsessed with the “superstar” coach – the Urban Meyers and Bob Stoops of the world, those coaches successfully leading high profile programs. For some, anything less than hiring these tier one candidates is beneath Notre Dame, and they blame similar hiring practices in the past for the current situation. It only takes a little common sense to dispel this idea, and in case that isn’t enough (since common sense rarely appears and even more rarely takes hold on internet message boards), I’ll try to provide some stats to back it up. No coach is born a superstar, and prior to taking the reigns at a premier college football program, no coach has demonstrated success at such a level. Before they are superstars, they are unproven. The point is, good Athletic Directors don’t hire a current superstar coach away from another premier program – a good AD hires the coach who will become the next superstar. This is the case with every coach who is currently thrown out there as the kind of elite hire that Notre Dame “must” have. When these elite coaches were hired by their respective universities, while some of them had impressive resumes, none of them had demonstrated success at the highest level. And in case you think the word “superstar” means “sure thing,” I’ll kindly remind you that Steve Spurrier is currently leading an incredibly average team down in South Carolina (where he succeeded another under-performing “superstar” coach Notre Dame fans are even more familiar with).
Let’s start with the name, already mentioned, of the one who got away. Urban Meyer was coming to South Bend. We knew it in our hearts. It made perfect sense. We would love the spread option. We would look the other way as 24 of our players were arrested. We would win national championship after national championship. We would have loved Tebow long before we’d ever heard of Te’o. And so on and so on. Let’s look at Meyer’s resume before he became a Gator. Four seasons as head coach, two at Bowling Green in the MAC, two at Utah in the Mountain West. 39 wins and 8 losses, or an .830 winning percentage. Impressive numbers, particularly his last year at Utah, a 12-0 campaign capped by a Fiesta Bowl victory. But four seasons as a head coach in non-BCS conferences do not a superstar make. I don’t care if he won every game and cured cancer in the offseason. We wanted Meyer because he was perceived as the next superstar. However, as they say in sports analogy investment commercials, past performance is not a guarantee of future gains. We didn’t know anything, and if Meyer has one strength above all others, I think it’s that he realized success isn’t just about being a good coach – it’s about being the right coach in the right place at the right time (please direct your attention back to South Carolina if you want an example of wrong coach, place, time).
Before coming to Ohio State in 2001, Jim Tressel had only one undefeated season to his credit, and that was at Division I-AA Youngstown State (14-0-1 in 1994). In the three years leading up to his hiring, he had lost at least three games each season (5, 3, and 3). Granted, he won four championships at that level (1991, 93, 94, and 97), but with a winning percentage of .703, he averaged almost 4 losses a year.
Nick Saban is the closest thing there is to an exception to the rule. His first head coaching position was at Michigan State, where for four years he barely managed to keep his head above .500. His fifth year saw the Spartans thrive, going 9-2 and finishing at #7 in the polls. He used this single year of success to jump to the SEC, where he took the reigns at LSU. All he had on his resume before taking the job where he would eventually win a National Championship was two 9-2 seasons (the first coming in his lone year as the head man at Toledo in 1990). When he was eventually hired by Alabama, Saban was in fact a superstar caliber coach, but his “sabbatical” in the NFL made his hiring situation different from a typical college head coach, for whom a “lateral” movement between elite schools seldom occurs. Again, look to South Carolina for an example of an elite college coach returning from a stint in the NFL to see that even this rare scenario doesn’t always work out.
Bob Stoops had never been a head coach before taking over at Oklahoma.
Pete Carroll had been unemployed (he hadn’t been coaching) for a year before the Trojans hired him. Before that, he was an average (at best) NFL head coach with the Jets and Pats. Considered a long shot when Southern Cal began the hiring process, I don’t think there is any hirer’s remorse over the eventual decision to go with him.
Football had not yet been invented when Joe Paterno was hired as head coach at Penn State. I’m just saying.
These are the elite of the elite at big time programs. They are the superstars of college football coaching, but none of them had done anything before they arrived on the national stage that would have indicated the level of success they now enjoy. I’m going to allude to a few candidates here, and I beg you not to take it as an endorsement. I’m done with endorsements, at least publicly. If a candidate has proven success at a lower division or in a lesser conference, we don’t know what that means. If he is an ex-NFL coach with a fiery demeanor, there is no way to tell how that would translate into the college environment. If he coaches a top college program, always in contention for a national title, who can say that he’d be able do the same thing at Notre Dame.
You may have noticed that I was picking on Steve Spurrier throughout this article. That is partly because I hate him, and his continued mediocrity brings me a sense of joy that Notre Dame football’s similar mediocrity has done much to dull, but I really did bring him up to reiterate a point. It’s about the right coach in the right place at the right time. A big name doesn’t guarantee anything. We need to find the next Ara, who was anything but a “superstar” when he came to Notre Dame. It might be something we feel in our gut more than in our heads, and more than likely, until the next coach shows us success on the field, none of us will agree on if it was the right hire or not. In the spirit of civility, I leave you with a statement I hope we can all get on board with:
Go Irish!