Official 2012 College Football Season Thread - Page 47

John L Smith went to Arkansas after a three year hiatus coming off a firing from the 4th or 5th best big 10 team. Seems like Arkansas is upgrading as well.

I am impressed at the Arky hire and feel it is a good fit. Gus back at Auburn is Chizik part II. Gus runs a great spread but is terrible at recruiting Qb's (with one exception). I hear Strong is going to Tenn. and that he is the best hire of all the coaches I have mentioned. Do not know why Auburn did not hire Smart instead of Gus.

Interim head coaches are interim head coaches.

and Alvarez is going to coach Wiscy in the Rose Bowl! LOL

One of the worst things about college football is lesser known programs having great seasons, then playing their bowl game without their coach because he got hired by one of the big boys. The team then almost always loses, reinforcing the idea that only big boy programs win bowls.

Lousy system.

I agree with all of this except the implication that Wisconsin is somehow a "lesser known program" , or that Barry Alvarez is somehow unqualified to motivate the team or win the game.

Well, Barry Alvarez is kind of the exception, and a really good one.

Last year, U Houston had an interesting bowl game: Coach Sumlin had been hired by A&M so I think Tony Levine stepped up to coach their bowl game, which they won...against Penn State (who was reeling from the Sandusky business and also I think under an interim coach).

Maybe they'll finally win one

Michigan State had this with Saban back in 99/2000. He left before the Citrus Bowl to LSU, and MSU had Bobby Williams as interim. They won, Bobby Williams was hired and the program fell dramatically from where Saban had/was taking it.

I was actually thinking about Northern Illinois right there, just happened to be under that post about Wisconsin. NIU probably would have lost anyway, but losing their coach before they even had a chance to plan for the bowl means they have almost no hope.


Saw the same thing with Cinci a few years back. They qualify for a BCS bowl, Kelly bolts for ND, Cinci gets massacred by Florida.


It seems like it happens every time a second (or lower) tier school gets successful. Big money program comes in, buys up the coach, program falls back in mediocrity. But even worse, because of the timing of it all, they don't even a decent chance to savor that bowl win. I'd love to see schools force coaches to actually coach their damn teams until the end of the year, but I guess you couldn't make them put their all into it anyway.

 

It happened in '02 when Wazzu went to the Rose Bowl. Mike Price had already signed on with 'Bama but insisted on coaching the RB game. It was an abject disaster. We probably would have lost to Oklahoma anyways but we got slaughtered instead. The team had completely quit and didn't want Price to coach, but the athletic director at the time said it was ok (this is one of the many reason why he is no longer the AD). Wazzu then fell into the Decade of Darkness, which is still ongoing.

I've always thought this was a bad idea. The players know the HC doesn't want to be there and is preoccupied with his new job. Like upthewazzu said, players will quit on a coach since they know there's no repercussions. You're usually better off with an interim HC then having a guy stay on.

Maybe it would be possible to ban schools from talking to prospective coaches until after the bowls are over. Might be hard to enforce but I dunno, I just hate the current system.

aside from the fact that they have no business being in a BCS game