Destroyers of value

The worst college football coaching hires of the past ten years.

Now that the college football regular season has ended, what is an avid fan to do with the several week’s pause until the bowls commence? Why, speculate who will be fired and who will be hired, of course.

In some cases, no speculation is needed. Clemson’s Tommy Bowden received an early pink slip, as did Philip Fulmer at Tennessee, and at several other programs, such as Washington and Syracuse, the official firings merely brought to a conclusion something everyone knew already. But there were some surprises, such as Auburn’s parting of ways with Tommy Tuberville and Sylvester Croom’s decision to call it quits at Mississippi State.

If college football is a business – and it is – then hiring your program’s CEO is probably the most important decision an athletic director can make. No doubt, some programs are destined to make ill-considered choices in the weeks to come. As in the business world, value is created and destroyed by the decisions of the guy at the top. In the business world, we measure it by money; in college football, value is measured in wins and losses. But sometimes, money, wins, and losses are not what they seem. There can be extenuating circumstances that prevent coaches from succeeding or that make a coach particularly ill-suited to the task at hand. Conversely, sometimes a coach can post a decent win-loss record, yet leave a program worse off than he found it (Rick Neuheisel at both Colorado and Washington comes to mind). Below, I have chosen what I feel are the five worst coaching hires over the past decade.

1. John Thompson, East Carolina – Thompson lost 20 of 23 games in his two years in Greenville (2003-04). ECU went 27-21 in the four years before his arrival and has gone 29-21 since his departure. This was unequivocally a value-destroying hire.

2. Buddy Teevens, Stanford – After posting an 11-45 record at Tulane, Teevens was inexplicably hired by Stanford to follow Ty Willingham, who had posted a respectable 44-36-1 record in his seven years on the Farm. Teevens responded by taking the nine-win team he inherited and going 10-23 over the next three seasons (2002-2004). Note here, too, that another school (Dartmouth) was stupid enough to hire Teevens once more…his club went 0-10 this year.

3. Greg Robinson, Syracuse – Robinson followed Paul Pasqualoni, who posted a very respectable 107-59-1 record in his 14 years at Syracuse. No Orange coach since World War Two had a finer winning percentage than Pasqualoni, although toward the end of his run there were definite signs of decay; his final three squads went a combined 16-20. Enter Greg Robinson. He took a minor fire and poured gasoline on it. By the time he was fired this year, the Orange had gone 10-37 in his four years at the helm, the worst four-year run in Syracuse’s rich football history.


4. Bobby Williams, Michigan State – Williams was promoted to the head job after Nick Saban bolted for LSU at the end of the 1999 regular season. He inherited a 10-win team, MSU’s first since 1965. He went a meager 12-11 in his first two seasons, and then the wheels came off entirely. The Spartans stumbled to 3-6 out of the gate in 2002, culminating in a humiliating 49-3 loss to cross-state rival Michigan. He was canned the following Monday.

5. Ed Orgeron, Mississippi – Orgeron was brought in to replace David Cutcliffe, who was fired after a 4-7 season in 2004, his only losing season at Ole Miss, where he posted a 44-29 record. This was clearly a case of the grass always being greener. Orgeron was a highly touted recruiter for Pete Carroll at Southern Cal, and the Ole Miss administration thought they could just take a west coast coach and plop him down in the Deep South and get results. Wrong. Orgeron went 10-25 during his three years in Oxford. The knock was that, despite his recruiting prowess, Orgeron simply couldn’t coach and develop talent, a criticism validated by Ole Miss’s resurgent 8-4 season this year under Houston Nutt.