Coaching Turnover During the Athletic Recruiting Process

Now that a number of college football programs have put their season to rest, the amount of schools that have fired their coaches continues to grow. And after just writing an article about how important the coaching staff is in the recruiting process, these firings come at a perfect to discuss that anything can happen within the coaching ranks.

Although it is still just Saturday afternoon, word has come out that Nebraska has fired head coach Bill Callahan after four seasons with the Huskers. Callahan is a coach who just signed an extension in the summer (Which many recruits felt was a sign that he would be there for the long term) and has actually coached in the Super Bowl with the Oakland Raiders. Now he is without a job but is going to receive a rather large severance package for his trouble.

With Callahan, the Cornhuskers were securing a top ten recruiting class in the country and had what could have been the best group of incoming offensive lineman anywhere. But since the rumors of him getting fired broke at midseason when they were getting pounded against a variety of teams, a number of these players decided to look for back up options. That just shows that no matter what type of contract a coach has, he can still get fired if he is not winning ball games.

The second big firing came down this morning was by Ole Miss. The Rebels have had a tradition of solid football teams and players (Eli Manning for one) over the years. Three seasons ago, they fired a solid coach in David Cutcliffe for USC assistant coach Ed Orgeron. Orgeron was considered the right hand man for Pete Carroll and many expected him to do huge things. Well, in just three seasons at the helm, Orgeron was able to bring some talented players to the team during the recruiting process. But the ability of those players did not carry over to wins.

This just shows that with how serious college football is taken these days, coaches can get a short time at helm. Three years is not enough time to recruit your players to the team but Orgeron saw first hand that schools all over the country are impatient. He was hoping for a fourth year, but that just didn’t happen. Here is a quick quote from an ESPN article on the firing (Click here for the entire article).

“A week ago, after Ole Miss outgained but lost to top-ranked LSU 41-24, Orgeron and his staff hosted more high-profile recruits than he’d ever had on any weekend during his tenure at Ole Miss. He seemed confident that’d he’d be back for 2008, but one of his assistants pointed out that votes of confidence rarely mean anything.”

The Rebel administration may have known all of those top ranked players were seeing the school because of Orgeron but they felt enough was enough. Before the firing, the team had verbal commits from four four-star recruits as well as ten three-star recruits. It was pretty obvious that Orgeron could recruit but the results did not show in the SEC.

The third coaching change happened at Texas A&M, but this time it was not a firing. Dennis Franchione decided that it was time he resigned from the Aggies after five seasons of struggles. Part of the reason he was forced to resign as opposed to being fired is that the University could have have him no severance after the newsletter scandal went down earlier this fall. In time with the school, Franchione went 32-28 overall.

What makes the Franchione resignation so surprising is the fact that he had a contract signed through 2012. If you were a recruit in the Class of 2007 and signed a Letter of Intent with him, you will be playing under a new coach over the next three or four years. And no matter how hard you try, it is not going to be easy to duplicate the relationships that you had with the coaching staff that recruited you to their program.

There will be many more stories popping up over the next few months about coaches getting fired, resigning, or taking better jobs throughout the country. These coaches are paid millions of dollars per year to do this but the risk of getting fired is very apparent throughout the entire season.

As a recruit, this is another case where I would recommend researching as much as you can about the coaching staffs at the schools recruiting you. Find out things like how long their contract lasts, what their career record is, has the school fired coaches in the past, how does the school feel about the coach, is the coach on his way up to a bigger schools, and questions along those lines.

Having a new coach take over could also impact if you still have an athletic scholarship on the table. I have seen Division I coaches step into a bigger program and say that there are no offers on the table to any recruits. The coaching staff plans to reevaluate the film of the prospects and will offer those accordingly. A think about that in the football recruiting process of the basketball recruiting process.