t4pizza wrote:I agree, clearly everyone in the coaching ranks would know what we did, I just don't think that would stop anyone from pursuing a job at our school. For an up and coming coach, we are a football destination where you can make a name for yourself. What do you think looks worse to an outsider; firing a coach after one season because he only wins a single game with a team that returned 10 starters on offense and won a conference title, or firing a coach that is the winningest coach in school and conference history and went 8-4 with a conference title (not to mention the national titles, Michigan, pro players, graduation rates, father figure to players, etc etc)? I would suggest that many people may consider the latter a worse scenario and yet we had plenty of quality candidates interested in the job.
I can't think of a single school that fired a coach and had great difficultly finding a replacement because the candidates did not like the manner in which the previous coach was fired. I will bet that USC has more applicants than they can shake a stick at despite firing a coach in mid season at the terminal while the team was suffering from significant NCAA sanctions. Coaches don't seem to care why the job opening occurred, they just want the job.
Maybe you can think of an example to illustrate your position because I can't recall a single incident. There are plenty of schools that have a hard time finding a coach, but I don't recall ever hearing the reason was because of the way that the school fired the previous coach. I could be wrong, and if you can provide an example I would really be interested in hearing about one. If not, we will just have to agree to disagree.
But once again, I am not calling for SS to be fired, this is just a philosophical exercise on my part.
Pizza, I've kept quite for the most part over this but I've got to say something here. You just sited USC. Someone on Rivals sited Ole Miss as examples of places where coaches were fired before or just after one season. Only one problem with those examples. Those schools are BCS schools. APP IS NOT. Many coaches would take a chance to coach a BCS program even if they didn't succeed. App is barely FBS right now. A D-II, D-III, or HS coach looking to move up would look at App as a step up but an FBS HC or assistant is not going to leave their job and come here, with the money we pay, with the specter looming over their head that, if they don't turn the program around in one year or less, they could be fired.
You also sited the JM situation along with the SS situation. Good example but you didn't put the two together. As WV said the coaching fraternity is a tight group. For better or worse, richer or poorer, whether you agree with the decision or not about JM makes no difference. That a lot of coaches didn't like how the university handled it is not in question. Then throw in firing SS after his first year (You keep bringing up the returning starters. Well two of those starters barely saw the field and the rest, well no matter how good they are or are not, the starters do not play the entire game. Our two-deep is loaded with Fr. RS Fr. and So. who had no game time) with a team installing a new D with kids mostly recruited out of a different system whose players they did lose have been replaced by a lot of Fr., etc. Do that and most FBS level coaches would say no thanks.
Add that to the fact that this is really SS's first full class (he was here last year but JM had the final say so on offers) and truly is Woody's first class. How many current players would leave and how many commits would go elsewhere? I'm already expecting 2-4 de-commits depending on offers and I expect a few players will leave but from what I'm reading from them maybe only 1 of this years (2013) class is considering it. The rest are solid. And as for the commits all I keep reading is the love of App as a family and how much they are looking forward to playing for SS and NW. Fire them and we are mostly starting from scratch with recruits.
Bottom line, there would be very few FBS level coaches willing to take a chance at a move up program that let a legend go and fired his move up assistant after one year. Again, as much as some like to think so, we are not a P5 school. We are moving from FCS to the Sun Belt and it will take some time. We don't know how many players we shirted that could have pushed for time and even started because there was no reason to burn them this year. We will see them next year. Ga Sou will have a little easier time because they go after kids for their system and there are not all that many TO teams to go against. Our D will get better as we bring in kids for our system that played in a 3-4. And with the latest offer to go out I think even SS might be re-considering exactly where we go on O. That's what I meant by the comment I made on that post. Look at the film, look at who we already have, and think about it a little.
