When I worked at UF, I heard John Lombardi talk about what it took to develop a great academic department -- and I've always thought that it applied to sports teams as well. He said that the best academic departments were ones where every time they hired someone new, they tried to hire someone who was better than the other faculty who were already there -- that was the path to excellence. But he also said that finding those departments was really rare, because people were insecure or threatened by people who were smarter than them. Or as another president once told me, A level faculty hire A level faculty; B level faculty hire C level faculty.
I think Strickland is a B level AD, which is why he hired Mullen. And Mullen is (at best) a C level coach, so he constantly hires C or D level assistants. Compare that to Saban, who constantly hires outstanding assistants, learns from them, and then replaces them with more outstanding assistants. Really great assistants don't want to work with mediocre coaches.
So I expect we'll get another C level coach. And a bunch of crappy assistants.
