- Sep 8, 2014
- 25,419
- 59,317
Florida’s Scott Stricklin: Hiring a football coach more difficult than fans realize
http://gridironnow.com/florida-scott-stricklin-hiring-football-coach-difficult-fans-realize/
GAINESVILLE, FLA. — The 2017 SEC football season will be remembered as the season all the coaches were fired. Some schools hired their new coach without any drama. Others? Well, that wasn’t the case.
Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin had to both fire and hire a football coach in his first year on the job. I had the chance to meet with him in his office recently, and wanted to ask one question above all others: What makes hiring a football coach more difficult than fans realize?
“Not everybody wants your job,” Stricklin said.
That will be difficult for Florida fans to hear. Or Tennessee fans. Or fans of any school who can’t imagine why all coaches wouldn’t be honored to put that whistle around his neck. That’s the nature of fans.
Fans don’t understand why an athletic director can’t “just go and get him,” Stricklin said.
“It’s not like going to Best Buy and buying a television,” Stricklin said.
Used to be, before college football revenues exploded, a school such as Florida would have such vastly greater resources than a school such as Purdue or Kansas State or Washington State — and those schools greater resources than a Houston or a USF ora Memphis — a school from the upper tier could double or triple the salary of a coach it wanted from a lower tier and the offer was simply too large for that coach to turn down. When coaches were earning $1 million or $2 million a year, instead of $4 million or $5 million or $6 million, a big raise from a new school could put aside fears of fit or comfort.
A 50 percent raise to a person making $50,000 a year is more meaningful than a 50 percent raise to a person making $5,000,000 a year.
Now, coaches across the country in all Power Five conferences – and, increasingly, Group of Five conferences – are making more money than they ever could have imagined. That being the case, Florida or Tennessee or any other “big” school can’t simply offer a coach they want more money and have them drop everything and come running.
“There are family and geographic and other considerations,” Stricklin said when explaining why waving a big check in front of a candidate is no longer enough.
Fans think about salary and stadium size and how many national titles a school won 50 years ago when determining the attractiveness of an open job. They don’t think about the same factors they would consider if they were moving across the country to switch jobs: what does the spouse think, where would the kids go to school, are you happy at your current job, do you want to live in a new city and work for new bosses who may not have the same vision as you do.
Another complication fans don’t deal with when playing fantasy athletic director and hiring coaches: agents.
Stricklin admitted finding it difficult when talking to agents to accurately gauge their clients’ genuine interest in the Florida job as opposed to their just trying to use the Florida job to leverage their client’s current employer for more money. He admitted the same difficulty when receiving a call from a sitting Power Five coach who also expressed his interest in the position.
Agents have a job to do. With the college football media ever larger and more aggressive, all of them looking for juicy, coaching-search tidbits from “sources with knowledge of the situation” to share with their audiences, agents have an ocean of parrots eager to share information that puts their clients in demand – regardless of how it can make an athletic director’s job more difficult.
Limiting loose talk about the job was the primary reason Stricklin decided not to employ a search firm to help find a new coach. While Stricklin respects the work of search firms, he didn’t want more people with knowledge of the search sharing information with the media.
One candidate’s name that did reach the media was Chip Kelly.
You don’t have to talk to Stricklin long to recognize the fondness he has – still – for Kelly.
“Chip is one of those guys who you sit down to have a conversation with, and five hours later you look at your watch and feel like it’s only been 40 minutes,” Stricklin said.
Stricklin said he and Kelly have no hard feelings after the conversations they had regarding the Florida vacancy. Stricklin said Kelly called him just before Christmas, unprompted, simply to chat and see how he was doing.
Stricklin expressed no disappointment in not being able to hire Kelly when we spoke. His enthusiasm and confidence in Dan Mullen’s ability to do the job are over the moon, and his optimism for the future of Gator football is sky-high.
That almost wasn’t the case.
“If Dan said ‘no,’ we could have been in a situation similar to Tennessee,” Stricklin said. “The pool of a candidates is more like a puddle.”
That’s another reality fans don’t recognize. If there is a major vacancy, like Florida or Tennessee, and certain coaches from lower-tier schools no longer are available for the reasons discussed above, you quickly run out of candidates with a proven track record of high-level success on the field, recruiting and running a program.
Stricklin thinks the rate at which universities turn over not only football coaches, but athletic directors and presidents as well, contributes to their being a shortage of all three to fill high-profile vacancies.
Athletic directors have many important responsibilities, none more so than hiring a football coach, and doing so successfully is a lot more difficult than it seems from the outside.
http://gridironnow.com/florida-scott-stricklin-hiring-football-coach-difficult-fans-realize/
GAINESVILLE, FLA. — The 2017 SEC football season will be remembered as the season all the coaches were fired. Some schools hired their new coach without any drama. Others? Well, that wasn’t the case.
Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin had to both fire and hire a football coach in his first year on the job. I had the chance to meet with him in his office recently, and wanted to ask one question above all others: What makes hiring a football coach more difficult than fans realize?
“Not everybody wants your job,” Stricklin said.
That will be difficult for Florida fans to hear. Or Tennessee fans. Or fans of any school who can’t imagine why all coaches wouldn’t be honored to put that whistle around his neck. That’s the nature of fans.
Fans don’t understand why an athletic director can’t “just go and get him,” Stricklin said.
“It’s not like going to Best Buy and buying a television,” Stricklin said.
Used to be, before college football revenues exploded, a school such as Florida would have such vastly greater resources than a school such as Purdue or Kansas State or Washington State — and those schools greater resources than a Houston or a USF ora Memphis — a school from the upper tier could double or triple the salary of a coach it wanted from a lower tier and the offer was simply too large for that coach to turn down. When coaches were earning $1 million or $2 million a year, instead of $4 million or $5 million or $6 million, a big raise from a new school could put aside fears of fit or comfort.
A 50 percent raise to a person making $50,000 a year is more meaningful than a 50 percent raise to a person making $5,000,000 a year.
Now, coaches across the country in all Power Five conferences – and, increasingly, Group of Five conferences – are making more money than they ever could have imagined. That being the case, Florida or Tennessee or any other “big” school can’t simply offer a coach they want more money and have them drop everything and come running.
“There are family and geographic and other considerations,” Stricklin said when explaining why waving a big check in front of a candidate is no longer enough.
Fans think about salary and stadium size and how many national titles a school won 50 years ago when determining the attractiveness of an open job. They don’t think about the same factors they would consider if they were moving across the country to switch jobs: what does the spouse think, where would the kids go to school, are you happy at your current job, do you want to live in a new city and work for new bosses who may not have the same vision as you do.
Another complication fans don’t deal with when playing fantasy athletic director and hiring coaches: agents.
Stricklin admitted finding it difficult when talking to agents to accurately gauge their clients’ genuine interest in the Florida job as opposed to their just trying to use the Florida job to leverage their client’s current employer for more money. He admitted the same difficulty when receiving a call from a sitting Power Five coach who also expressed his interest in the position.
Agents have a job to do. With the college football media ever larger and more aggressive, all of them looking for juicy, coaching-search tidbits from “sources with knowledge of the situation” to share with their audiences, agents have an ocean of parrots eager to share information that puts their clients in demand – regardless of how it can make an athletic director’s job more difficult.
Limiting loose talk about the job was the primary reason Stricklin decided not to employ a search firm to help find a new coach. While Stricklin respects the work of search firms, he didn’t want more people with knowledge of the search sharing information with the media.
One candidate’s name that did reach the media was Chip Kelly.
You don’t have to talk to Stricklin long to recognize the fondness he has – still – for Kelly.
“Chip is one of those guys who you sit down to have a conversation with, and five hours later you look at your watch and feel like it’s only been 40 minutes,” Stricklin said.
Stricklin said he and Kelly have no hard feelings after the conversations they had regarding the Florida vacancy. Stricklin said Kelly called him just before Christmas, unprompted, simply to chat and see how he was doing.
Stricklin expressed no disappointment in not being able to hire Kelly when we spoke. His enthusiasm and confidence in Dan Mullen’s ability to do the job are over the moon, and his optimism for the future of Gator football is sky-high.
That almost wasn’t the case.
“If Dan said ‘no,’ we could have been in a situation similar to Tennessee,” Stricklin said. “The pool of a candidates is more like a puddle.”
That’s another reality fans don’t recognize. If there is a major vacancy, like Florida or Tennessee, and certain coaches from lower-tier schools no longer are available for the reasons discussed above, you quickly run out of candidates with a proven track record of high-level success on the field, recruiting and running a program.
Stricklin thinks the rate at which universities turn over not only football coaches, but athletic directors and presidents as well, contributes to their being a shortage of all three to fill high-profile vacancies.
Athletic directors have many important responsibilities, none more so than hiring a football coach, and doing so successfully is a lot more difficult than it seems from the outside.
