Posted by bambi2godzilla on 12/24/2007, 11:25 am
63.249.102.18
Continued...
Behind the scenes
And then there are some who just want to be heard.
Barnhart, who has hired football and basketball coaches at Oregon State and Kentucky, said he once received a call during a major-sport search from a man who had built a multimillion dollar business. He was willing to cash out his business, and give the money to the university if Barnhart hired him. (We'll assume Kentucky basketball is the only job that could inspire such lunacy).
"The funny part is we checked it out and it was for real," Barnhart said. "I was stunned that someone would want to toss his life savings away. I said, `There's no way I want to do that with your life.' It probably would not be one of his best life decisions. Nor ours."
When the Texas-El Paso job became open in 2003, Tomey was interested. He liked El Paso and it wasn't far from Tucson, Ariz., where in 14 years he had taken Arizona to its best seasons. But Tomey, then an assistant with the San Francisco 49ers, heard that athletic director Bob Stull was leaning toward hiring Price, the former Washington State coach.
"So I find out from someone that the El Paso newspaper is running an online poll about who should be the head coach," Tomey said. "Mike's got 80 percent and hardly anyone else has anything. I figured it would probably be important to look like people are interested in you, so I get on the phone and talk to some friends to get online and vote. The thing starts changing a little.
"Then my wife starts calling friends. A son of one friend found a way to break into the thing and start to fix it. We ended up being way ahead in the poll. One of my wife's friends is a poet. She calls and asks, didn't we win? And what were we trying to win?"
Tomey is laughing while telling the story.
Unfortunately, this not being a race for a seat on the Politburo, Price won. But it shows that coaches don't check their drive to win when they set down their whistle.
"You're competing," USC coach Pete Carroll said. "You're looking for ways to better your situation, you've got people calling in - doing whatever you can in a timely fashion to present your case."
USC turned to Carroll after striking out on attempts to hire Dennis Erickson, Belotti and Mike Riley. Carroll was far from the hot commodity he is now - he'd been out of coaching for a year after being fired twice in the NFL, hadn't coached in college in nearly 20 years, and had to convince athletic director Mike Garrett that this wasn't Paul Hackett redux.
Mostly, though, he wanted to show he wanted the job.
"After I interviewed, I sat down at the beach waiting two or three days for them to make the call," Carroll said. "I went to the Loyola-(Long Beach) Poly game down on the sidelines. I talked to (then-assistant) Eddie Orgeron a lot. He wanted to stay on. I was trying to get a feel for what was happening. I was working."
The interview process
The importance of the actual interview appears to be in inverse proportion to the success of the candidate: the more successful, the less important. In fact, Carroll said that in the case of Bellotti talking with UCLA, it was more a case of the coach doing the interviewing.
Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh, a relative newcomer to coaching, said in the four interviews he has had for head coaching positions he has mostly answered questions.
"The coach needs to convey his vision for the program and his plan for how you get to that vision," said Harbaugh, whose brother John, an assistant coach with the Philadelphia Eagles, interviewed with UCLA. "Who the key staff hires would be, what you'd do with offense, defense and special teams - the nuts and bolts - and the kind of people you want to get into your program. You're explaining what your philosophy is."
As their search narrows, Guerrero and Block have plenty to consider. With Neuheisel, there is the baggage of his stops at Washington and Colorado - both of which ended up on probation when he left. With Golden, how do they evaluate a 5-19 record at a downtrodden program like Temple? And as for Walker, are there qualms about hiring another coach, like Dorrell, without any head coaching experience?
They can only hope the step-by-step approach is as fruitful as the snap decisions of Morgan, who hired Tommy Prothro, Pepper Rodgers, Vermeil and Donahue - Vermeil later taking two teams to a Super Bowl, and Prothro and Donahue ending up in the College Football Hall of Fame.
"Sometimes, like any relationship, you put on a new shoe and it takes a while to break in," said Barnhart, who hired Erickson at Oregon State and Rich Brooks at Kentucky. "Certainly there's good fits in different areas, but each program, each administration has to determine what will work for them. I don't think any relationship is perfect from the get-go. But at the end of the day, you'd like to have someone you enjoy working with."
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