Posted by bambi2godzilla on 12/24/2007, 11:27 am
63.249.102.18
Dick Tomey gets all sorts of press here. He interviewed at UCLA in 1976 and was also interested in the UTEP job that went to Mike Price.
This is a great read -- congrats to Billy Witz.
Search for college football coaches has gotten tougher
Billy Witz
Los Angeles Daily News
12/24/2007
When UCLA football coach Dick Vermeil left UCLA for the NFL after the 1976 Rose Bowl, it didn't take athletic director J.D. Morgan long to search for a successor.
On a Tuesday night, he interviewed three assistants - Terry Donahue, Lynn Stiles and Dick Tomey. The next day, he hired Donahue.
UCLA's search for a successor to Karl Dorrell, who was fired earlier this month, has been considerably different.
UCLA hired a consultant to assist with the search. Athletic director Dan Guerrero and assistant athletic director Bob Field have flown to Philadelphia, Kansas City, Dallas, Eugene, Ore., and who knows where else - sometimes on a private plane - to interview candidates.
Some, most notably Oregon's Mike Bellotti, have said thanks but no thanks. Two of them, Rick Neuheisel and Al Golden, have been flown to Los Angeles to meet with UCLA chancellor Gene Block. Defensive coordinator DeWayne Walker, who served as the Bruins' interim head coach for the LasVegas Bowl, is expected to do the same later this week.
The search is now on its 21st day.
"Everything has changed," said Tomey, the former Arizona coach who is now at San Jose State. "With agents, the salaries, with the Internet, with talk radio. All those things have changed the process - and obviously the dollars."
Stakes are higher
College football has undergone an explosive financial growth over the past decade. If Notre Dame's football program were a stand-alone entity, it would be valued at $101 million, according to Forbes magazine's analysis last month.
Thus, hiring the stewards of these programs has become a high-stakes proposition for universities. The average college football coach's salary topped $1million this year, according to an analysis by USA Today. When Alabama hired Nick Saban a year ago, it lured him from the Miami Dolphins with an eight-year, $32 million contract.
Committing millions of dollars to a new head coach might be reason to proceed with caution, but the attention from fans and media demands immediate action. Of the 17 openings this year, only two - SMU and Michigan - have taken longer to fill than UCLA's.
"It's interesting that on a university level, it often takes 18months to two years to hire a president or dean," Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart said. "Yet in a two- to four-week period, you're expected to find someone to lead one of the most visible programs at the university. That's a daunting task.
"Everyone says have a name in your pocket, but there are a lot of other considerations - agents, attorneys, advisers, the families of coaches. There's a lot of moving parts and some things you can't know or won't know until you get into that process."
Checking references
Increasingly, athletic directors are turning to head hunters to assist in the search. These consultants help develop a list of candidates, make initial contacts with agents to gauge their clients' interest and salary demands, and do background checks so that nobody ends up like Notre Dame when it hired George O'Leary, only to have it revealed by a newspaper that he'd fabricated his playing career on his resume.
"The resumes at this level and the materials they all present are all slick - it could be a script for a Hollywood presentation," said former Cal athletic director Steve Gladstone, who hired Jeff Tedford in 2001 without using a search firm.
Gladstone was checking references for a candidate whom he hadn't met, an NFL assistant. So, he called an NFL coach to ask about him.
"I got, `Oh, he's the greatest,"' Gladstone said. "He's got great management skills, tactical abilities, he was just fired up. So I called a friend who played pro football and said `I just got off the phone with coach so-and-so about this one guy.' He said, `Uh, Steve, he just fired him last year."'
This explains why Nebraska athletic director Tom Osborne, who retired as a coach after winning back-to-back NCAA championships, recently employed a consulting firm.
"It's not just giving them a list with names and phone numbers," said Jed Hughes, a former UCLA and NFL assistant coach who is a head hunter for the New York firm Spencer Stuart. "Athletic directors can talk to other athletic directors, but unless you know someone very well, getting the right information on an individual isn't always easy.
"At Ohio State, I did 20 references on Jim Tressel. Clearly, I have access to people that other people aren't going to have. That can be a huge difference-maker. What coach is involved with a cheerleader? Does a coach have a degree? What about his behavioral habits, his social habits, how they work with others? There are all sorts of social pieces that you may not find on paper or in an interview."
Hughes said his firm charges $200,000 per search, perhaps explaining why he does no more than one NFL and one college search per year.
Nebraska spent $75,000, according to a school official. UCLA is believed to have spent about half that much on Bill Rees, a former UCLA assistant with Chicago-based Reilly Partners.
Not that this guarantees much of anything beyond a well-vetted candidate pool.
Gladstone, who still serves as Cal's crew coach, received plenty of scorn when the search he conducted - along with the Cal rugby coach and two associate athletic directors, one a former Cal football captain - dragged on for five weeks.
Now, with Tedford having turned a program that had won 12 games in five seasons into a perennial Rose Bowl contender, the laughing has long since ceased.
"The structure is not going to yield the best candidate," said Gladstone, whose rowing teams have won eight national championships. "What it takes is individuals to suss out human nature.
"I don't think it matters if you're coaching football, wrestling or rowing, coaching is coaching. The qualities of a gifted coach are fungible. I (was) looking for a person who doesn't have the desire to win, but somebody with a profound need to win. Whether it's business or writing or coaching, there are people who are going to define themselves by their work, and when you bump into those people, there will be a full measure to the work they're engaged in."
Coach-hunting season
At Alabama, which is on its fifth coach in eight years, there has been a new, almost seasonal, sport to capture the fervor of the state. Along with football and spring football, there is now coach-hunting season.
Five years ago, when Alabama was looking for a replacement for Dennis Franchione, who had just left for Texas A&M, a posting on a message board mentioned a Web site, flightaware.com, that could track any commercial or private flight.
Soon, the Birmingham News reported that a booster's plane had been parked in Coeurd'Alene, Idaho, waiting for word to zip down to Pullman, Wash., to pick up previously under-the-radar candidate Mike Price when he accepted the job.
Now, flightaware.com has become a de rigueur tool for reporters and fans, alike. The flight-tracking software led to the discovery early this year that Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga was meeting with USC coach Pete Carroll - in Costa Rica.
Alabama, though, remains ahead of the curve. Not only is there a stable of booster planes to choose from, but when all eyes became fixed on the Tuscaloosa airport, athletic director Mal Moore began flying out of nearby Bessemer, Ala.
"The press is very interested, but the Internet - even though it might be right one out of 10 times - and talk radio have changed the way you have to do business in athletics," said John McMahon, president pro-tem of the Alabama Board of Trustees. "It's very difficult to keep anything confidential."
UCLA found that out last week when Guerrero flew from Las Vegas to Eugene to meet with Bellotti. At first, Bellotti denied to local reporters that the meeting took place, then acknowledged it that evening, and turned down the job the next day.
"Most high-profile coaches are in a terrible situation," McMahon said. "A lot of them are willing to listen, but don't want to be perceived as disloyal. Sometimes they may not even have a serious interest, but they may want to just listen."
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