Why does this coaching carousel feel off?

[Alex C]

I have been hearing and thinking about the travels of Lane's family and he has been around a bit. He has Ole Miss working and is the son of a legendary coach in Monte.

Here begins what I do not understand. Why is he the top candidate for so many searches? He has a longer history that is neutral or bad- Tenn, USC, the Raiders to name a few.... But he was a Saban rehab project (so is Sark, but when we hired him there were not schools and NFL teams clamoring for him, although Lane had 2 stops as a HC between the 2 events)

Here is where that thinking took me- coach rankings based on some categories. These are my impressions and and totally subject to my biases (which I lay out some below). But it also made me think about James Franklin and Sark. Penn St knew who Franklin was. I do not know if there is someone ready to be better. So I decided to rank some known current coaches and some Championship winners to try to keep in context Sark is a great coach (I am no Sark hater, so I continue to root for him) and the number of truly great coaches that are proven and can repeat success is small.

 

I welcome banter/ comments/ feedback or any challenge on how I rated them. My ultimate conclusion was: I would not want to be looking for a coach right now. 

 

Some assumptions:

1) Some of these coaches have long runways and some are short. I am not giving a lot of benefit of the doubt to the unproven side
2) I watch Texas religiously, and then the SEC some, and don't watch much from other conferences
3) These are gut reactions and may be a little nuanced by coordinators, schedules, etc, and are my interpretation on how i would rank them in a coaching search. (I don't claim to be right- for instance if Kirby has had more top 5 defenses than Venables)

Here is my ranking list:

[Roysterr]

Player Development under Mack Brown would not be a B+ in my opinion. lower 

[Alex C]

I thought a lot about that, too. I tried to remove recency bias of his last few years where the team got soft. 

If I look at the number of NFL players that were on the early to mid 2000s teams, the recruiting was good but those players who stuck around 3 or 4 years got better and played on Sundays.

[ArizonaLonghorn]

Hypothetically, say Sark wants to leave (for whatever reason) and CDC is OK with it - no buyout, nothing like that, just a mutual amicable parting of the ways.  Texas job is open.

There are only two coaches on the list who just might (possibly) come here that I think would do an excellent job, based on what they've done the past say 5 years - I'm leaving out Kirby, Dabo, Saban, Cignetti - the usual extremely unlikely or unobtainables.

Marcus Freeman and Dan Lanning are the two I think would be great fits at Texas.  I know there are solid reasons that might keep them in their current jobs, but those are the two I'd go for who seem even remotely feasible, probably in that order.

What do you guys think?  Any other big names that you think are interested?  Would Freeman or Lanning be suitable for you?

[Jeff Howe]

The realistic pool of college coaches isn't as deep as maybe some folks making decisions at other programs thought it would be.

Throw in a shallow pool of proven candidates for NFL jobs and those who don't get their top choice could be going pretty far down the wish list to hire a coach. 

[Alex C]

Is this a product of the time to fire (TTF- a new metric in the NIL era!) being quicker over the past few years in the 12 team playoff cycle? 

The fact that Lane was the definitive "Hot" coach always seemed weird to me as he is slightly better than average in a P4 setting, in my opinion.

I wonder how much the retirement of Saban plays a role, too, as there were always coordinators in his org that were in the mix with up and coming head coaches. 

Knowing the coaches that were "poachable" were Kiffin, Rhule, Drink, and Sumrall makes it seem a bit of a letdown compared to previous cycles. (And maybe its the money keeping many names like Lanning, Cignetti, Smart, Day, etc completely out of consideration)

Thoughts @Jeff Howe?