BleedGopher
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per Athlon:
In 2012, the SEC’s perceived dominance over the rest of college football was an unquestioned fact of life in the sport. Five years later, the conference with the most money, most fertile recruiting base and most passionate following looks like a shadow of its best self, reduced to Alabama and the 13 Dwarves. What the heck happened?
There are enough different answers to that to keep radio call-in shows in business for another five years. But a good place to start is on the sideline: Twelve of the SEC’s 14 teams have replaced their head coach in that span — all of them except Bama and Mississippi State — with underwhelming returns, to say the least. Meanwhile, the exponential inflation in coaches’ salaries has only thrown the mediocrity into high relief. At least five SEC coaches hired in the 2012-13 cycles (Arkansas’ Bret Bielema, Auburn’s Gus Malzahn, Ole Miss’ Hugh Freeze, Tennessee’s Butch Jones, and Texas A&M’s Kevin Sumlin) are facing obvious make-or-break campaigns in 2017, with the implicit promise that not all of them can survive another year. Many of their colleagues are only a losing season or two from the chopping block themselves. With Les Miles’ ouster at LSU, the only remaining coach with tenure is Nick Saban.
To put that situation into context, we’ve ranked the eleven full-time SEC hires from 2012-16 alongside the rest of the hires in the Power 5 conferences in the same span, divided into seven categories based on their performance to date. One positive note for the conference: None of the most recent hires has been so disastrous that they’ve already been fired. By this time next year, though, that won’t be the case.
BUSTS
The not-so-dearly departed:
2. Tracy Claeys, Minnesota (2015-16) Claeys assumed coaching duties from Jerry Kill when health concerns forced Kill into retirement, and it’s debatable how much job security he ever really had. It’s not debatable, however, that Claeys’ first full season was among the Gophers’ best in decades, yielding a 9–4 record, or that he almost certainly would have kept his job if not for his tone-deaf response to the suspension of multiple players for the Holiday Bowl as part of a university investigation into sexual assault.
https://athlonsports.com/college-fo...lege-football-head-coach-hire-power-5-2012-16
Go Gophers!!
In 2012, the SEC’s perceived dominance over the rest of college football was an unquestioned fact of life in the sport. Five years later, the conference with the most money, most fertile recruiting base and most passionate following looks like a shadow of its best self, reduced to Alabama and the 13 Dwarves. What the heck happened?
There are enough different answers to that to keep radio call-in shows in business for another five years. But a good place to start is on the sideline: Twelve of the SEC’s 14 teams have replaced their head coach in that span — all of them except Bama and Mississippi State — with underwhelming returns, to say the least. Meanwhile, the exponential inflation in coaches’ salaries has only thrown the mediocrity into high relief. At least five SEC coaches hired in the 2012-13 cycles (Arkansas’ Bret Bielema, Auburn’s Gus Malzahn, Ole Miss’ Hugh Freeze, Tennessee’s Butch Jones, and Texas A&M’s Kevin Sumlin) are facing obvious make-or-break campaigns in 2017, with the implicit promise that not all of them can survive another year. Many of their colleagues are only a losing season or two from the chopping block themselves. With Les Miles’ ouster at LSU, the only remaining coach with tenure is Nick Saban.
To put that situation into context, we’ve ranked the eleven full-time SEC hires from 2012-16 alongside the rest of the hires in the Power 5 conferences in the same span, divided into seven categories based on their performance to date. One positive note for the conference: None of the most recent hires has been so disastrous that they’ve already been fired. By this time next year, though, that won’t be the case.
BUSTS
The not-so-dearly departed:
2. Tracy Claeys, Minnesota (2015-16) Claeys assumed coaching duties from Jerry Kill when health concerns forced Kill into retirement, and it’s debatable how much job security he ever really had. It’s not debatable, however, that Claeys’ first full season was among the Gophers’ best in decades, yielding a 9–4 record, or that he almost certainly would have kept his job if not for his tone-deaf response to the suspension of multiple players for the Holiday Bowl as part of a university investigation into sexual assault.
https://athlonsports.com/college-fo...lege-football-head-coach-hire-power-5-2012-16
Go Gophers!!