Tuesdays with Gorney: 'Loyalty' is an empty buzz word for most coaches
College football coaches love to bellyache about their packed recruiting schedules and now the complaints du jour are how the transfer portal and NIL are impacting the game in negative ways.
Spare me your millionaire crocodile tears.
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Coaches, athletic directors and the decision-makers on these college campuses should look in the mirror and see that coaching turnover is negatively impacting the lives of thousands of college football players – a vast majority of them not reeling in big NIL deals – and come to grips with what that means to the bigger picture.
Jedd Fisch seems like a good guy. He’s been good to us and our National Signing Day show. But Fisch held a team meeting Sunday that lasted only a few minutes to inform his Arizona team he was leaving for Washington.
An hour or so later, Fisch posted a video on social media calling out Husky Nation as he was about to board a private plane to Seattle. According to a source, Fisch told his assistant coaches that he’s leaving and if you’re coming, let’s go and if not best of luck to you.
Quarterback Noah Fifita, receiver Tetairoa McMillan and others made Arizona a 10-win team this season. Best of luck to them, I guess.
That’s a really bad look. But Fisch has been a coach since 1997 and has only stayed in two jobs - an assistant with the Baltimore Ravens and the Arizona job - for three years max. Everything else was dip in, dip out, thanks for the memories.
Fisch is just the latest example of this worrying trend in the sport: It’s no longer about getting a job, establishing roots, raising a family in that town and winning games. Maybe it never was. It’s about squeezing every penny possible out of the system and then parlaying wins into a better job.
The players are just pawns ready to be toppled to protect the king - who wins the game laughing with a big new deal on a private jet.
The College Football Playoff was played just over two weeks ago.
Since that time, Alabama coach Nick Saban retired, fellow playoff contender Washington saw its coach, Kalen DeBoer, take the Crimson Tide job, Michigan might lose Jim Harbaugh back to the NFL (amid a sign-stealing investigation that has still not been remedied by the NCAA) and then there’s Texas coach Steve Sarkisian, who just finished his third season in Austin and said he didn’t have interest in the Alabama opening. Good for him.
This is a Power Five pandemic, not relegated to one person, one school or one conference.
The ACC has two coaches – Clemson’s Dabo Swinney and Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson - who have been at their school for a decade or more. Miami hasn’t had a coach last five full seasons since Larry Coker in 2006.
Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy (19 seasons) is the only coach in the entire Big 12 to last longer than a decade and how many times has his name been shopped for other jobs?
Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz (25 years) and Penn State’s James Franklin (10) are the only ones to last that long in the Big Ten. Harbaugh will get to 10 after next season if he doesn’t parlay the national championship into big bucks with the Los Angeles Chargers or another NFL franchise. He might be looking to get out of Dodge if the NCAA brings the hammer down.
The meat grinder SEC is of particular interest. Texas A&M brilliantly decided to give former coach Jimbo Fisher, a wild disappointment in College Station, $100 million guaranteed whether he won anything or not. In six seasons with the Aggies, Fisher never won 10 games, finished 45-25 and 27-21 in the SEC. Former coach Kevin Sumlin had a better overall winning percentage.
Only Kentucky’s Mark Stoops (11 years) has lasted more than a decade in the conference where it just means more. In the SEC West, Alabama, Texas A&M and Mississippi State have hired new coaches for next season. Four years for Ole Miss’ Lane Kiffin and Arkansas’ Sam Pittman (who the fan base wanted fired after a 4-8 year and one conference win) are the standard-bearers in that division.
The Pac-12 has been disbanded but those conference schools follow a similar pattern. Of the 12 schools only Utah’s Kyle Whittingham (19) has lasted more than 10 years. Washington, Arizona and Oregon State have or will have new coaches and then Stanford’s Troy Taylor, Arizona State’s Kenny Dillingham and Colorado’s Deion Sanders are wrapping up their first seasons.
Coaches preach loyalty, camaraderie and team unity. When their agents preach a bigger check somewhere else, many of them cannot wait for NetJets to come pick them up.
But coaches are only partially to blame for what’s happening across the sport. Athletic directors throw asinine contracts at these guys in a desperate attempt to please well-heeled boosters who have a childlike obsession with winning a national championship. Texas A&M AD Ross Bjork preached how special a place Texas A&M is. Oh, yeah, he’s the leading candidate for the open Ohio State AD job now. See ya.
All the while, Arizona players are walking out of a five-minute team meeting teary-eyed and wondering if all the work they put in to make their program relevant again was just so Fisch could get a bigger job somewhere else. Sure seems like it.
Michigan’s players will be checking social media this week to see if Harbaugh, the guy who sat in their living rooms during the recruiting process and talked about their future together, is off to the NFL again. Transfer portal DL Jaxson Moi this past weekend was literally checking into his hotel room for his official visit to Washington when he learned DeBoer was leaving for Alabama. Hope he enjoyed some room service.
This is one of those situations where there are concerns everywhere you look. Coaches shoulder plenty of the blame. Athletic directors and boosters do, too. Even fans, who one day celebrate the new coach coming to town only to turn on him after not getting immediate results, do, too. How many fan bases out there – I could easily name a few – just want a new coach hired so they can bitch and complain about them on Day 2.
The transfer portal and NIL are to blame as well. Recruiting is difficult enough, hours on planes and in rental cars and hotels to suck up to ego-inflated teenagers who think they alone are the key to a national championship.
At 72 years old and with seven rings, one wonders if Saban just had enough. Good for him if that’s the case. But other coaches complain about the same thing and rightfully so: No time for actual Xs and Os, almost all the time dedicated to recruiting. And now with portal and NIL and recruiting your own roster because other schools are coming in with juicier NIL deals to steal your best players.
Once all this toothpaste gets out of the tube, there’s no putting it back in. And coaches have a lot of reasonable complaints that need to be addressed more thoroughly.
But first, lots of these guys should look in the mirror. A lot of problems are first solved that way.
Chasing the next best job might give you a fuller bank account. A lot of times, it also makes you full of something else.