As The Gridiron Turns: October Begins, And So Will The Coaching Changes

By Laurie N. Gallagher, Esq

We’re just getting into the heart of the college football season and the polls have been shuffled from top to bottom. And as the places in the polls are juggled, so are the futures of coaches. For some, the end of the season could be the next game that they lose without enough justification to satisfy the athletic department and the boosters, or it could be the result of off-the-field behavior, or both.

Before the season even opened, the University of Illinois fired its head coach Tim Beckman on August 29 due to his alleged practice of overstepping his boundaries into the medical treatment of athletes, namely discouraging treatment that would prevent them from playing.  Of course, it probably didn’t help Beckman’s fate that he had compiled a lowly 12-25 record, losing all but 4 of the team’s 20 Big Ten conference games during his tenure. But an investigation by The Chicago Tribune found that many of the 50 players interviewed for an article labelled Beckman as gruff and confrontational and verbally abusive.

The Illini’s offensive coordinator Bill Cubit has been named interim head coach for this season.

But a firing just before the first game of the season may be better than a mid-season firing. At least Beckman’s exit left the rest of the season in the hands of a coach who had already been a part of the team’s preparation for the year.

In recent years, coaching changes in the college ranks have not been unusual in the first few weeks of the season. Last year, Charlie Weiss was fired from the University of Kansas before the end of September. In 2013, three programs had removed their head coaches by mid-October: Connecticut fired Paul Pasqualoni and Miami (Ohio) let Don Treadwell go. The third coach was USC’s Lane Kiffin, now the offensive coordinator at Alabama, who, after an early season loss to Ole Miss that dropped the team out of the Top Ten and last week’s social media frenzy about alleged unbecoming off-the-field behavior, is once again subject to speculation about his future.  

Firing a college football coach just 3 or 4 games into the season begs the question: what were administrators thinking in July and August?  What could go so horribly awry on the field during a couple of actual games that wasn’t evident on the practice field during the summer? Or even earlier?

In Beckman’s situation, accusations were leveled against him in the spring by Simon Cvijanovic, an offensive lineman, who claimed that he had been forced to play while injured and was bullied off the team. At that time, Illinois’ AD Mike Thomas dismissed the allegations as a personal attack against Beckman. To be fair, some Illini players say even now that they don’t feel that the firing was justified. But that position apparently changed over the summer.

Just as during the process of hiring a new coach, firing involves a number of factors that must be considered: current players, recruiting, boosters and alumni, fans, prospects for the post-season and, of course, the common denominator in all of these factors: money.

In Beckman’s case, Illinois’ AD Mike Thomas boiled all those factors down to one word: “culture”. In announcing the coach’s dismissal, he said that the information he received from an external review of Beckman’s program “does not reflect our values or our commitment to the welfare of our student-athletes” and doesn’t “reflect the culture we are building with Illinois athletes”.

Whatever the reasons, any firing at the beginning of or during the season requires decisions that affect the heart, the mind and the coffers.

Every situation is different, of course, but the deciding question is: are we better off with the status quo until the end of the year or will it do any more damage if we cut our losses now and start moving  in a different direction?

When schools make the choice to move forward, the first issue is finding the right time to officially cut ties and what to do immediately after. Once you fire your coach, do you leave him in place as a lame duck? Some might find it ludicrous that you would leave a coach in charge of your team after telling him and the world that you no longer have any faith in his abilities. But, at the same time, when that coach knows that he is in job search mode, he may step up his game in hopes of impressing other potential employers. If that happens, the institution ending the relationship may be subject to second-guessing itself should the coach turn the season around or be subject to questions about what was happening before the decision was made that changed afterwards.

If the current coach doesn’t finish out the season, the first step must be to find the person who will lead the team. The circumstances behind the firing are often the determining factor in whether the immediate action is to fill the gap temporarily or go ahead and start the next era now. If the team has a decent record and the termination is more for off-the-field or personal issues than a failure to motivate the team to perform, promoting someone from within may be the best choice so the team can continue its forward progress with a similar system in place to work toward a possible post-season invitation.

What about availability of prospective candidates? Is someone available now that may be at the top of the list of numerous schools that make changes at the end of the year? Is it better to start nurturing that relationship now and try to get that person onboard? Or, if there is not a good fit on the table right now, do you leave the lame duck in place and hope for the best in the off-season shuffling?

Whichever way the firing and replacement is handled, it will have long-term effects on recruiting. If the coach has already made significant strides in bringing heralded high-schoolers to the team for the next season, what will their reactions be? Will they wait to see who the replacement will be or will they start to decommit and look back to their second choices? Will a new coach be likely to attract better recruits?

Personnel decisions can be difficult to make in any occupation. But with today’s high visibility of college football programs and the multiple pressures tugging at the coattails of athletic directors, deciding to fire a coach can make or break a program not just for that year, but for several seasons. The ability to weigh these factors in a manner that will satisfy players, boosters, trustees and recruits and still manage to run a successful program may be a job description that is the definition of this era’s college athletic director.