When we look at coaches, people often look on how many wins they had. I was surprised that Satterfield has performed so poorly at Louisville—he’s got a great QB, lots of funding, and what would superficially look like a better environment than he had at AppState. But, he’s done worse.
It’s more important to look at the difference a coach has made at every stop they’ve had. AppState may have some great factors related to the school or to their Athletic Department (and maybe we want their AD more than their HC). People have said that Mullen isn’t a bad recruiter because his classes have been top 20, but what were the classes of the other coaches?
Listening to other coaches or to sportswriters is really misleading—many of them graded the Collins hire a “B”, for example.
I think this is one reason that we should let the search agency do their job, and that we should ruthlessly question their results to make sure that they’re grounded in reality.
We shouldn’t just ask whether they’re a good or great coach, but also what they need to succeed.
Also, from Alice and the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough"
We swapped from "doing more with less" to "NFL lite". Unless we've figured out where we're going AND it's a place that we should be going, then we'll churn through a lot of people until we luck into results.
