Put yourself in the athletic director’s chair. It’s 2022, and you’ve decided to fire your coach. Coaching hires are hard to make and even harder to get right. Good coaches have bad years and bad coaches have good years. There are no sure things, and there are always coaches who surprisingly pan out.
The success of a modern AD hinges on three things: 1. Hiring a football coach 2. Raising money 3. Building facilities. People can quibble about pillars two and three, but there is little doubt that No. 1 is the most important in major college sports, considering how the football program’s success has a knock-on effect on the university side as well. So you have to nail this, because you may not get another opportunity to make a hire—rightly or wrongly, AD tenures are increasingly tied to the success or failure of their football coaches, and there are dozens of other sports to pay attention to, as well as various fundraising efforts and potential responsibilities on conference or NCAA committees. But you’re in the seat, so you make the call.
College athletics sits between its amateur roots and its professionalized reality, especially at the Power 5 level, and how ADs use external assistance in hiring is part of that. An AD has worked their entire career to get into the position to hire a football coach. A good selection can make their career as an administrator from a public perception standpoint. So how do you go about it?
