2021-22 College Football Coaching Carousel
- Status
DeonThomas
- South Carolina
DeonThomas
- South Carolina
I'll second that nomination.
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
His schtick would fall flat in five minutes in that market with that level of recruit.
I know the AD hired Fickell at Cincinnati but that doesn't seem right either.
USC is not a hard hat, lunch pail, blue collar football program. USC is Hollywood. Maybe doubly so in the NIL era. You need someone who will let USC be USC.
Franklin seems like barking up the right tree. If anything goes wrong for Kliff Kingsbury in the NFL, that's the kind of guy they should be looking for.
They probably think they could do better than Tony Elliott, but they thought they could do better than Pete Carroll too, that's another guy with the right vibe.
Whoever it is, hire a monster staff of recruiters and get to work letting the best players in California play where they've always wanted to play anyway.
mhuml32
- Cincinnati, OH
USC is Hollywood yet you don't think a schtick is important? These two beliefs are not inclusive of each other. Fleck is all about narrative and moving to a town like Hollywood is a glove fit for him and his beliefs. Coaching in LA takes plenty of schtick. Case in point:
I've been open on here for a while now that USC or UCLA would be a great fit for him, particularly USC.
I don’t follow USC at all. 46-24 (.657) in his 6+ seasons there. Went undefeated in the regular season as recently as last year. Took over after the complete chaos of the Kiffin and Sarkesian eras.
What am I missing here?
What am I missing here?
Go Nats 88 Illini
Fairfax, VA
High expecations and the frustration with the $$ folks supporting the program? Like Mackovic getting canned at Texas. As star at Illinois a bust at 41-28 at UT.
the national
- the Front Range
They all wish they had their “Ryan Day”, only losing once in the regular season (against Oregon last sat). They want to dominate and then March into the playoffs. They haven’t been relevant in the playoffs or nations championship for a while and find that completely unacceptable.
He couldn't accomplish anything against Lovie's defense.
Bill O'brien could make a lot of sense for USC. Elite offensive play caller and can probably handle the pressure.
Like others have said, expectations are the main reason. Helton was never supposed to have the interim tag taken from his title, because he really wasn’t a great fit — southern guy in SoCal. But after winning conference in first year, the players wanted him and USC AD (believe it was Haden) had all kinds of problems and gave job to him before running much if any kind of search. Then 3 years later he had the audacity of finishing under .500 and compounded it with bringing in a overall recruiting class of 20 (4th in conf.) followed by a class that was 64th overall and 12th in Pac 12. USC doesn’t finish under .500 and doesn’t fail to recruit well — especially in its own backyard. He also had the audacity to lose quite a few of their top out of conference games (think he only beat ND once, but sure he had losing record against Irish). A lot of people thought new AD would make change after 2019 season, but he had all kinds of other fires to put out in the athletic department, so he decided to wait on Helton until he could give him a thorough look of his own. So when a guy who wasn’t really a good fit culturally and not considered a great coach overall loses to Stanford 42-28 at home (a Stanford team that lost to Kansas St. at home the week before while scoring only 7 points), AD said he had seen enough. Helton just didn’t seem like the guy who could make them consistent winners at the top of the conference — giving them real chance at playoffs every year.
PJ Fleck, while he is a little cheesy, I think he'd kill it there - and have the perfect personality for USC.
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
Big difference between A schtick and THAT schtick. Just to pick the most obvious surface-level thing, no way is USC putting a dang oar on their uniforms, nor should they.
My feelings on Fleck are well documented and goodness knows I'd love to have him out of the conference, but I think he'd embarrass himself out there. So I guess that makes two reasons I'm rooting for it!
USC signed the 64th ranked recruiting class in the country in 2020. That's almost impossible, imagine Ohio State randomly going 1-11 some season.
And that's the danger with this job, say what you will about the "chaos" of Kiffin and Sark, Helton inherited one of the most talented rosters in the country, head and shoulders above the rest of that conference. That's not what he's leaving behind. He took over a team with Sam Darnold, JuJu Smith-Shuster, Ronald Jones, and Adoree Jackson. There aren't skill players like that on that roster anymore.
But if they make the right hire there will be, that has to be the easiest school to recruit to in the country, and again NIL may only make that stronger. Imagine a world in which Reggie Bush's situation was legal.
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
Another fun factoid, #1 Bama and #2 Georgia are both helmed by 5-star LA-area QB's who decommitted from and transferred away from USC, respectively.
Y’ouch!!!
The Bryce Young decommit hurt, but to be fair JT Daniels leaving is the same thing that is happening all over country — lose starting job and transfer. Daniels wasn’t exactly lighting it on fire at USC. Can’t remember if he lost his job to injury or not, but Slovis has put up good numbers.
I think the USC job would expose Fleck for how fake he reaslly is. Fickell will be thier first call but ain't cut out for it(to be fair I don't know what big job he is a fit for). Have hard Stoops, wouldn't be surprised if he entertained it. The real question is Urban Meyer though.
I think JT got hurt and then Slovis showed enough to keep him the starter.
I would hope Fickell stays at Cincinnati. I think only job he leaves Cincy for is Ohio State and with Cincy's move to Big12, I would think that he stays put and builds his roster up for Big 12 competition.
Matt Campbell's name has been thrown in the list of candidates as well. I think he stays at ISU and sees the build through with only exception being NFL gig?
Stoops in my opinion seems like the name that USC would go for.
If USC calls, no way Campbell stays in Ames. He would absolutely kill it there.
I just remember right around Beckman’s first game against Western Michigan, either right before or right after, one of the local beat reporters got to talking to some of the WMU press and they told him, “You guys hired the wrong guy off of that staff.”
I seem to recall the local beat reporter got skewered for revealing that publicly, but the WMU guys ended up being so right.
It ended up a horrible indictment of Thomas’ vetting process when stuff like that was floating out there just as Beckman’s first game was being played. Made you wonder if he did any background work on Beckman at all.
Definitely!
Beckman was more of a CEO type of coach who loved to micro-manage. Toledo got better after Beckman left. Unfortunately for us, we got worse.
I'm not sure what ended up being the worse hire - Tepper, Beckman or Lovie? Tepper inherited a top 3 or 4 program in the Big 10 and ran it into the ground, so probably have to go with him. Lovie was a massive disappointment and had an opportunity to do much better than he did, so he comes next. Beckman's /Cubit's record was not far off where his predecessor finished, so I guess I'd put him third on this list.
Ed Orgeron was the D Line coach under Pete Carroll and recruited LA like no other. During the crisis years, he became interim head coach and went something like 6-2. The players would run through a brick wall for him. But the USC boosters didn't want him because he wasn't like them. So what did he do? Win the national championship at LSU. The other problem at USC was the succession of bad athletic directors.
Coach O's days at LSU are numbered. He is the perfect guy to get top talent just not necessarily the guy you want steering the ship. As for USC you are right on the poor leadership, Clay should have been canned 2 years ago.
There were extenuating circumstances with both the Tepper and Smith hires that weren’t there for the Beckman hire.
Tepper was promoted by a committee overseeing DIA before Guenther was hired. No nationwide search was conducted. It was a completely backwards way of going about it by a bunch of academics who didn’t know what they were doing and the inflection point for these 3 decades of mostly football futility.
Whitman was hired at an extremely awkward time of year - again because the people above him don’t know what they’re doing - right before Spring practice and he had to make the quick decision as to whether to get a coach outside of the usual hire/fire cycle or go with the lame duck interim coach for a second full season/recruiting cycle. It was a catch 22 and unlikely to turn out well regardless of what he did.
Of the three, Beckman was the one where the AD had the opportunity to look over the entire field of nationwide candidates and bring in “his” guy. Beckman took Illinois from what was merely a bad football program into the dumpster fire it was when Whitman took over.
- Status