Power and ego
2024-25 College Football Coaching Carousel
Power and ego
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
He was breaking out at North Texas after hiring the extremely inexperienced Graham Harrell fresh out of the NFL as OC/QB coach. The knock on Littrell was that it was a Beckman/Campbell, Hawkins/Petersen situation and it was Harrell who everyone went after.
North Texas took a downturn thereafter and eventually Littrell got fired, seeming to confirm that Harrell was "the good one".
I don't know if that was just wrong and Harrell was a flash in the pan, or if Clay Helton, Neal Brown and Ryan Walters was a disastrously bad series of choices of head coaches to hitch his wagon to, but here we are full circle and both of them have gotten canned midseason.
It's a crazy business.
So often that it seems like a pretty tenuous argument for a firing for cause, as opposed to a pretty ugly act of blackmail by the school to screw Walters out of a bunch of his buyout.
Again, it's a crazy business.
Bret Bielema, as in all things thinking through the big-picture strategy, didn't get married until he'd gotten this sort of behavior out of his system.
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Yep, try to fix it or get out first. Btw, Wikipedia shows he has a wife Tara and two sons. Sad ( for them) if true.
Such a dweeb.
The irony of this topic re: Walters and your username is just too much.
I know my dweebs.
.... additional insight into BBs post game comments?
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Yeah, he's not getting canned for this if the team is 6-1 instead of 1-6. Winning absolves all manner of sins.
redwingillini11
White and Sixth
- North Aurora
So are we going to be on Barry Lunney Jr to Oklahoma watch the rest of the season?
Mr. Tibbs
- southeast DuPage
Just don’t bite the hand that fed you…..and then keep trying to bite it after.
Drink got rid of him at Mizzou….Bret basically threw him a bone when he was about to get canned at Mizzou.
Someone else mentioned that that job had gone to his h--, never mind, sorry
I could be mistaken here, but I think Lunney is the perfect level hire for us at this point. He’s had some questionable play calls here and there but overall is a good, competent P5 coordinator. Historically our offenses have been so atrocious he feels like a revelation, but in reality he’s not setting the world on fire statistically. I think we are around 65 this year in Offense.
So what he’s doing is working, I think we should extend him and give him a pay bump, but I don’t know that his resume will draw the attention of a bigger program like say Kotelnicki does.
Never say never but I see him getting a G5 head coaching gig before he gets poached by a powerhouse program. Which I think is right in the sweet spot of where we want our coordinators to be. JMHO.
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
It's funny how our desire to pretend this isn't true has ebbed and flowed over the years.
This is pretty different than the usual buyout-dodging "oh but we're actually firing him for cause because of a trumped-up NCAA scandal" stuff, IMO. That has a certain fig leaf of puffing up the athletic department's compliance process.
An esteemed public university unilaterally publicizing an extramarital affair by one its two dramatically most prominent and highest paid employees is quite different, some seriously ugly business, it's unambiguously blackmail, and if I am Walters' agent I would have a very strong suspicion Purdue is bluffing about their willingness to really go through with it.
If it's a staffer, particularly someone he hired, it seems like it's pretty easy to paint that as a gross misuse of a influential position which hurts everything from recruiting to day to day operations. The Coach O saga comes to mind in a way.
Too much $ in Lincoln Riley. I think he gets at least another year, although nothing would surprise me.
I was talking to a buddy and we agreed that SC needs a coach that is questionable ethically. In other words, a bit of a scumbag. They should stop pretending like they’re on any moral high ground, because they’re not. It’s a facade. Urban Meyer would’ve been perfect. Might as well bring Pete Carroll back like they did with John Robinson.
Mr. Tibbs
- southeast DuPage
would/could/should they throw enough money at Urban and get him to LA ?
Mr. Tibbs
- southeast DuPage
Mitch Daniels runs a tight ship
if it’s true , RW is GONE & he will fight the buyout or give him 15% to just go away & avoid a lawsuit .
an affair with a staffer is likely spelled out in the contract as cause .
if he’s still up to the task, why not. I don’t know if Meyer is though because a lot has changed, and maybe he likes retirement. The same can be said about poodle Pete, except he’s been at sc before, had a much more successful nfl career, and was saying publicly that he’d love to coach at sc again. It’d be his swan song.
The NIL system has created an environment in which a head coach can create an "all-star" team of his best players from the old school and the new school. However, once you jump into that process, the only way to keep your level of success high is to keep repeating the process every couple of years. I think that's what we're seeing at Indiana and we're going to see a lot more of. Unfortunately, it leaves victims behind at both schools who weren't quite good enough to make the all star roster.