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Evaluating Your Next Job

There are a Number of Considerations Before Commiting to That Next Position. AFM talks exclusively with Urban Meyer, John L. Smith, Mike Stoops, Chris Hatcher, Brian Kelly and Al Borges
by: Richard Scott
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It’s that time of year when the coaching business is buzzing with changes and rumors, with coaches preparing resumes and working the telephones to promote, save or launch a career.
Coaches are renewing old contacts, making new ones and mining every source they can find to help them make the next move.

“There are two types of coaches: those who are sought after, which I’ve been, and those who are not, which I’ve been,” says veteran offensive coordinator Al Borges, whose career has taken him from California high schools to Boise State, Oregon, UCLA, Cal, Indiana and now Auburn. “For years, for three or four years in a row, I was pursued. Then when I went to Indiana and really when I came here, I was not a top candidate for either job.

“That’s different. It’s hard to go in pounding your shoe on the desk saying this is what I want and this is what I demand. I’m not going to do that either way, but you’ve got to be able to sell yourself.”

Selling yourself can almost be the easy part for a confident coach who knows what he has to offer. The more difficult part of the process can be evaluating each job for what it’s worth and deciding if it’s the best move for your family and your career.

The first two questions most coaches usually ask are the easiest and most obvious, and two of the most important:

Can you win?

“The first thing I’d look for is: do you have a chance to be successful? Do you have a chance to win?” says Valdosta State head coach Chris Hatcher, whose name has been mentioned frequently for jobs on the Division I-AA and I-A levels. “That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re winning at that time, but are the resources there? Are they available for you to win? Winning is fun and that’s how you’re measured, so that’s the first thing you’ve got to look at.”

“If you get the right answer on that, then you’ve got to look at whether or not you’re going to get the right support from the university and the community.”

Can you sustain winning?

“Can you recruit there? Are you better than most in your league,” Utah head coach Urban Meyer says. “There are a lot of great coaches out there stuck in places where they wake up every morning about eighth or ninth in their league in facilities and resources and the opportunity to win and they have to coach their hearts out just to win five games.

“There are some places that haven’t had winning seasons in about 12 years and it’s not a good place. Some people say, ‘well, you can make it a good place.’ I think those people have too much ego involved because some places just aren’t very good.”

Beyond the initial questions, though, coaches have to consider a multitude of issues and concerns regarding family, standards and costs of living, schools and fan and media attitude. Head coaches also have to be concerned with how things apply to their prospective assistant coaches and their families.

Remember the old saying “If mama ain’t happy, no one’s happy?” It applies to football coaches and their wives, too. The average coach’s wife is a resilient, independent lady, but if your wife is a small town Southern girl who wants to stay close to her mama and daddy, she might not like that job in a big Northern city. If she’s a big-city girl from the East or West coasts, she might not be too supportive of that move to a rural Western outpost.

And that big raise you expected? It won’t mean much if you move to an area where costs are high and the real estate prices makes even Donald Trump and his comb-over cringe. And how about those property taxes? If they’re so low that you think you’re getting away with something, it could mean your kids are stuck in a backward education system.

Michigan State’s John L. Smith has been fortunate to be married to a supportive wife, Diana, who has followed him from Weber State to Montana, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, Washington State, Utah State and Louisville. Everywhere they’ve gone they tried to create a positive environment for three children to grow, meet new people and experience new things, but only after checking out the area first and making sure it fits the needs of the coaches families.

“The most important thing I’ve considered in every area is the people at that university. The president and the administration and the athletic director have to be supportive or you’re going to have a difficult time succeeding,” Smith says. “But I think it’s also important to know as much as you can about the area, because you want to take your family and your coaches’ families to an area where you can raise your family.

“Then I think you look at the campus, the facilities, the history, the tradition and the fan support they have, because all of thosethings are important.”

Those are just a few of the important questions to ask for any coach evaluating that next potential job. In an effort to gather some experienced advice, American Football Monthly sought out feedback from coaches who have gone through the process in recent years and lived to tell about it.

One of those coaches is Meyer, who went from being a hot young assistant coach to the head coach at Bowling Green in 2001.

After going 17-6 in his first two years at Bowling Green, Meyer recalls that “four or five” schools came calling about he and his staff. At that point he reflected back on his original search process at Bowling Green and applied it to his new situation.

“I think I relied on probably too many people the first time around,” Meyer says. “I have a lot of friends and a lot of friends voiced their opinions and I respect a lot of those people.

“I tried to talk to people who had gone through the wars. It was the same way when you study offense, defense or special teamsand you go to the people who are really good at what they do and manage their lives correctly.”

The second time around, Meyer relied mostly on his most trusted confidants: his wife Shelley, Texas A&M head coach Dennis Franchione and his former boss at Ohio State and Colorado State, Earl Bruce.

“The first things they asked about were my family, because ultimately it’s a family decision first, and ‘can you win there?’” Meyer says. “Then they asked ‘can you recruit there?’ Those are three things you always try to evaluate.”

When Utah emerged as a serious suitor, Meyer says some of the unsolicited advice he received told him he was “nuts” to leave Bowling Green for Utah. Meyer admits “it clouded my judgment there for a little bit.” However, once he narrowed the focus his evaluation process his more trusted feedback provided positive answers regarding all three issues. He also did some research and relied on his experience at Colorado State to determine that former Utah coach Ron McBride had continued to recruit well and had not left the cupboard bare for the next coaching staff.

“Going to a place that’s run into the ground, that’s hard,” Meyer says. “You don’t have the time to prove yourself these days. Look at what happened to Ron Zook. They used to say you have four or five years to build a program. If they tell you that now they’re not being truthful with you. The fans and the media won’t allow it.

“But I knew this was a good place. I knew the previous coach. I had recruited against them and I knew they had good facilities,better facilities than a lot of their opponents, and I knew they had good players here.”

Once Meyer sat down with the Utah leaders, he wanted to make sure he would have the necessary resources to hire and move a quality staff. One current head coach turned down a job six years ago because the cost of living in a large U.S. city would have forced his assistant coaches to live more than an hour away from the office.

“Money can’t be your No. 1 issue,” Meyer says. “It’s more important to have the money to hire the staff you want and pay your staff to work there. You take a head coach and surround him by an average staff, you’ve got an average team. You take an average head
coach and surround him with the best staff in college football, you’ve got a great team.

“There were some places that talked to us and the coache’s wives didn’t want to go there and they weren’t going to go. Those were all big issues and it affected me.”

Like Meyer, first-year Arizona head coach Mike Stoops saw his name rise quickly through the coaching ranks as a hot commodity during jobs as an assistant and defensive coordinator at Kansas State and Oklahoma.

For three or four years Stoops found his name somehow connected with just about every major head coach opening. The truth, however, is that most of those rumors were just that – rumors with no truth behind them. Without naming names, Stoops says “not many” of the indirect inquiries from schools were serious and he wasn’t seriously interested in most of those jobs anyway.

“I wanted a real good shot at a what I thought was a quality job at a place where you can win – where you can win championships,” Stoops says. “So I was going to be selective and not force things. To be honest, I really didn’t want to be a head coach until last year.”

By the time Arizona and Stoops got together, it was actually his first and only formal interview for a head coaching job.

“I wanted to know what kind of support I would get; presidential support, athletic department support, academic support, facilities – those were the things that were important to me,” Stoops says. “How they approached me was very important, too. They approached me very aggressively and made me feel very comfortable and very wanted.”

In addition to his interview with Arizona, Stoops made a few calls to ask around to ask about Arizona’s situation and seeking feedback from Oklahoma basketball coach Kelvin Sampson because Sampson had worked with Arizona athletic director Jim Livengood at Washington State.

Stoops had also already helped himself by keeping a close eye on several of the nation’s more interesting jobs. Arizona just happened to be one of those places, so he was prepared with research and information when university officials contacted him.

“Things had deteriorated over the past five years with internal problems between the coaching staff and the players, and that’s never a good sign,” Stoops says. “But I felt strongly enough what I can bring to a program to be able to overcome that. The other things were a little tougher because it takes time to develop your players to mentally and physically so they can compete at this level.”

Stoops says he knew Arizona wasn’t going to be good immediately, but “I knew it was going to be good. It’s just going to take a couple of years to bring in some players. It’s a great place to live and we’ve got a lot of support so we’ll be allright.

“You don’t get many opportunities like Oklahoma or Florida, so for me Arizona was a great opportunity in a great place that had achieved a lot in the past so I thought there was no reason it couldn’t happen again.”

Brian Kelly also knew immediate success would not come quickly when he left Division II power Grand Valley State for Central Michigan last December but saw CMU as a potential sleeping giant in the MAC. Before he could he accept CMU’s offer he also considered offers from two other schools.

“First and foremost, the most important thing for me was an environment that I could go into that was committed to being successful,” Kelly says. “That commitment has to start from the top, from the president to the athletic director and on down.

“I really felt like meeting with both the president and the athletic director was really crucial in the decision-making process.I wanted to know what kind of committed had been made and was going to be made to the football program.”

CMU got Kelly’s attention by including people from throughout the athletic department in his process. The days when someone like Paul “Bear” Bryant could control an entire athletic department are gone, so you better know who you are working with.

“I think administrators understand now more clearly than ever that people make a big difference in making those kinds of decisions to bring somebody in as a new coach,” Kelly says. “That means getting all the people involved who would be surrounding the new coach and his staff. All of the schools I talked to did a good job of bringing the assistant ADs and compliance people and academic support people into the interview process so we could meet the people we’d be working with on a day-to-day basis. I wasn’t expecting that, but each one of those schools did a good job with that.”

Another job to evaluating a potential job is research. You can rely on the Internet for information and background, but it’s hard to rely on the opinions of strangers.

“It’s clandestine meetings, airports, phone conversations on cell phones in some weird places,” Kelly says. “You’re really trying to gather and put together as much information as you can.”

Most coaches make a few phone calls to trusted sources to check out a school or potential boss.

“History tells you a lot of it,” Hatcher says. “You look back at the previous coaching staffs and that tells you alot of what you need to know. You talk to other coaches in that area or that conference that compete against that school or you talkto former coaches who were there.”

For assistant coaches involved in a potential move to another coaching staff, it’s important to learn all you can about the person you might be working for.

“You want to find out as much as you possibly can about what you’re dealing with because your boss makes your job,” Borges says. “Not just in football, but in anything. If you’ve got a good solid character guy to work for, a guy who knows how to treat his employees, as long as he’s fair even when the pressures on and the situation isn’t going well, you’re probably in a good situation.”

Borges says he’s also looking for someone who’s willing him to let him do the job he’s being hired to do.

“A guy who lets you do what you want to do – that’s what I’m looking for. A guy who will give you the autonomy to do what you believe it takes to move the ball,” Borges says. “And that means when times are difficult, too, not just when times are going great; when you’ve got a two-or three-game losing streak and a guy who won’t come into your office and try to revamp the entire offense. I want the chance to fix it because I know how it works.

“Some of that is ego – I’m willing to admit that. But by the same token the head coach has to have faith in you being a team player and you’re going to do everything you can to help the team win. If he doesn’t believe that, he shouldn’t hire you.”

Borges isn’t asking for a job without accountability or feedback. He’s had his fanny chewed by a head coach before and he knows it will happen again, but he’s looking for a head coach who is who he says he will be, during good and bad times alike.

“You’ve got to have respect for authority,” Borges says. “It doesn’t matter who the head coach is, if he says ‘this is what I want’ then you do it and you go about your business. If you don’t have respect for that authority you won’t make it in this business.”

As far as Borges is concerned, that authority also needs to be reasonable and concerned about his coaches as people.

“I’m also looking for a guy who isn’t going to work you into the ground,” Borges says. “The hours are long enough as it is but I’m not into burning the midnight oil and sleeping in your office. I’ve got a life, too. I’m not leaving at 7 during football season but I’m not leaving at 1 a.m., either.”

Once the connection is made and the school has sold itself as a potential place of livelihood and living for you and your family, it’s just as critical for the coaching candidate to sell
himself as the right fit for the right job.

The key is being real. Don’t sell gimmicks. Don’t be something you’re not. Don’t make promises you can’t or don’t intend to keep.

“I didn’t worry about trying to impress them or not. I was just myself and talked about what I believe in and my strengths and the strong people I could bring in with me,” Stoops says. “I’ve been in rebuilding situations everywhere I’ve been so I hit on my coaching record and my ability to prepare and my defensive experience and knowledge. Those are my strengths. We all have weaknesses but you try to emphasize the things you can bring to a program.”

Once the offer is presented, you and your family come first. Create some quiet time to think or pray. Make some phone calls to key confidants or mentors. Contact an agent or attorney if you need help in understanding the details of the contacts.

At the same time, it’s important to make a timely decision that respects the institution and its needs. If you’re not serious about the job, don’t leave someone hanging when they could be moving on to the next candidate. Be decisive and be honest with everyone involved.

“I probably put off making a decision longer than I needed to,” Kelly says. “In one particular instant I knew down deep it wasn’t the right fit and I should have made that known sooner. If I could do it over again I probably would have done that.

“I think you get caught up, not playing off each other, but in not really letting people know how you feel. Some people would say ‘you’re crazy, don’t tell them how you really feel, wait until you make your decision.’ But you can’t mislead. I don’t think I intentionally mislead anybody, but I think if I ever went through the process again I’d probably be even more direct.”





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