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Tag Archives: Baylor

A No-Win in Waco

26 Thursday May 2016

Posted by itlneil in Coaches

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Baylor

The dissolution of Baylor’s football coaching staff, about three months before the Bears kick off the ’16 season, has consumed much of my morning. Until today, I thought the hiring of Lovie Smith at Illinois had been late, but that’s nothing compared to what’s happening in Waco with Art Briles now out of the picture. For several hours now, I’ve fielded texts from friends and associates. It’s a weird, wild time.

I talked to a few friends in the business who handle coaches to get their feedback on the situation. Would they send a client into the unsettled situation that Baylor offers? Bay Harbor Islands, Fla.-based Brian Levy of Goal Line Sports, who represents several hot young college and NFL coaches as well as Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin, said he’d stay away.

“I think with this situation, you’re not gonna send an up-and-coming guy,” he said. “The program is great, but it has a lot of problems. With the President (Kenneth Starr) on the chopping block and the AD (Ian McCaw) too, I don’t know what they’re going to do and how they’re going to restructure. They’ll probably want to get a big name to reestablish dignity and order there, and they’ve gotta bring in the right guy.”

Brian said it could be a no-win situation with so many variables and so little time until the season starts.

“Do (the circumstances that led to Baylor’s upheaval) have a lot to do with the caliber of players they recruited? I can’t answer that. They may have been taking a lot of guys whose ACT and SAT scores are not the greatest and they get them in. Sometimes those are the kids you have to babysit a lot. These coaches aren’t looking to be babysitters. They want structure, and you don’t know how these programs are run. There’s no accountability and no system set up for the player to come in and ask the right questions and get the right results before the program imploded. All these big sports supporters who will do anything to win, that doesn’t go over well (with the better coaches), and then all of the sudden you have a disjointed program.

“(The school will) have to spend money. I really believe they’ll try to keep the continuity this year. Who are you gonna get (at this point)? It won’t be a big-name guy. You can’t get a guy from the NFL at this point. Your next coach will be a disciplinarian, an experienced, veteran coach who will bring them respectability. . . At this point, you can’t build a staff.”

He said the team is probably conducting two searches simultaneously.

“This (hiring) process will start immediately for next year. Now, the interim head coach could do an incredible job. You don’t know. But I’m telling you, anyone with the stench of the past regime they will want to get rid of. As we’ve seen with the Lions, who got rid of their whole offensive staff. I think you’ll see that there. Will get new a new President and a new AD, and then they will immediately begin the search for a new head coach.”

 

A bit about our service

16 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by itlneil in Coaches

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Arizona State, Art Briles, Baylor, Chad Morris, Clemson, Football business, Inside the League, Kliff Kingsbury, New York Jets, NFL, sports agent, Texas Tech, Todd Graham

I’ve alluded to the fact that I’m speaking at a clinic in San Angelo this week. I wanted to expand a bit on the subject of my talk and why I’ll be there.

I’m one of six partners in Champions Search Firm. We’ve got some cool videos and we’ve even been referenced (indirectly) on si.com once, but we prefer to stay in the background (though that’s becoming harder and harder to do). Our mission is simple. We work with schools that have vacancies on their athletic staffs, though at this point I’ll admit the only positions we’ve helped fill are head coach and/or athletic director, though we have the bandwidth to help in much more than that. Soon, our website will provide a way for school districts to look for coaches, sorting them by their qualifications, experience level, or other criterion.

I know that coaching high school football may not seem glamorous or lucrative, and to some degree that’s true. However, salaries aren’t that bad after a few years, and the facilities and stadiums are very nice: two high school facilities (Galena Park ISD Stadium outside Houston and Eagles Stadium in Allen, outside Dallas) have hosted college football all-star games since 2007. Meanwhile, high school coaches here often use their careers as platforms into college and pro football. Fun fact: as recently as 1997, four of the hottest coaches in college football — Baylor head coach Art Briles, Texas Tech head coach Kliff Kingsbury, Arizona State head coach Todd Graham and Clemson offensive coordinator Chad Morris — were coaching or playing Texas high school football. That same year, Jets Director of College Scouting Jeff Bauer was coaching high school football in the Houston area.

We’ve been fortunate to have helped schools hire more than 30 coaches in the last eight years, plus one college coach. Typically, we’re engaged by the school and we help them through the hiring process, conducting interviews and doing background checks, and then recommend a predetermined number of finalists. The school then picks the candidate it feels is the best fit.

We’ll have more on our firm and keep you posted on the clinic here later this week, so stay tuned.

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