treyuca So close!
Coach X is Bret Bielema at Illinois.
Coach Y is Bret Bielema at Arkansas
Coach Z is Bret Bielema at Wisconsin.
One guy, three different situations, three different outcomes. One of them is 44 games over .500, another 10 over, and then the other is 5 under, including 18 under in conference play whereas the other two are both over .500.
So he was really good at Wisconsin, has been pretty darn good at Illinois, and was … not as good in between. Did he just forget how to coach for five years? Is Bret Bielema a bad coach or a good coach? Wisconsin Bielema looks pretty damn good. Arkansas Bielema maybe not so much … but in retrospect, maybe not so bad, either.
I say that to illustrate that sometimes a program’s success, or lack thereof, isn’t necessarily all because of the head coach. There are a whole lot of factors that come into play into having a successful football program, these days in particular – many of which are beyond the head coach’s purview. Depending on the situation, good coaches can lose a lot, and lesser coaches can win.
Firing your coach doesn’t guarantee success, and keeping him doesn’t guarantee failure. I get that the opposite can also be true – it’s all a gamble.
Regardless of whether we change coaches, we’re going to need to change the overall situation with the program if we want to have any reasonable hope of consistently being near the top of the UAC. The level of investment has to meet the level of expectation. And that isn’t just in terms of dollars … but that’s largely in terms of dollars.
We at least have the revenue sharing coming next year. That should help somewhat in terms of attracting players, though that’s going to be heavily reliant upon donor money to the championship resource funds to amount to anything substantial (or we’re going to have to play more money games, making it even more difficult to put together playoff seasons). I don’t know specifics, but I don’t believe our NIL situation is particularly strong – and I’m speaking relative to our peer institutions, not FBS programs. We need updated facilities – a lot of things look like they haven’t been touched in 20+ years. We need to market the program better. We need a bigger recruiting budget to be able to bring more kids from a larger radius to campus for visits. We need a larger salary pool to hire and retain quality assistants. Building a team and sustaining a program aren’t solely on the head coach. Look at some of our best teams and where those assistants are at now.
If you look at the published budgets, you’ll see we have fewer assistants making $50k or more than we did in Coach Conque’s final season which was over a decade ago. Adjust for inflation, and on average our assistants now would need to make almost 60% more than they are to be on equal footing to their 2013 counterparts. Our total football salary budget for all coaches (including the admin assistant) for this year is $850,256. Tarleton State’s, three years ago (first one readily available with a quick Google search) was $1,587,939. So it was almost double ours then, probably is or more by now. And the cost of living ain’t any higher in Stephenville, Texas than it is in Conway.
People say “Well we won with Coach Conque & Coach Campbell!” and this is true. It is also true that we have never seen either one of them coach in the NIL/Portal era and in the UAC, at UCA. They might very well do great. But we don’t know that for sure.
Coach Campbell had won everywhere he’d been. Then he went to South Alabama and went 9-26 (6-18 in the Sun Belt). Did he just suddenly become a bad football coach? Or was he in a position where the deck was stacked against him?
Coach Conque went to SFA and was 21-25 overall (17-18 in the Southland). Did he just forget how to coach football when he stepped foot in Nacogdoches? Or did his situation change to something less advantageous?
The guy they replaced him with (after an interim year), Colby Carthel, was 59-18 at Commerce and won a D2 national title. That man can coach some damn football, right? Well, coming into this year he was 33-35 overall & 14-18 in conference games with no playoff appearances in his 7 seasons at SFA. You’ve absolutely got to fire that guy, right?
Well, they stuck with him, and SFA is back in the Southland now, and the Jacks are 9-2 and conference champs. Did he just remember how to coach football again after a long bout of amnesia? Or did the change in circumstances have an impact on their success?
Todd Whitten, Tarleton’s coach, went 25-28 (16-17 Southland) at Sam Houston State. He’s 79-35 (44-19) at Tarleton. Did he just learn how to coach ball? Or did he benefit from a better situation?
Scott Frost was 19-7 (12-4 AAC) at UCF, had an undefeated season. Finished Top 10. Went 16-31 at Nebraska (10-26 Big Ten). Went back to UCF, which is now in the Big 12, and is 4-6 (1-6). Is Scott Frost a really good coach? A really bad coach? Or does it kinda depend on circumstances and external factors?
How about Mike Norvell? He had four 10-win seasons in 7 years, was 69-32, had an undefeated season at FSU, etc. Also has had 3 losing seasons in his first 5 in Tallahassee, and this year is TBD, but they’re hovering right at .500. But they beat Alabama. So is Mike Norvell a good coach or does Mike Norvell need to be fired? Or is it that there are ebbs and flows to seasons and coaching tenures and outside of a select few coaches/places, nobody wins all the time?
And circling back to Bielema – Arkansas fired him because he wasn’t meeting that very lofty Arkansas standard. Didn’t let him get off the field. Had to get him out immediately. And look what they’ve done in the years since. Regressed. They were 29-34 with him, 36-59 since. And burned through some buyout money to get there. And now he’s 7-3 and could be on his way to a 10-win season.
Nebraska fired Bo Pelini in 2014 after a three-year stretch of going 28-12 because he wasn’t living up to a standard of success born in a previous era. He won 9 games in each of his last 2 seasons. They have won 9 games just once since then, in 2016, and haven’t finished in the Top 25 since he left.
So again, you can change your coach – but if you’re not changing a bunch of other stuff with it, you might find yourself worse off.
I would much rather UCA make a real commitment & investment to having a great football program and giving the guy we’ve got – who has had some success here (though not as much as we all want), wants to be here and isn’t jumping at the first train out of town – the opportunity to show what he can or can’t do on a more level playing field, before going off rolling the dice on another coach (and maybe another, and another) trying to get it right without changing anything else; or hiring a new guy and making a big investment then when it would’ve been nice to just go ahead and do that earlier.
Do we need to win more games? Yes. Do we as an institution/university community need to do more to create a better situation for our coaching staff do that? Also yes.
This season is rough, sure, but all sickness is not death. Coach Conque went 3-8 once. He had a losing season in his 10th year. We went 23-11 the next three years with back-to-back playoff trips. Can Nathan get us there on the field if we catch up off of it? I think he deserves the chance to answer that question. And I know I’m pissing in the wind here and in the minority of this group, but yeah - I think he can.
But, one way or the other, where the program goes from here depends on a lot more than who the head coach is. That’s just one piece of the puzzle. Whether it’s Mario Andretti or Tiger Woods at the wheel, you probably ain’t winning many races with a flat tire.
