Notre Dame’s head football coach left the program after the regular season ended, and joined LSU. The Irish immediately moved to hire their defensive coordinator as their new head coach.
College football seems to be unique among the major sports in that head coaches will sometimes leave their existing programs high and dry after the regular season but before the postseason. Why is that, and do you think it’s appropriate that the NCAA take measures to prevent that?
Part of it is that there’s a significant gap between the end of the regular season in college football (late November), and the lion’s share of the bowl games (late December and early January).
Comparatively, in pro sports in North America, the postseason begins immediately after the regular season ends, and in college basketball, the postseason tournaments also begin just a few days after the close of the regular season.
College football teams that want to start over with a new coach will, in most cases, have fired the old coach immediately after the last regular-season game (if not before), and as the “contact period” for recruiting high school players (during which coaches are allowed to make in-person visits with recruits) runs from the end of November through the end of January, there’s likely a lot of pressure to get a new coach identified and on-board ASAP in late November or early December, so he can do those recruiting visits.
I know nothing about college football, but I would have guessed it had something to do with recruiting for next year starting at the end of the regular season.
A major factor is, the first date for recruits to sign their National Letter of Intent is December 15. It helps a team to be able to show to its potential recruits who the coach will be next season.
So why don’t we push all these dates back some, to allow teams that have made it to a bowl game to be with their head coaches?
It’s a fairly small problem in the grand scheme of things (affecting maybe two or three schools a year, for only one sport), which is probably why it hasn’t been changed.
Plus, most of the bowl games don’t matter much at all. The casual fan isn’t going to care that Coach Jones will not be available to coach Northeastern Idaho Tech in the Preparation H Bowl because he accepted a job offer elsewhere.
Indeed; unless it’s one of the New Year’s Day bowl games, and/or a game that’s part of the College Football Playoff, it’s getting into a bowl game (and, ideally, a reasonably prestigious game) that’s the real “win” for the program, from the standpoint of (a) being part of a winning season, and (b) generating more revenue and exposure for the team and school.
Yes, they would certainly also like to win the bowl game to close out the season, but simply getting there is a big win.
Kind of like the Pro Bowl? It’s a huge deal to be invited to the Pro Bowl because it means you are one of the best players at your position in the NFL. But many players who are invited don’t even play in it.
As noted, if you quit your job and an assistant has to coach the team in the Bad Boy Mowers Bowl, it’s not that earth-shaking.
Abandon your team on the cusp of selection for the championship playoff (hello, Brian Kelly) and you are an opportunistic sleazebag.