You always get weird College Football stories like this. I LOVE them. I guess it's a function of rabid fans + small town life.
What is Missouri doing right now? I haven't seen them play in like 5 years. I'm honestly not sure. TAMU was looking pretty Leachy when Kingsbury was the OC. That's about it.
I'm not that crazy about big incentives in college football but I get it's just part of the culture. It makes sense to reward people for good work but you wonder what compromises in ethics for athletes a coach could make subconsciously because they have millions of dollars on the line. I don't think it's a matter of a coach saying I'm going to do whatever I can because I want to get paid but it could create an obsession to win at all costs. Or maybe not. I don't know.
10 years/ 80 million!? If Jimbo can bring in FSU level recruits, maybe he can make A&M a 9-3 or 10-2 program, if he fails tho, that buyout will cripple the program for a decade
Crippled for 10 years seem a bit much, but suffering through several terrible seasons in a row is expected from just about every team at some point. Cyclical. A few good years and a few bad seems more likely than a National Title. But if he can sustain, do well enough, and keep the job, beat Bama every now and then, he'll be able to coach TAMU well past Saban's eventual retirement. That's not what they're paying him to do, but it's a reasonable expectation.
Would need to see the buyout information and would depend on how long before he hypothetically struggled. If he goes to TAMU it is going to go a long way to determining his legacy one way or the other and also the future of football at TAMU... will it be what it has been or will it take a step up. I personally don’t think Fisher has been all that great a coach since he lost Winston. He has had a lot of talent there the last few years.
Cripple?? You understand that A&M has some of the richest boosters in the country, right?? Nobody is getting crippled.
Seems to be somewhat of a factor in Jimbo's decision. TAMU keeps pumping money into its facilities and support staff, FSU was pinching pennies. TAMU runs their program at the highest level, you'd think they were actually an elite program the way they throw money at football.
Being elite is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you build the infrastructure of an elite program, the players and coaches will come.
Hopefully this marks the end of the endless Jimbo rumors every offseason, until Jimbo goes 10-2 his first year and demands a raise to 12 years 144 million dollars
I have a feeling that by the end of the Tennessee saga, John Currie is going to look like something of a sympathetic figure. Phil Fulmer has apparently been doing everything he can to torpedo the search since it began, and Pat Forde of Yahoo mentioned his his latest piece that Fulmer even went so far as to reach out to certain coaching candidates himself, which confused some of the candidates. Tennessee punished him by making him interim AD. I meant that as a joke, but as I typed it out, with the way the coaching search has gone, maybe it is a proper punishment.
That along with guaranteeing them 75 million dollars. @SBNationCFB Per ESPN, Jimbo Fisher's deal is *fully guaranteed* at 10 years, $75 million. We're all in the wrong business.
Missouri isn't far off from that, although they go vertical with the passing game more than a typical Leach-style offense. Their quarterback, Drew Lock, by just about every measure, was the best in the SEC this season. Granted, the SEC isn't known for their QB play, but that's still pretty impressive, and I think his season was one of the best that no one has really been talking about. His 3,695 yards passing are more than 800 more than the second-place passer in the league, Vanderbilt's Kyle Shurmur (which is something of a surprise in its own right). His 43 touchdowns also lapped the field. Shurmur's second-best total was 26. His rate stats also stack up, as he averaged 9.6 yards per attempt, tied for tops in the league with Georgia's Jake Fromm among regular starters. And he took just ten sacks all season, which speaks to offensive line play, sure, but also suggests that he's really good at getting the ball out on time.
Bruce Feldman tweeted earlier this afternoon that individuals within the Nebraska athletic department have called Nebraska recruits to let them know that Scott Frost has already selected a majority of his coaching staff and that they'll be "pleased." While it's not a huge surprise that Frost is heading to Nebraska, it does seem to rule out the idea that Frost would get swept up in the emotion of a big game like the AAC title game, with huge vocal fan support, and decide to stay. The ESPN announcers mentioned a lot during the early portions of this game that they felt like Frost was really struggling with the decision, and used that to suggest that he was still making his decision, but I'm not sure what they expected to hear from a sitting head coach about another job. It just goes to show what we already knew- that much of what you hear on game broadcasts is parroted from what coaches told the crew the day before the game. Although a cynic might say that all of the leaking news during UCF's game might be Nebraska's way of making sure it's a lot tougher for Frost to back out if he changes his mind, especially in light of other fiascos in the world of college football coaching searches.
UPDATE: Brian Griese, in the middle of a conversation about how the news has broken that Frost is going to Nebraska, says something along the lines of "he sure didn't sound sure last night and he's been coaching a game today, so I'm not sure where that is coming from" as if agents and athletic departments don't do most of the legwork on these things and as if it's not possible that Frost (GASP) might not have led on how advanced the negotiations were. I honestly think most game announcers get criticized unfairly, but I always bristle at stuff like that, where Griese is clearly clinging to this platonic ideal of a college coach as someone whose word is ironclad and unwavering.
