Always wondered if little brother was a stipulated holdover. But guess the timing of everything basically tied Riley to the entire coaching staff anyways. Wonder if he’ll give his old HC Ruffin a call. Edit: Didn't know Ruffin was already on the staff, promoted to Interim DC this morning.
Well duh. The main OU coaching staff change after the season will be Lincoln Riley leaving for the NFL.
As what? NFL teams aren't hiring a 35-year old head coach with no NFL experience at all (player or coach or anything). And he's not leaving OU to be an NFL coordinator.
What a strange chapter of Doug Meacham's career. When he took that job, which was a surprised in itself, he was one of the hottest names in coaching. The worst case scenario was always him getting swept into the morass of Kansas football and it seems like that was the case.
Ya remember thinking TCU had an embarrassment of riches with Meacham/Cumbie as Co-OCs while UT was rolling with Shawn Watson. Him leaving for KU was definitely one of more stranger moves, it'll be interesting to see where he pops up.
That's a really short leash (~2.5 years) for Jinks, but BG has pretty high expectations for their head coach. I guess that makes some sense when you consider that three of their previous four head coaches (Urban Meyer, Dave Clawson, Dino Babers) left because they won enough games there to end up in better jobs.
A week or so ago when Jordan McNair's mother publicly stated she was worried Durkin would be re-instated, I thought she had lost it. The evidence collected to arrive at this decision must be made open to the public.
It’ll be very interesting to see how the players respond to this. Even without cause, don’t understand how they can possibly conclude reinstatement is the best thing at this point.
News just broke in the last hour that Maryland has fired D.J. Durkin. With the reaction to the news yesterday that he was originally going to be reinstated being so overwhelmingly negative, both internally and externally, it seemed pretty clear that there was no way they could move forward with him as head coach. I'll go back to what I said when the original story broke right before the season. I'm not really sure why Maryland seemed so set on fighting to find reasons to hang on to him. I'm sure they were concerned with having to pay him if lawyers determined that he wasn't really liable for Jordan McNair's death, but it's not like this guy was having Nick Saban-level success. Why save a few bucks to stand by a coach that you're probably going to have to fire after next season for not winning enough, all the while taking heaps of criticism for hanging on to him?
Regardless of the culpability determination, how the board of regents could be so tone deaf about reinstating Durkin is what I want to know. Are they advisers to MBS?
It's been clear for several weeks now that Bobby Petrino is all but done at Louisville, but with the beating his team has taken today against Clemson (it's 70-15 as I type), I wouldn't be surprised to see them make a change before the season is up. Assuming that comes open, I'd be shocked if anyone but Jeff Brohm is the head coach there next season. In fact, it almost seems like an open secret that Brohm will jump from Purdue to Louisville if the opportunity arises. Kind of a bummer for Purdue because Brohm got them moving in the right direction very quickly, but I always say that you'd rather lose coaches that other teams want than make milquetoast hires that you think you can talk into staying for their entire career.
Tough to blame Kansas for making a move, but I can't help but feel a little sympathy for him. There was a piece on The Athletic before the season about just how extensive the hole was when he got there. Long story short, the JUCO recruiting during the last couple years of the Charlie Weis era were so bad that it left them with about as many scholarship players as what you see in an FCS program. And even coming into this season, after a few years of working at it, they still were working to get up to 70 scholarship players, which is still 15 under the limit. With that said, I'm not sure how confident I was that Beaty would be the guy to turn things around, even if he was given more time. He was an odd hire at the time, particularly when you consider how steep the mountain in front of them was. He didn't have much experience above being a position coach and his expertise was in high-level recruiting, which is not an area where you're going to have much success at Kansas, particularly at that time. I suppose it can be tempting to bring in a guy who recruited a bunch of four and five-star players to Texas A&M (at a time, mind you, when A&M was really hot in recruiting), but this seemed like a job for an experienced program builder, even if they had to go down to FCS or DII to find someone up for it.