Rich Rodriguez will not be fired at Michigan despite his rocky start. Neither will Dan Hawkins at Colorado, despite his rockier start, middle and end.
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| Dan Hawkins' job is safe for one more season, presumably for financial reasons. (Getty Images) |
But it has already been a slow year for firings, and this is only going to make it slower still. In short, these times are as good as any to be an average football coach, and poorer than usual to be good and ambitious.
As of today, the biggest, and quite possibly only, high-profile vacancy will be at Notre Dame, where neither money nor graduation rates will prevent the alums from overthrowing Charlie Weis, perhaps as soon as Monday.
But it is the exception that proves the rule, or in this case, two. The first is that the economy is still sluggish and even large athletic departments are feeling pinches it once took for granted.
The second is that there aren't a lot of coaches on the spot this year, relatively speaking. There have been 40 changes in the past two years, a third of the Division I membership. Another big purge is simply not likely if you believe that most coaches get at least three years (although Notre Dame will be working on its fifth in this decade when Weis' replacement is named).
Third, it's a down year in the cycle. Firings ebb and flow in a two-year rotation, at least going back to 2001, the last really relevant year we bothered to check. It's gone from 25 to 13 to 18 to 13 to 23 to 10 to 23 to 18 to 22, and that doesn't include the deaths of Northwestern's Randy Walker in 2006 and Indiana's Terry Hoeppner in 2007.
Fourth, only five dismissals/retirements have happened already, which is a low number this late in a season. San Jose State's Dick Tomey retired, UNLV's Mike Sanford and Memphis' Tommy West were canned and Western Kentucky's David Elson was replaced by Stanford running backs coach and WKU alum Willie Taggart.
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Dennis DoddAnd fifth, the expense of overturning the government in these parlous times is more of a deal-breaker than usual. The proof here is Hawkins, who is 16-32 in four years at a fairly unforgiving place for the unsuccessful. He came from Boise State, where he was considered something a gentle genius and a fine get at Boulder, but found out that the Big 12 is a harder nut to make. Or Colorado found that Hawkins was an uncomfortable fit, one or the other.
Either way, the $3.1 million buyout of his contract was too much to swallow, so he will return to the great consternation of his critics. And so it will be for a legion of other struggling coaches who might otherwise be on the griddle.
A typically target-rich environment is down to a few relative sure things, unemployment-wise. Mark Mangino of Kansas, Al Groh of Virginia, Steve Kragthorpe of Louisville, maybe Ron Zook at Illinois, are the highest profiles in danger. Everyone else lives either in a world of safety, relative safety, just got there, not worth the bother or too expensive to eat.
In addition, the two noted octogenarians, Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden, are safe for yet another year. They are always on the mad speculators' lists, but Paterno won and didn't get steamrolled by any players, and Bowden isn't leaving until he is damned good and ready.
Thus, this will be a quiet job-hunting season in college football for any number of reasons, and if Rich Rodriguez and Dan Hawkins can survive the black hole of big-school expectations, then the list will be shockingly short. Which, whether you like it or not, is probably a benign message to send in these days of 10 percent unemployment.
But trust us, it isn't because people don't want there to be firings, or that they don't want to be more vindictive. They just have to bite their tongues until next year.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
