Aggie football program decision shouldn't discount stability

[Editor's note: This column was written before the Aggies football season ended with wins at NMSU and Idaho.]

By Graham Terry

November 26, 2007 | As the USU football team staggers down the backstretch of another miserable season, the fans in Aggie blue are frustrated and ready to lash out.

We are two weeks from the end of the season, with road dates at New Mexico State and Idaho remaining for the team to salvage some semblance of dignity. The best we can possibly do is go 2-10, but that's unlikely.

In these conditions, the head coach makes a compelling, easy target. It's a lot more fun to tear apart the playcalling after a loss than after a win. An easy target for the armchair quarterbacks is likewise an easy target for media opinion leaders like the Deseret Morning News' sports columnist Brad Rock, who greeted me today by proclaiming Brent is the "Wrong Guy for USU football" on page one of the sports section, above the fold.

Is Brent Guy too conservative? Does he play not to lose, thereby guaranteeing losses? These are fair questions, and deserve to be answered when it is time to renew (or not) Guy's contract.

For now, all I know is there is a mountain of evidence suggesting that changing coaches more often than your oil is the single worst thing for a football program. Coach Guy was signed to a five-year deal. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe five years means five years, not five years unless things don't go our way. If USU fires Guy early, he walks off with $600,000 to not coach. That buys a lot of bloody prime rib and horseradish sauce. Yeah, I'm writing while hungry.

Right now, with Guy's winning percentage in the better part of three years at .121, it seems like maybe Utah State is just not meant to be good at football ever again. (Yes, we were good...once.) Watching the team improbably find a way to blow a fourth-quarter lead against San Jose State earlier this year, I questioned my atheism. I am still an atheist, but if there is a god, I'm sure he must hate USU football.

The thing is, one play can change a game. One play can change a season. One play can change a coach's legacy. It would really suck if we fired Coach Guy right before his team came up with a season-changing play.

Let's look at some programs that stuck with coaches despite rough starts to their tenures, while remembering to give thanks to college football guru Phil Steele for doing all the research and publishing it in his annual college football preview:

Virginia Tech hung with Frank Beamer even though his first seven seasons were very unimpressive, with records of 2-9, 3-8, 6-4-1, 6-5, 6-5, 5-6 and 2-8-1. The patient approach paid off. Hanging his hat on swarming defense and a lethal kick-blocking package, Beamer pulled Tech up into respectability. Then, in 1999, Beamer put a skinny redshirt freshman in at quarterback. Some guy named Michael Vick. With Vick providing the big plays and the defense smothering opponents, Beamer's Hokies made it all the way to the 1999-2000 national championship. They have not been back since, but Tech is routinely mentioned among the national elite of college football these days, it's an annual preseason top 25 team, and a prohibitive favorite in the Atlantic Coast Conference every year.

A good example from the same mid-major realm that USU occupies is Coach Joe Novak at Northern Illinois. Novak was 3-30 in his first three years. Those are Guy-esque numbers. Since then? Though the Huskies are 2-8 this year, they enjoyed seven consecutive winning seasons after Novak's tough start. NIU even enjoys a reputation as the Running Back U of the Mid-American Conference, with top runners like Mike Turner and Garret Wolfe shining in Novak's offense and moving on to the NFL.

My old man went to grad school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and to hear him talk, the Badgers might as well have played their home football games on the moon for all the interest that losing program generated back in the 70s. Big Red's losing reputation changed when Barry Alvarez came to town. By the time Alvarez moved on to Athletic Director, he had taken the Badgers to 11 bowl games and won three Rose Bowls. Wiscy runner Ron Dayne finished his career as the NCAA all-time leading rusher and Heisman Memorial Trophy winner. It's not like Alvarez walked in the door and was immediately booking hotels in Pasadena. He was 1-10 his first season, and had two losing seasons in his first three.

Dan McCarney was recently fired at Iowa State in favor of the hot defensive coordinator of the moment, Gene Chizik. Although a new athletic director in Ames wanted to take the next step to the top of the Big XII conference by bringing in Chizik, McCarney's tale of perseverance is still instructive here. In his first three years, McCarney's teams regressed each year. From 3-8, the team went to 2-9, and then, under McCarney's leadership, to 1-10. But the book was not closed yet. McCarney coached a 3-8 team the next year, and a 4-7 one the year after that. And after that; well, the Cyclones were bowl-eligible in five out of seven years, and produced one of the most exciting college football players of my lifetime in Steve Young clone Seneca Wallace, who now plays backup QB/WR for the Seattle Seahawks.

We live in a world where Rutgers, yes, Rutgers, is no longer terrible at football. Greg Schiano moved up from defensive coordinator at the University of Miami to head coach at one of the worst programs in Division-1 in 2001. He went 2-9, and followed that up by going 1-11. In 2003 he made some progress, going 5-7. The next year Rutgers was 4-7. Schiano was recruiting the talent hotbed of south Florida successfully, but so far all he had accomplished was improving Rutgers from dismal to merely poor. Then, in 2005, Rutgers and Schiano went 7-4 and made it to the Insight Bowl. The best was yet to come. By 2006 Schiano officially had the ball rolling. The Scarlet Knights crashed the top 25, beat the highly regarded Louisville Cardinals 28-25 in Piscataway on national television, and went 10-2. It was the first time Rutgers had won ten games in a season since 1976.

Kansas is no longer purely a basketball school. As of this writing, the Jayhawks are 10-0, with the single largest roadblock to a berth in the national championship game being a game against 10-1 Missouri in a little over a week. How did this happen?

In 2002 Kansas hired Frank Broyles Award winner Mark Mangino away from the University of Oklahoma. Mangino came in with a reputation as a whiz in the spread offense; under his tutelage Josh Heupel quarterbacked OU to an undefeated 00-01 season and a win over Florida State in the national championship game. Mangino's offensive know-how came to naught in his first year, the Jayhawks were 2-10. Dancing with the date they asked to the prom paid off for the KU administration, however, as Mangino followed that up with 6-7, 4-7, 7-5 and 6-6 seasons before this remarkable year.

Are you sensing a trend here? It sure does sound attractive to dump Guy and go out to hire a whiz-kid like Urban Meyer who can be successful immediately. But there's no guarantee that a new coaching hire would turn out as well as Meyer did for the University of Utah. If there's one overarching lesson to be learned from the six examples of coaches turning around bad programs I just cited, it is that the value of continuity and stability to a football program is difficult to overstate. Even if the only thing the team is stable in is sucking.

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