The tricky proposition of South Carolina trying to hire a sitting Power 5 head coach
The past few weeks featured the usual back and forths that come when a Power 5 coach gets linked to an open job.
A set of reports connected Louisville coach Scott Satterfield to South Carolina’s open job. That set off a chain of events, Louisville’s athletic director picking up the phone for reporters to say the interview was not going happen, the coach himself sending out a tweet that really didn’t categorically deny anything but seemed to try to put out the fire.
Then West Virginia coach Neal Brown, another name linked to the search, flat out said he’s not a candidate.
Maybe that puts an end to that speculation for good. On the Satterfield side, despite the AD’s words and the tweet, multiple outlets reported he interviewed. There’s a degree to which that is still a long shot since Louisville has a good bit going for it and his buyout is $5 million.
In a lot of years, maybe that matters. In this one, where funds are already so tight, it really could. And that fact points to a bit of the history of the program and where it gets its coaches.
Brad Crawford of 247Sports did a study on SEC hires since 2000 without head coaching backgrounds. The results are unsurprising, with a sub-.500 record overall and more than half of them getting fired (most coaches, when all is said and done, are fired).
The flipside is a look at all of the coaches who were hired with previous head-coaching experience. Their records are notably better, buoyed the likes of Urban Meyer, Nick Saban (twice), Les Miles, Gus Malzahn, Ed Orgeron (the second time) and Steve Spurrier.
But those numbers have some quirks. Florida, LSU, Alabama, and Auburn with Gus account for the vast majority of the most successful hires. And the fact is, those schools on average have higher baselines.
People at LSU were irked by Orgeron and Miles winning nine or 10 games a year. Ron Zook and Jim McElwain were run out of Florida for winning better than 62% of their games. Even subtracting the 0-11 season, Lou Holtz won just short of 56% of his games in Columbia.
What’s more, some of those schools have plucked their coaches from the likes of Michigan State, Oklahoma State and others. South Carolina’s history did not, for the most part, include that. And it is actually amazingly static when it comes to finding coaches who are either high-level mid-major coaches or coaches who could use a landing spot.
The history:
▪ Will Muschamp: Spent a year as an Auburn assistant off an unsuccessful tenure at Florida.
▪ Steve Spurrier: Already destined for the Hall of Fame, he was coming off an unsuccessful stint in the NFL and a flap with the then-Gators AD. Everything worked out for both sides as the Gators got a two-time national title winning coach of Meyer and South Carolina got its all-time best coach.
▪ Lou Holtz: another coach with Hall of Fame credentials, he had retired a few years earlier and was lured back to the game.
▪ Brad Scott: The extreme rarity in this group, Scott was never a head coach, but rather an extremely successful coordinator with Florida State‘s early dynasty teams. The offenses at USC were good, the defenses were not and the records were close to .500 for three or four years before the bottom fell out in year five.
▪ Sparky Woods: He came from Appalachian State, where he guided the program to some of its early bigger successes. His Gamecock teams almost never hit really big skids, but they never broke through either.
▪ Joe Morrison: Another small-school success story. He jump-started programs at Chattanooga and New Mexico. He turned in a volatile but mostly successful tenure in Columbia, which ended with him dying of a heart attack just before likely getting fired for NCAA issues.
▪ Richard Bell: A rare internal hire, he was the defensive coordinator after the previous staff was fired and hung around for one year before getting fired himself after the offense struggled.
▪ Jim Carlen: His success came at schools that weren’t all that small. He got West Virginia to 10-1 and Texas Tech to 11-1. His hiring came at USC with the athletic director role, and he ultimately ranked third in school history and wins, primarily powered by the George Rogers era.
▪ Paul Dietzel: A former national champion, he tried to get Army back on track after winning a title at LSU. That didn’t work, and he came to Columbia, where he posted three winning seasons in nine years and won the school’s only conference title.
▪ Marvin Bass: A former Gamecocks assistant, he came to Columbia after a year as Georgia Tech’s defensive coordinator. He’s previously gone 7-3 in one season as head coach at William & Mary, and parlayed that into an assistant job in the NFL.
▪ Warren Giese: Off six years as an assistant at a strong Maryland program, he took over the Gamecocks in 1956, posted records of .500 or better his first four years and was let go after his first losing campaign.
So, dating back to the mid-60s, the Gamecocks hired only a single head coach without previous experience leading a program. Sometimes things went well, other times they did not.
In this year’s coaching search, Shane Beamer is the only name in the mix that has never been a head coach. Billy Napier and Jamey Chadwell fit the small-school mold.
With Satterfield saying the right things without saying anything directly (and then interviewing) and Brown’s denial, the Power 5 cupboard still seems pretty bare (Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson came up in passing somewhere, too).
Outside of Carlen, who also picked up an athletic director job and was plucked for a bit of an outpost, South Carolina has not pried a sitting Power 5 head coach directly from their job. No Steve Spurrier or Lou Holtz-esque figure appears to be in the offing, so the Gamecocks, with a bit of a head start, seem to have a few options:
Go the normal route, pluck an up-and-comer with head coach experience. Go a little nontraditional and grab someone who’s never sat in the big chair before.
Or maybe, just maybe, see if there’s a little surprise turn that this could take.
