Advice for Tanner: How to get a coach who fits the USC program

Gil Brandt has been in the coach searching business, and his telephone never stopped ringing, which is one reason he’s not in the business anymore.

“(South Carolina athletics director Ray) Tanner will receive calls from all kinds of people saying, ‘Gosh you have to hire so-and-so as your next coach. He’s the best there has ever been,’” Brandt said. “Tanner has to learn who really knows the individual and who really knows what he can do as opposed to the individual who is just trying to do a friend a favor.”

Brandt, 82, created a chart to help athletics director do just that, and although he will not reveal its 10 points, it has helped place some of the biggest names in coaching into jobs. Brandt’s day job was with the Dallas Cowboys. He was one of the team’s first hires when it was formed in 1960, and he became one of the team’s chief architects by revolutionizing the way NFL teams evaluated players.

As a sideline, he did the same thing for coaching searches and advised athletics directors on objective ways to find football coaches.

“It’s like anything you do. You just try to find ways to play the odds by past history, what gives you the best chance of being successful as opposed to who has the least chance of being successful,” Brandt said.

Brandt advised Eric Hyman on the hires of Gary Patterson and Dennis Franchione when Hyman was the athletics director at TCU. He has also helped get Nick Saban to Michigan State and Mack Brown to North Carolina. (He is not working with Tanner on the Gamecocks search and declined to name current coaching candidates he favors.)

Brandt doesn’t share his criteria publicly, but the one thing on the list he did reveal shines some light on his outside-the-box approach.

“If you’re at Washington State in Pullman, Wash., or some other small school, you better have a wife who can help you raise money because places like that they don’t have a lot of large donors, so when they get a $50,000 donation, that’s a large donation,” Brandt said. “You better have a Jerri Spurrier that can go to the country club and hobnob with the lady who is having the party for this new coach who is being hired. If you’re at Southern Cal or Texas, you don’t need that kind of person.”

Brandt also has looked at which position coaching group has the best chance of success as a head coach. Brandt’s suggestion to Hyman when he hired Patterson in 2000 was to find a defensive coordinator who also coached the linebackers.

“I have tried to find out a way through past history what leads to success and what has led to failure,” Brandt said. “There is no way to pick players or coaches absolutely correctly, but if you have a way to do it that you fit them into categories and hire the people who have the most points so to speak, that’s the best way of executing the plan.

“You have never seen a boarded up McDonald’s because they have a plan.”

Brandt even put in a good word for Steve Spurrier when Spurrier was hired at Duke in 1987.

“Tom Butters, the athletics director there, called me and asked me about Spurrier, and I said I really liked him,” Brandt said. “He said, ‘Well, doesn’t Spurrier like to play a lot of golf?’ I said, ‘Yeah, but he’s really good at the things you need to do,’ and that’s why he hired Spurrier at Duke.”

Twenty-eight years later, the Gamecocks now have to replace Spurrier, who became their winningest all-time coach with 86 wins in 10-plus seasons.

“It’s tough to follow God,” Brandt said, “and that’s what you’re following at South Carolina.”