Coach Candidates List (and who you would like to see)...

Lots of articles below naming potential candidates...
www.kansascity.com/sports/college/big-12...rticle221090945.html
www2.ljworld.com/sports/ku-football/2018...u-footballs-next-he/
sports.yahoo.com/10-candidates-kansas-co...hawks-220247256.html

These include:

• Les Miles (former LSU head coach)
• Dave Doeren (current NC State head coach, former KU football asst. coach)
• Lane Kiffin (current Florida Atlantic head coach, former NFL coach)
• Troy Calhoun (current Air Force coach, former Houston Texans asst. coach)
• Willie Fritz (current Tulane head coach, Shawnee Mission NW grad/former Central Missouri head coach)
• Bret Bielema (former Arkansas head coach)
• Jason Candle (current Toledo head coach)
• Seth Littrell (current North Texas head coach, former asst. coach under Mangino)
• Jeff Tedford (current Fresno State head coach)
• Jim Leavitt (current Oregon defensive coordinator, former K-State assistant coach)
• Jeff Monken (current Army head coach)
• Neal Brown (current Troy head coach)
• Matt Wells (current Utah State head coach)
• Ken Niumatalolo (current Navy head coach)
• Chris Klieman (current North Dakota State coach)

I'd love to see some thoughts on the above list or add some names of coaches you think would be good fits.

As for Beaty, I met him once at an alumni event and we spoke for a few minutes. Seems like a good, hard working guy. He just wasn't a fit for this position. I hope he can catch on somewhere and restart.

For what I know, I would be a little nervous about Mr. Kiffin. Seems as if trouble has a tendency to follow him.

Yes, I think Beaty would be good at the D-2 level and/or as an assistant coach.

Interesting about Kiffin. It seems these lists are pure speculation, at this point. Definitely will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

Looks like Doeren is less likely because of the size of his buy out.

This article adds Scott Satterfield (head coach at Appalachian State).

fox4kc.com/2018/11/05/who-will-be-the-ne...as-5-possible-picks/

Call me a pessimist, but I think whoever we get is yet another interim coach on a long, long path to having a decent football program. Sadly, I think we could accomplish the same thing if we'd give Beaty another 2-3 years of on-the-job training.

Beaty has won 0, 2, 1 and 3 (so far) games in his 4 seasons. While I don't think we're going to win at KSU, OU, or when Texas come calling, it's not impossible for us to get to a 4 win season. Realize that if that happened, it would be our best season in the post-Mangino era. As it is, Beaty has tied the best efforts put forth by Gill or Weis. Arguably, Gill inherited the Mangino program, so you could argue that he had a leg up. Beaty inherited the Weis debacle which gave him a lot less to work with starting up.

My point is, 3 wins is an improvement, and I don't think anybody is going to come in and magically get us to 4 or 5 wins next year. If anything, I think we can expect a 'rebuilding year' next year with Beaty guys leaving, few/no recruits of any consequence showing up, and a year where we're gathering our sea legs under a new program. If it takes the NEXT guy until year 2 or 3 to get to 4 wins, I'd argue that we could get there next year instead of 2 or 3 years with rebuilding thrown in.

And that's a BEST CASE scenario.

The way I see it, there are 3 types of coaches that MIGHT want the KU job:
1.) the young up-and-comer from a smaller school/conference
2.) the seasoned pro
3.) the promotion

Let's look at all 3:

1.) We find a guy who's doing great at a small school and is "ready to take the next step". A good option, and you can probably offer less money. But then we're back at "on the job training" as the coach moves from a smaller program to trying to recruit and work within a power conference. How is that better than keeping Beaty around making modest gains? I'm not sure it is, and the downside is that the young coach bites off more than he can chew and we're right back at the bottom in 2-3 years when the guy fails.

2.) The seasoned pro: Find a guy who has had success at a medium/big school before. Great! Why not? Ok, first question: if you were having success elsewhere, why are you looking for a job now? These guys tend to command a bigger salary and come with baggage. Charlie Weis version 2. SOMETHING chased them off their last job and we'll be inheriting whatever that SOMETHING was, AND we'll have to pay a lot for a guy in that category because they KNOW how tough the job is going to be.

3.) The promotion: find a guy who's the offensive coordinator or other assistant elsewhere and "promote" him to his first head coaching job. Wait. Isn't that EXACTLY what we did with Beaty? How'd that work out.

The fact is KU has gone .500 or better in conference only 4 times since 1985: 1992 (4-3) and 1995 (5-2) under Mason; 2007 (7-1) and 2008 (4-4) under Mason. That's 4 years out of 33 years (12%) under 7 coaches. More significantly, going back to Mason, we kept guys longer...Mason 9 years, Allen 5 years, Mangino 8 years....compared to Gill 2 years, Weis 3 years and Beaty 4 years.

Call me pessimistic, but I just get a hunch that we're throwing away 2 seasons to get things reset before we know if any "experiment" works. I know that the donors call the shots in the end, but it seems that the strategy of throwing the next coach on the wall to see if he sticks only to repeat the process every 3-4 years does nothing to help us.

NotOstertag, you make some great points above and I agree with how your categorized the potential coaching candidates.

I decided to dig into this during my lunch break and crunch some numbers. Using the candidates listed above, I came up with the records of the losing programs they inherited and their records the first two seasons.

I didn't include any coaches who inherited programs with winning records or no head coaching experience.

This is the list of the coaches (and the programs they inherited): Les Miles (Oklahoma State), Lane Kiffin (Tennessee, FAU), Troy Calhoun (Air Force), Willie Fritz (Central Missouri, Sam Houston State, Tulane), Bret Bielema (Arkansas), Seth Littrell (North Texas), Jeff Tedford (Cal-Berkley, Fresno State), Jeff Monken (Georgia Southern, Army), Neal Brown (Troy).

Key Findings
* The combined prior season records of the programs was 44-119 or an average of 3-9 (sound familiar).
* The combined first season records was 89-86 or an average of 6-6 (bowl eligible).
* The combined second season records was 102-60 or an average of 7-4 (.500 conference record)
* Only one coach/program took more than two seasons to have a winning record: Jeff Monken/Army

Notes: Central Missouri is Div. II. Lane Kiffin only coached one season at Tennessee and is still in his second season at FAU. Some coaches on the list also inherited programs with winning records. I didn't include those records.

This isn't terribly scientific, but I think it shows that, with the right coach, a football program can turn around in the first or second season.

Very cool bklynhawk! Good info and well thought out.

I'm not stuck on Beaty, but as I hope I pointed out, since Mangino we've had a revolving door and I don't know how long you can let a guy work. 1-2 seasons to bowl eligibility would be great and clearly within the timeframe that Beaty was given.

The only thing that the data doesn't show is how they do it. You can go raid JUCOs looking for "seasoned" guys, you can build from the ground up with high school recruits (takes longer but you have 4 years of eligibility), or do some kind mix.

I actually think there are 2 parts to the process.

Part 1 is righting the ship: taking this 3-win team to a bowl eligible team. "Bowl eligible" to me should be a MINIMUM requirement since you can go to a bowl even if you lose half your games. Playing against SW Montana Teacher's College in the Preparation H Cold Bleacher Bench Bowl might excite some fans, but doesn't necessarily mean "success" to me. We should be looking at a goal of something like .500 or better, or finishing in the top half of the conference. Just my opinion. Nevertheless, step 1 is getting there.

Part 2 is the harder part: STAYING THERE. There are a lot of tricks and shortcuts that can give us "quick" success, but what I think we all want is SUSTAINABLE success. Not to give you more homework, but it would be interesting to see how the programs you listed are doing 5 years, 10 years down the road.

Take the Mangino era as an example. Full disclosure: I'm not a Mangino fan. The minute he got tossed out of his son's LHS game for terrorizing the refs, I felt that he had some significant underlying issues. Nevertheless, he got us to a bowl game in his 2nd year, and we had a total of 4 bowl appearances 8 years. The 12-1 Orange Bowl year was great, 8-5 the next year was very acceptable, and then he got canned after a 5-7 year in 2009. Right now, I think a lot of KU fans would be ecstatic with a 5-7 year, lol.

Despite this, when he was booted, we SHOULD have been able to sustain some success. Before the 5-7 last season, we had 4 winning seasons in a row and were by no means a "doormat". Just shows you how fragile success can be in a 'rebuilt' program. Notre Dame has had ups and downs over the years, but no matter how bad they are periodically, they're Notre Dame and will attract great coaches and recruits. After 4 winning years on a row, we still weren't a "destination" coaching job, and we promptly imploded.

Not knowing much about these coaches, and if you assume that they're all capable, I think the hope would be to bring in a guy that's not only capable of getting the program on its feet, but who would also be committed to KU for the long haul....somebody with KU roots, etc. Wishing we had a "Danny Manning" former player who's had some success coaching who could be lured home, have success, and not be looking to bolt the minute things start looking up (or who doesn't have a screw loose like Mangino).

Notostertag,You ask really good questions. I think the reality of college football is like any career these days. You jump to a better, more prestigious or higher paying job if it's offered. I don't blame coaches for that. The longer term success of a program is a combination of the coach, the school, and the fans.

Here are some more numbers to help paint the picture of the group of turn-around coaches/programs I analyzed above.

• Average tenure at "turn-around program": 5 seasons (5.2 to be exact). If I take out Lane Kiffin, the number jumps to almost 6 seasons (5.8 ).
• High: 13 seasons. Low: 1 season. Mode: 4. Range: 12.

It seems to indicate that these coaches are at least past their predecessor's recruits and are fielding teams almost entirely of their own recruiting. I'll try to look at the larger set of coaches on the original list, plus any else mentioned above.

FYI, saw that Dan Enos, associate head coach at Alabama, was a potential candidate.

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Thanks for the info. I'm a numbers geek, so this stuff is interesting to me.

It's just soooo frustrating, and very difficult to dig out. In basketball, you see mid-major programs that land 1 or 2 "stars" and if they can surround them with 3 or 4 halfway decent players, they can have a good year, make the tournament, and have some success.

Football is a whole 'nuther thing. You can have a great QB, but if you don't have a decent offensive line, you've got nothing. Or no receivers. Or a lousy defense. There are so many things that need to come together to get a decent football team together that it takes a long time and a lot of work.

I look at it from the recruit's perspective. We frankly don't have a lot to offer for a program of our size. Yes, we have great facilities, but so do about 50 other programs. About all we can offer, of late, is that you'll get to play on TV a couple times a year, but you'll probably lose. Now we have the added fun of trying to instill confidence when the recent history dictates that the coach who recruits you won't be there by the time you're done.

Anyway, I guess I'm just griping. Change is hard because it includes a large dose of risk. The devil you know vs. the one you don't. With pressure to get results, I always fear that a coach will overlook character issues in order to get players, and then we end up with a bunch of felons playing for us, lol.

When you know you're recruiting from 2nd-tier kids, you have to give up something...playing skills, or some other baggage that's keeping the kid from being a 1st tier recruit.

Looks like Todd Graham (former ASU head coach) is being seriously considered...

www2.kusports.com/news/2018/nov/12/repor...zona-state-football/

Pro's:
* Power 5 HC experience
* Overall winning record 95-61
* Winning bowl record 5-4
* Texas, Oklahoma, Big12 (territory) recruiting experience

Con's
* Has not turned around a team with a losing record
* Left two programs after one year as head coach

Looks interesting/promising. I would hope AD Long does some deep checks with his contacts on his character and why he made those two jumps.

Thoughts?

Jed Fisch - another candidate that is being looked at seriously.

www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/...yhawks-coaching-job/

Pro's
* Coaching staff experience at Power 5 teams (and successful coaches)
* Offensive Coordinator experience at college and NFL level

Con's
* Scant/no head coaching experience. Interim HC at UCLA for two games (went 1-1).
* Has not turned around a program with a losing record.
* Moved around a lot. Seven jobs in the last 10 years.

Thoughts?