Filling a coaching vacancy is tough business in major college football. Your pool of potential targets is always shifting, already happily employed, and also filled by men who have to act as if they’re absolutely uninterested in switching jobs right until the point they sign on the dotted line. Adding to the complications, there’s an unruly group of fans and media watching your every move, and even tracking your flights, as you set about scouring the country for your next head football coach.
Yet when Jack Swarbrick went about looking for the next head coach of Notre Dame after dismissing Charlie Weis after 21 losses in three seasons, he did so in a relative cloak of secrecy, only turning up after securing Brian Kelly as the Irish’s next football coach. While there was smoke surrounding Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops, there were no leaks from the Notre Dame Board of Trustees, no outsiders with advanced knowledge of the search, and no real idea of who else was in the running for the job until Kelly’s name was announced by Notre Dame.
Maybe the fact that Kelly was the overwhelmingly logical choice is what rankled many of the feathers of those that didn’t like the hire. Perhaps it was the workman like apprenticeship Kelly had served, with six years spent at the D-I level at Central Michigan and Cincinnati after an illustrious run at Grand Valley State, a solid, but certainly not dazzling CV. Sure Kelly put up near historic numbers in the Big East, but that incredible run came with the built-in caveats that come with playing in a conference that now lacks the traditional powers of the other automatic qualifiers.
But after watching elite football programs like Miami miss on Domer fantasy Jon Gruden and “settle” for Temple coach Al Golden, while Florida AD Jeremy Foley replaced fellow Domer dream Urban Meyer with Will Muschamp, the defensive coordinator of the worst Texas team of the decade, and it might be time for Irish fans to either recalibrate what kind of coach should be coming to South Bend next time the head job comes vacant, or come to grips with just how good of a hire Kelly was by Jack Swarbrick.
Thanks to some research by the hibernating website Blue-Gray Sky, let’s take a look at the hires of some of the other “big name” colleges since 2006:
| School | Outgoing | Incoming | Days Elapsed |
| Florida | Urban Meyer | Will Muschamp | 2 |
| Miami (Fla.) | Randy Shannon | Al Golden | 14 |
| Tennessee | Lane Kiffin | Derek Dooley | 2 |
| Southern California | Pete Carroll | Lane Kiffin | 2 |
| Florida State | Bobby Bowden | Jimbo Fisher | 0 |
| Notre Dame | Charlie Weis | Brian Kelly | 10 |
| Oregon | Mike Bellotti | Chip Kelly | 0 |
| Tennessee | Phil Fullmer | Lane Kiffin | 28 |
| Washington | Tyrone Willingham | Steve Sarkisian | 39 |
| Clemson | Terry Bowden | Dabo Swinney | 49 |
| West Virginia | Rich Rodriguez | Bill Stewart | 18 |
| UCLA | K. Dorrell | Rick Neuheisel | 25 |
| Arkansas | Houston Nutt | Bobby Petrino | 15 |
| Nebraska | Bill Callahan | Bo Pelini | 8 |
| Texas A&M | Dennis Franchione | Mike Sherman | 3 |
| Michigan | Lloyd Carr | Rich Rodriguez | 28 |
| Stanford | Walt Harris | Jim Harbaugh | 14 |
| Alabama | Mike Shula | Nick Saban | 37 |
| Miami (Fla.) | Larry Coker | Randy Shannon | 15 |
| North Carolina | John Bunting | Butch Davis | 21 |
Above are arguably the 20 most high-profile coaching transitions of the last five seasons. Taking a look at the list, you get the idea of just what type of coach jumps from a job that they have to a job that opens up.
Of the head coaches on that list, regardless of what you thought of the job that Kelly did in his first year at Notre Dame, it’s hard not to rank him above every head coach on this list with the exception of Nick Saban, Rich Rodriguez, and probably Bobby Petrino. Obviously Rodriguez’s struggles at Michigan help frame the discussion, while Petrino’s “personality” make him a tough fit at a place like Notre Dame.
Simply put, no matter the shine of the Golden Dome, or any other college program, here’s empirical evidence that shows no coach -- regardless of the history of the football program -- flees a top job at an elite college or NFL team for another school.
Even new Florida coach Will Muschamp addressed the concerns of his lack of head coaching experience in his opening press conference, surely as a reaction to the news of a defensive coordinator getting his first head coaching job at a place like Florida.
“I know that there will be criticism about maybe not hiring a guy without head coaching experience and I certainly understand that,” Muschamp said. “But I do think if you look at it you can really look at all the examples across the board of guys that had no head coaching experience and did an outstanding job because they were the right fit, for the right job, at the right time. And you can look at a lot of examples of guys that had head coaching experience and went to situations like Florida and didn’t have success like you thought they might have.”
Muschamp’s comments might as well be taken verbatim from Swarbrick’s introductory press conference where he called Kelly “the right man at the right time for Notre Dame.” Only in Kelly’s case, he also put together one of the best six year runs of any coach in Division I-A football in his two stops at Central Michigan and Cincinnati.
Neither Swarbrick nor Kelly are happy with being 7-5 after one season on the job. But if you look at the process of hiring a new coach at a major college football program, there’s every reason to believe that Notre Dame and its administration actually made the best move possible when considering their options. That may be a tough pill for some Irish fans to swallow, but it’s probably a far better one when you consider Kelly would likely have been the front-runner for both the Miami and Florida position had he stuck around another season at Cincinnati.