A lot (a lot a lot) of the ink spilled either in articles like these or in comments sections of articles like these about the effect that NIL, the transfer portal, a cartoon pie left unattended on a window sill, etc. have had on college football has centered mainly on athletes.
How much they potentially stand to make, their ability to extract promises from teams, how difficult it is to maintain a roster now... these issues are what seem to cause the most consternation among college football fans, and I think that sometimes we're letting coaches off the hook a little too easily.
An assistant coach at a West Coast program watched the news of Nick Saban’s retirement earlier this month. His first thought: “Damn, God has retired.” Next: “Who’s gonna get (the Alabama job)?”
Five days later, the answer was revealed: Kalen DeBoer, fresh off leading Washington to the national title game, was headed to Tuscaloosa. [...]
“You don’t think any of that stuff is going to affect you,” said Les Fifita, father of Noah Fifita, Arizona’s starting quarterback and the 2023 Pac-12 Offensive Freshman of the Year.
As Antonio Morales from The Athletic points out in his article, the domino effect from Nick Saban's retirement was as wide-ranging as it was immediate. Within a week of Saban announcing that he was going to spend a whole hell of a lot more time boogie boarding with Ms. Terry, Alabama had hired the coach from fellow College Football Playoff finalist Washington, which itself had triggered a mass player exodus from both Tuscaloosa and Seattle, which then caused further chaos as Washington hired University of Arizona head coach Jedd Fisch, who then brought several of his guys to the University of Washington.
Gary Cosby Jr.-Tuscaloosa News / USA TODAY NETWORK
Obviously someone was eventually going to get screwed in the inevitable mad scramble that ensued after Saban retired, but in the not-so-distant past I'm not sure that Alabama would've had the ability to have their pick from the best college football coaches in America within days of their head coach position being open. And I'm not sure that their confidence in knowing they'd get the pick of the litter is such a great thing.
This isn't limited to blue-blood programs. UCLA seems to have found some stability under Chip Kelly, winning at least eight games in each of the last three seasons, including a bowl game in 2023. But that might be news to Kelly, who reportedly just interviewed for the Las Vegas Raiders offensive coordinator job. Columbus favorite Jeff Hafley (who was defensive coordinator at OSU for exactly one season) is reportedly leaving his role as the Boston College head coach to become the defensive coordinator for the Green Bay Packers.
And then there's Michigan.
Nobody in Ann Arbor was shocked, or probably all that angry, when Jim Harbaugh left for the NFL. After all, he'd accomplished everything he had set out to do with the Wolverines, leading them to their first outright national title in a billion years and their first winning streak against Ohio State in a generation. Offensive coordinator Sherrone Moore slid nicely into Harbaugh's vacated head coaching slot, and all was well.
Until, of course, Harbaugh took defensive coordinator Jesse Minter with him to Los Angeles. And, shockingly, special teams coach Jay Harbaugh. And strength and conditioning coach Ben Herbert, long credited with being the heart and soul of the program. And, if you believe message board rumors, Harbaugh even tried to nab the team's dietician (she ultimately stayed in Ann Arbor).
It isn't just that first time head coach Sherrone Moore now has to attempt to fill massive holes in his program on the fly that I think is wild, it's that those holes were created by the guy who looked his athletic director and former teammate in the eye in 2022 and told him that he was done looking for jobs in the NFL.
"That's how I felt, and how I feel," Harbaugh told reporters.
Maybe said reporters should've asked about the Lombardi Trophy, which, as Harbaugh recently pointed out, college football simply doesn't have.
Stupid pablum aside, I think that Michigan fans, even with a national championship in hand, have every right to feel uneasy about how this all went down. It'd be one thing if Harbaugh had gone off into that Los Angeles sunset to build something of his own out west. But that he did that while pulling bricks out of the foundation from casa de Wolverine doesn't display the kind of loyalty that the program has always preached.
College football players operate on what are essentially non-guaranteed year-to-year contracts that can be rescinded at any time. The vast majority of them have four to five years to maximize whatever earning potential they might have from football, and that's it. Coaches, on the other hand, are making millions of dollars on guaranteed contracts that sometimes extend for a decade, yet we tend to expect (and often get) more loyalty from players to fans and a university than we do from the people that lead them.
It is absolutely true that demands on college football coaches have only gotten more strenuous over time and that the job is much more difficult that ever, but it is equally true that coaches in general have become much more opportunistic at pursuing jobs within college football than they ever have. Blaming the latter on the former seems to miss the reality of how the sport is viewed by coaches in 2024.
The era of a Woody Hayes-type head coach operating on one year contracts at a relatively low salary because of the love of their school is long gone. Maybe it's time to direct some of the ire about NIL and the transfer portal towards coaches who have long been the beneficiaries of the same environment.
