Opinion: Other schools can learn from Oregon's hiring of Mario Cristobal

Dan Wolken | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption What the committee got right, wrong in the second College Football Playoff ranking SportsPulse: Georgia at No. 4? Really? According to Dan Wolken the committee missed the mark with their second College Football Playoff ranking.

The biggest story of the college football season is that the man who built the nation’s No. 1 team failed so badly in his first go-around as a head coach that he could barely have imagined resurfacing years later with the keys to one of the nation’s Cadillac programs.

If anyone can appreciate the trajectory Ed Orgeron’s career took from the humiliation at Ole Miss to a complete triumph at LSU, it’s Oregon’s Mario Cristobal.

Seven years ago, Cristobal’s career wasn’t on track to coach at a place like Oregon or contend for a national title as the 8-1 Ducks have done up to this point. In fact, two weeks after he had wrapped his sixth season at Florida International, Cristobal was one of 13 FBS coaches that year who was fired for losing too much.

It didn’t matter that Cristobal had taken over arguably the toughest job in the country with no facilities and no budget and, at one point, had to spend nine hours on the runway in the team charter because nobody had paid the bill. It didn’t matter that he’d seen a few bursts of success, going to a couple bowl games and even once pulling a big upset over Louisville.

Fair or not, all it took was one bad year for all the career momentum Cristobal had built to be wiped out of the public consciousness. Once considered a rising star, it was certainly possible getting fired at Florida International meant he’d never get another chance.

“In this industry your name can go from hot to cold in a minute, and that stinks for a lot of people,” Cristobal said Tuesday in a phone interview shortly before the College Football Playoff selection committee ranked his Oregon team No. 6 this week. “It’s the best profession in the world, but in terms of the business side, it's pretty brutal.”

BOWL PROJECTIONS: Oregon moves into College Football Playoff field ahead of Alabama

HEISMAN WATCH: Joe Burrow now unanimous No. 1 ahead of Jalen Hurts and Justin Fields

That both Cristobal and Orgeron could be in this position — not just as head coaches, but winning big at behemoth programs after fizzling at lesser programs — is a unique moment for the college football industry that should bring some perspective to fans and administrators as the coaching carousel gets rolling again.

Typically, successful coaching careers follow a linear path from opportunity to success to even bigger opportunity that eventually leads to championships. In fact, not a single team that has made the Playoff or played for a national title going back to the beginning of the BCS in 1998 has been coached by someone who was previously fired from another college program.

If Orgeron or Cristobal is able to defy that trend this year, it would be happening amid a backdrop where schools are growing more impatient with coaches while getting hungrier to identify an ascendant coaching star, leading some schools to take big risks on coaches who lack the seasoning to run high-profile programs.

Maybe the examples of Orgeron and Cristobal suggest there’s something valuable about getting roughed up a little bit along the way.

“You see trends in coaching (hires) too, whether it’s the hot coordinator getting a head job or now you're guys that have done it before and shown flashes get a second chance,” Cristobal said. “It all comes down to the fit, it comes down to the people they surround themselves with, the vision, the work ethic, the integrity. And there are some people who have done a good job with that, and I think it’s great.”

When Oregon named Cristobal the head coach on Dec. 8, 2017 shortly after Willie Taggart left for Florida State, it didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. Cristobal, who hooked onto Nick Saban’s staff at Alabama after FIU, had been a key assistant hire for Taggart. Not only was he the offensive line coach and co-offensive coordinator, but Cristobal had helped built the recruiting infrastructure that was having some early success, particularly in California.

Though some fans may have had reservations about Cristobal’s 27-47 career record, he was — like Orgeron at LSU — a hire that brought continuity, stability and proven recruiting results.

But in another interesting parallel with Orgeron, both LSU and Oregon have completely overhauled their style of play. Just as LSU ditched its antiquated offense for a modern passing game that nobody in the country has been able to slow down, the Ducks have transformed from an undersized speed-and-finesse program to one that is built on physicality and going toe-to-toe with anyone in the trenches.

And in some ways, you can probably owe that directly to self-reflection, second chances and having a better understanding of what a good program needs to look like. When you can add that perspective to a place like Oregon with an attractive national brand and facilities that are practically unmatched, it’s not that hard to envision someone who failed once finding success the next time around.

“We had some really good moments (at FIU), but this industry is different," Cristobal said. "Over there, you had to do everything on your own because you had no support. Then when you go to a place like Alabama and learn from coach Saban and study the process of not only achieving excellence but sustaining it, you learn a lot about what you want to do and don’t want to do and be able to piece it all together as it relates to the vision. It all starts with the people that you bring into the building from the coaches to the nutritionists to the development people. There is no wiggle room to kind of take something as a little thing. Every facet of your program is going to impact your people.”

We’ll find out over the next few weeks if Oregon is good enough to realize that vision this year. The only knock on the Ducks so far is a 27-21 last-minute loss in the season opener to Auburn, and as Cristobal notes, they were missing four key receivers and tight end Cam McCormick due to injuries in that game.

Regardless, if the Ducks can win their final three regular season games and beat Utah in the Pac-12 title game, they’ll have a great chance to make the final four — even if Cristobal doesn’t want to talk about that yet.

“I feel real good about us working our way to becoming one of the better teams in the country,” he said. “I believe we’ve come miles, but I believe we have miles to go as well. That’s our humble and driven attitude.”

But in the next few weeks, as another dozen or so coaches around the country lose their jobs and a new cycle of hires begins anew, one only needs to look at the top of the poll to see that many coaching narratives won’t fit into a neat little package.

As Cristobal and Orgeron have proven, not every firing is a career death sentence.