Success for CSU athletics increases challenge of keeping coaches

Mike Bobo will be the CSU football coach next season.

Beyond that? Well ...

He's barely been at Colorado State University for a full year and already his name has been tied to various job openings across the country.

Bobo declined to publicly address whether he has interviewed for any coaching vacancies but did tell his team any reports that stated he did were false.

For some CSU players, such as quarterback Nick Stevens, there was never any concern about losing his coach. For All-American wide receiver Rashard Higgins, though, hearing Bobo might have interviewed at Missouri felt like déjà vu. Who can blame him?

It was just more than a year ago that Jim McElwain left the Rams following the conclusion of a 10-win regular season to take over at Florida.

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Losing a hot-shot young coach isn’t a problem unique to CSU. The reality is, coaches in today’s era of college football — especially at Group of Five schools — don’t stay put as long as they used to. The Group of Five conferences include schools from the Mountain West, American Athletic Conference, Conference USA, the Mid-American Conference and Sun Belt Conference.

Not counting the one job that remains open, since 2000 the 128 active NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision schools have made 353 head-coaching hires with an average tenure of less than 4.2 years. That’s a significant increase in helm changes from the 300 coaches hired by the same schools during the preceding 16-season span. Those coaches lasted an average of 6.2 years.

“I think over time there has been a progression where it does seems like there is a more competitive space,’’ CSU athletic director Joe Parker said. “Where everyone seems to be competing for coaching talent, and obviously, you’ve seen that with the increase in compensation. I don’t think even if you’re a Power 5 school that you’re immune to it.”

Of the 35 programs that have hired four or more coaches since 2000, 21 reign from the Group of Five conferences, considered part of college football’s “have-nots.” These conferences are without an automatic tie-in to the College Football Playoff’s elite New Years Six bowl games.

There are two motivators for an increase turnover, former longtime CSU football coach Sonny Lubick said. On one hand, high-performing Group of Five programs are apt to lose their coach because a bigger school can offer more money and resources. Lubick is one of the exceptions. During his 15 years at CSU, he was twice up for the job at the University of Miami, turning it down in 1995 (Hurricanes hired Butch Davis) and being passed over for Larry Coker in 2001.

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Twenty-three coaching changes have occurred this cycle with three Power 5 jobs (Iowa State, Syracuse and Virginia Tech) filled by the 2015’s top-performing Group of Five coaches (Matt Campbell, Toledo; Dino Babers, Bowling Green; Justin Fuente, Memphis, respectively).

But more often than not, a smaller program loses its coach, Lubick said, due to an administration that’s impatient and has unrealistic expectations. There are only a handful of schools outside of the Power 5 conferences that have the infrastructure to regularly compete at a national level.

“I’ve been on both sides of the fence,” said Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich, who served in that capacity at CSU from 1994-97. “The toughest challenge I’ve had during my entire career was keeping Sonny Lubick. That took a whole host of people, but most importantly it took Sonny and his wife. Miami wanted him desperately and he would have been a phenomenal choice down there.

“You don’t run into a lot of Sonny Lubicks, though, who have great loyalty, that love the community, that are doing it for a lot of other reasons than chasing the almighty dollar.”

Jurich, who has made four successful football hires at Louisville and brought in Rick Pitino to coach the basketball program, added he urges coaches and athletic directors to bet on the fit and not the size of paycheck. When he lost football coach Charlie Strong to Texas after the 2013 season, he was surprised because not only did Strong seem happy, but Jurich was willing to match any financial offer the Longhorns made.

“Don’t look for the greener grass. We’ve had a lot of people we watched here who left because they thought the pastures were greener,” he said. “I have one presently, Bobby Petrino, who actually lived it and I think he found the grass in Louisville is pretty green.”

No matter the fit, retaining a coach, especially younger coaches, isn’t easy. Like most businesses, in order for a coach to progress their career they usually have to move on to a new program, Lubick said.

Niko Medved has lived it.

Though his sport is basketball, he spent 15 seasons as a Division I assistant at Furman, Minnesota and CSU, taking what he felt were natural steps toward becoming a head coach before finally taking over the Paladins’ program in 2013-14.

COACHES' PAY: CSU assistant salaries increased under Mike Bobo

He said the win-now mentality from administrators and boosters brings unnecessary pressure to coaches at smaller schools, making many fear the idea of building a program. While he’s in no rush to leave Furman, a team that was four points shy of making the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1980 last season, he said it’s common to see a young coach have one good season at a school and jump ship before they’re ready. The reason is if they don’t repeat the same success in back-to-back years, they’ll be out of a job.

“People say they’ll have patience with you, but that’s very rarely true. We’re in such a volatile profession,” Medved said. “I think the best advice I ever got was to make your current job your next job.

There’s no magical way to combat losing a good coach. Parker said schools try to protect themselves with large buyouts to steer rival programs away, but that’s never a sure-fire defense. Last year, despite having a $7.5 million buyout built into McElwain’s contract at CSU, the University of Florida was willing to invest enough to make it only a minor hurdle. Florida increased his base salary from $1.5 million at CSU to $3.98 million. CSU used the buyout money from Florida as seed money for a new coach and to help fund new cost-of-attendance stipends.

And when an athletic department’s revenue ranks 67th in the country like CSU’s does compared to Florida’s ranking ninth, there’s not a lot more a smaller school can do to provide protection.

“You try to focus a little bit with the budget limitations we have on the intangibles. Some of the things that lend themselves to quality of life,’’ Parker said. “Hopefully, the environment we’re creating for coaches here, across the board, they feel like they’re respected, appreciated and they realize we do our best to compensate them relative to the market.

“If we’re having situations where people feel think coaches that have built something here at CSU are the answer to their situation, that’s probably going to be a long-term good thing for us; it’s better than the alternative.’’

Parker knows with winning comes the calling from larger athletic departments.

“When we get on a path for all of our programs where there’s a lot of success, it’s going to be difficult just because if money is the primary motivating factor, we have a space we’re comfortable playing in right now,’’ Parker said. “To go beyond that would compromise some other things we think are valuable to the experience of our students.”

How long will Bobo remain at CSU?

Only Bobo can determine that. Despite a $1.35 million salary and $5 million buyout, continued success will keep him a target of Power 5 schools. The same goes for Utah State’s Matt Wells and Air Force’s Troy Calhoun, a former quarterback at the academy, who are tied to job openings on an annual basis.

The era of the 20-year coach at the same school appears to be over. But with a little luck and a lot of patience, CSU and its peers can always be the exception.

So long as they find the perfect fit.

For insight and analysis on athletics around Northern Colorado and the Mountain West, follow sports columnist Matt L. Stephens at twitter.com/mattstephens and facebook.com/stephensreporting.

Coaching changes, by year, since 2010

Year

Hires

2010 24 2011 28 2012 31 2013 20 2014 15 2015 26

Souce: FootballScoop.com