Coaching Search Maybe Non-Sensical Rant: Hire A Competent Administrator

This might be nonsensical but I need to get it off my chest. The pic of Reveille is there to make me happy.

This coaching search has me soul-searching about how good of a job Texas A&M is. We’ve got all the resources in the world—I was in College Station the other day and I’ve legit never seen facilities like we have. We’ve got the stadium, fan support, money out the ass...we’ve got everything. And yet we can't seem to get to where we think we should be. Is potential really potential if it’s never been actualized?

And it seems like every time we search for a coach we look at the guy to FINALLY get us “there”. Rarely do we hear about “how” they’re going to get us “there”...instead we just hear about how they are the guy to get us to our vision of the program that we see ourselves as being.

So with that in mind, I don't want the vision anymore. I don't want someone coming in and talking platitudes about how we’re here to win championships and bullshit like that. I’m tired of hearing about the “what”. Give me some fucking information on the “how”. Hire me someone, and articulate the vision of the “how”.

Jimbo was not a “how” guy as it relates to running a football program. We can point to blank checks leading to the hires of Addazio and Petrino, but the biggest glaring red flag in my mind is that we have had an open Director of Player Personnel position that has sat vacant since June. This person is responsible for our coordinated recruiting efforts and roster-related stuff and the damn thing has been vacant since June.

And like then the temptation is to say we need a CEO coach not a players coach or a coordinator. Man, we’re paying this person millions of dollars, why cant we expect them to do all of those things or at least surround themselves with the ability to do those things? Why is it an either or dichotomy?

This isn't about getting someone with a vision of who we could be. This is about finding someone who can be a good steward of these resources and line them up to get us to where we need to go. We’ve got all the ingredients in the world, we just need a competent chef to put them together.

Hire me a good administrator. Set up a team-based effort within the AD to where the AD can hire folks to support the football program and the football program can have open honest two-way dialogues with the Athletic Department about what is needed and then folks work together to create solutions. Hire me someone who can run the program effectively and efficiently, not a demigod to lord over it.

I need someone who is energized by the process of maintaining. We’ve had build/rebuild...but what are you going to do to maintain? Maintenance includes self-reflection every year, after good and bad, to see what needs to be changed. And that shit is built into football, players watch film every single week to figure out what they need to do differently within contexts. Assessment and evaluation on a micro level are built into the football experience. Build it into the damn process of running a program too. Continuous evaluation, continuous assessment.

Don’t grant a big-ass extension after a good season in years 1-3. Be measured. If excellence is the expectation, find the balance between rewarding it and incentivizing, and if they threaten to leave have the temerity to say thanks for the service, fuck off, go elsewhere we’ll just replace you.

In short, I genuinely do not know how good of a job we are because all I’ve heard is how good of a job we are and not how specifically people will use the things that make us a good job (facilities, recruiting base, donors, ability to create generational wealth) to create a winning damn football program. Not team, winning program. “Program” involves systems, structures, and processes.

The pieces are there. Find someone who can articulate the process by which they’re going to figure out how to solve the puzzle, not just someone who can tell us what the final product will look like.