“The most expensive thing to do in college athletics is to have a losing program. The second most expensive thing to do is to churn head coaches.”
That was what new WVU athletic director Wren Baker told me during a Zoom interview this week when I asked him about the logic behind keeping football coach Neal Brown in Morgantown for another season.
“(Firing a coach is) the first thing that fans want you to go to, but you just watch programs around the country and that’s how they dig really deep holes for themselves,” Baker said. “It costs a lot to change head coaches, it’s not just the money you’re paying coaches to leave…very rarely do you pay the next head coach less and that cost is probably more than what most people understand.”
Churning head coaches is an expensive practice to be sure, just ask Auburn how much they enjoy paying Guz Malzahn, Bryan Harsin and now Hugh Freeze all at the same time. It’s also not guaranteed to work — again, ask Aubrun how they’re doing — so from Baker’s point of view, what’s the harm of saving some money and giving Brown one more season?
“If you have a head coach who’s proven that they can do something really, really well, it makes a lot of sense to try and give that person, who’s already been on the job, a chance to make changes and do it,” he explained.
A not-so-generous read of this reasoning would be that WVU has resigned itself to keeping an underachieving head coach simply as a money-saving tactic. But Baker said it’s not all about the dollars and cents, it’s about being rational and making the best decision for the future, not the one that’s most popular today.
“If you could run a department by fan vote, I believe the department would be heavy in the red because I think we’d be giving extensions and then firing people pretty regularly,” Baker quipped. “When people are passionate about something like sports, they’re not always rational. As an athletic director, as a president, when you’re talking about your teams and your coaches, you have to be thoughtful, you have to be analytical, you have to be somewhat deliberate, you’ve got to resist the urge to be emotional and reactive.”
Another aspect of Brown’s retention is time. Firing a coach forces a hard reset on the program. Who’s to say a new hire could have the team in a better place in three years than Brown could?
“If anybody knew exactly how it was going to turn out, they would be a billionaire,” Baker said. “These are decisions that you just make the best-educated guess that you can.”
Over the past few years, college athletics have become more and more fast-paced. Nearly gone are the days of giving a coach enough time to lay a foundation and really build up a winner. If Lincoln Riley can go to USC and get the Trojans on the cusp of the playoffs in year one, why couldn’t someone do that here? But Baker stressed the importance of patience, of truly giving a coach the chance to succeed or fail before simply pulling the plug.
“Would Coach K (Mike Krzyzewski) have ever gotten the time to build Duke that he did, would (Clemson coach) Dabo Sweeny, in this environment, have gotten the time that he did?” Baker wondered. “I think when you hire a highly-talented coach, you have to look in totality at all of the metrics along with the winning. You take all of that into account and then make the best decision that you can. It won’t always be the decision that’s the most popular for the day.”
At the end of the day, the only thing that will tell if keeping Brown was the right move is time. And at this time, Baker believes WVU made the right move.
“Even though I know it’s not a decision where there’s universal acceptance, I think the right decision was made,” he said.
TWEET @CodyNespor
