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Photo by Andrew Kilzer, TexAgs
Texas A&M Football

Lopez: Coach in waiting ... coach-speak for “program killer?”

December 15, 2010
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Mack Brown was at the forefront of two of the most innovative trends in college football. One was brilliant. The other was beyond foolish.

One helped Brown and the Longhorns build a 2005 national championship team. The other ultimately toppled the Longhorns and today has Brown scrambling for answers, assistant coaches and a Plan B retirement strategy that can protect his legacy.
    
Not surprisingly, both of Brown’s bold strokes in large part had to do with recruiting. One innovation was setting the standard for early commitments from the state’s best players – earning and securing the love of five-star junior high school players as young as 16-years-old. The other was making Will Muschamp the designated Longhorns coach in waiting.

Make no mistake, everything in college football is about recruiting. And considering the high-dollar stakes, no idea should be discounted. From the color schemes on a team’s uniform, to square footage of weight rooms, to when and how recruiting trips are staged, and the length of the shorts that co-ed recruiting hostesses wear, it’s all about getting signatures on letters of intent.

ESPN Two years after anointing Will Muschamp as coach in waiting, Mack Brown was left at the alter in favor of UF. {"Module":"photo","Alignment":"right","Caption":"Two years after anointing Will Muschamp as coach in waiting, Mack Brown was left at the alter in favor of UF.","MediaItemID":3214}
But there are valuable lessons to be learned from both concepts, specifically on the heels of Muschamp spurning the coach-in-waiting designation for the Florida job, Oklahoma State’s Dana Holgorsen accepting the tag at West Virginia on Tuesday and, of course, the Aggies’ Tim DeRuyter sitting there as one of the hottest commodities in college football.

It’s already been bandied about to designate DeRuyter as a coach-in-waiting. But rest assured it would be a huge error to offer DeRuyter any sort designation. It guarantees nothing, inevitably drives a wedge between coaches and hinders instead of helps recruiting.

It would, in fact, ultimately undo all the strides the Aggies have made as a program in 2010.

College football learned a lot from Mack Brown’s re-inventing the early-commitment. He didn’t initiate it, but Brown committed wholeheartedly to snagging early commitments. With better facilities, more resources and the ability to provide makeshift combines – i.e., “summer camps” – Brown and the Longhorns built a recruiting edge on the majority of college football.

The most notable commitment in Brown’s 2002 class was Vince Young, who did not commit early, but the majority of those players did. Included among them were six eventual All-Americans and nine NFL draftees. There also were several busts and bad characters never heard from again in that class. Such is the price of doing business with early commitments, but the mold has been set and success stories on the field are numerous. As much as there are issues with evaluating talent so early and pressuring youngsters to commit to their future even before they decide on a Homecoming date is unfair, it’s going no where.

The coach-in-waiting, however, is an idea whose time has come, crippled and splintered programs and should go away.

Muschamp’s status at Texas led to good, old-fashioned office politics and back-biting in Austin. Within the staff and even among players on the team, coaches and players took up sides with or against Muschamp as the successor. It was unhealthy and Brown is trying to piece back together his staff and his team because of it.

There were similar issues and bad feelings with Jimbo Fisher at Florida State as well. And as much as Holgorsen’s status is ostensibly more cut-and-dried, with the 2012 season apparently cast in stone as the date for him to take over as head coach from Bill Stewart, don’t be so sure.

Suppose Holgorsen works his offensive magic at WVU and the Mountaineers become a national title contender next year. What’s to stop Stewart from deciding he enjoys the ride and would like to stick around another year or two?

To paraphrase an old Darrell Royal quote, three things can happen when a program designates a coach in waiting and two of them are bad. There’s the chance, a slim one, that the transition will be smooth. There’s the chance that a Florida State or Texas situation undoes a winning legacy. And third, there’s the limited recruiting the coach in waiting is allowed to do, now that the NCAA has legislated that coaches in waiting must adhere to the same restricted road recruiting limitations as head coaches.

Andrew Kilzer, TexAgs Tim DeRuyter has been a great hire by Mike Sherman, but there is no need to follow the coach in waiting trend. {"Module":"photo","Alignment":"left","Caption":"Tim DeRuyter has been a great hire by Mike Sherman, but there is no need to follow the coach in waiting trend.","MediaItemID":2789}
The price of success, frankly, is that others want to duplicate a program’s transcendent moment. They take your ideas, copy your formula for success and if possible hire your coaches away.

Tim DeRuyter will be courted and clearly some options out there will be intriguing for him, if not outright too good to pass up. It may not happen this year, or next or the year after that. But it will happen.

If the Aggies have learned anything from recent trends in college football, it should be that gimmicky “coach in waiting” tags do more harm than good. The best way to ensure long-term success is to pay your best coaching talent and hope they hang around.

Beyond that, it’s about creating a culture, not a catchy title. The best defensive coordinator the Aggies ever had – the true architect of the Wrecking Crew – was R.C. Slocum.

It was Slocum whose defensive roots ran to 1970s defensive guru Melvin Robertson. He created a style that was passed along to Slocum, who developed and built upon it, then passed it along to Bob Davie, Tommy Tuberville, Phil Bennett and Mike Hankwitz. The names changed. The Wrecking Crew defensive culture remained the same for more than a decade’s worth of Texas A&M football success.

If you’re an Aggie, today you’re hoping Tim DeRuyter never goes away. The truth is, he most likely will. Eventually.

But somewhere among the staff, however, is a Nick Toth or a Dat Nguyen or others not taking up sides or playing typical office games, but soaking it all in and buying into a style defined by a culture.
 
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