Headhunters

This isn't about George Trafton, Hardy Brown, Jack Tatum, and Andre Waters or any of the other on the field headhunters throughout the history of football. No, this is about the growing reliance among college athletic directors on the use of search consultants to find their coaches. These consultants now operate as the conduit for some of the best coaching jobs in the country. Fees generally range from $30,000 to $90,000 for a Division I football coach search. I hadn't really thought about this trend until Cal athletic director Sandy Barbour took this route to find a replacement for Jeff Tedford. I realize that many things fill the plates of athletic directors. I just assumed that finding coaches for their school was one of those things. In the recent couple of years, Cal has come close to dropping a handful of sports programs. Technically, they did drop the programs but the programs saved themselves. While even $90,000 may not seem like much when talk of money on a university scale is in the millions, it's still a nice chunk of change. A chunk of change that can be better used elsewhere. It can be better used elsewhere because I could have come up with a list of coaching possibilities for Barbour. In fact, I did come up with a list of coaches that included the same coaches that Cal was known to have interviewed. This list included Cal's current head football coach Sonny Dykes. Pretty much everybody's dream candidate was Boise St. coach Chris Peterson. Any idiot could have placed him on their list. Former San Jose St. and current Colorado coach Mike MacIntyre and Fresno St. coach Tim DeRuyter seemed like automatic choices. Dykes too. It was easy to put together a list without "consultant" advice and it didn't cost even $30,000 to do so. One of these search consultant firms placed Jim Harbaugh at Stanford a few years ago. Wow! Genius! Harbaugh was a coach of interest as soon as he entered the field. But, Stanford's coaching choices prior to Harbaugh made it fairly obvious that finding a decent one was beyond them. They needed help.

Headhunters have been a part of the employment world for decades. It's no real surprise that headhunters would pop up in the football world. With today's media overload there are no coaching unknowns. While I think that spending close to $100,000 on an external coaching search is a waste, it must have some merit. So many schools are doing it. They can't be spending that much money simply because they can. Can they? Apparently the consultants can go deeper in their background checks. They can find the skeletons if they're there. Using consultants also provides the athletic directors with some cover if a hire doesn't work out. That's not very optimistic. If Sonny Dykes becomes the second coming of Pappy Waldorf, but with Rose Bowl wins, then that's fantastic. It shouldn't have taken external consultants to bring Dykes and Cal together but maybe it did. Sandy Barbour still had the final decision. She obviously felt that she needed some help getting there.