Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Muschamp, Eh?

My Longhorns have decided to annoint defensive coordinator Will Muschamp as the Head-Coach-In-Waiting, to succeed Mack Brown when Brown decides to retire (for which there is no timetable, nor will there be if Brown keeps winning 10+ games a season). To entice him to stay, Muschamp will be paid head-coaching dollars (I have heard $900,000 per year from the local news and Wikipedia; this is apparently more than any other assistant coach in the nation; answers-dot-Yahoo tells me the average head coach salary is $950,000).

Cool. Continuity is wonderful for recruiting. Your 'Dlogger is optimistic now that UT need not experience a rebuilding effect when Brown retires and could keep rolling up 9+ wins per season for the next twenty years. And as wealthy as the university is, $900,000 seems a small price to pay.

However: we are not having a good defensive year. This from cfbstats-dot-com: 58th in total (yards allowed per game) defense, 111th (out of 120) against the pass. Yeah, right there behind Idaho. Yes, the Big 12 is a pass-happy league, but we're 9th in conference, worst in the southern division.

Colorado lured Dan Hawkins from a precocious Boise State squad in 2005 (a typical move, hiring a brilliant coach from a school that can't adequately pay him, by larger schools that can), and it seems that correlation didn't equal causation: Hawkins, 53-11 in five years at Boise State, is 12-21 in (nearly) three years at Colorado (from Wikipedia). Since Hawkins's departure, Boise State is 33-3 (from ESPN-dot-com). The lesson: be careful correlating success with a particular coach.

When Muschamp left LSU in 2004 the Tigers' defense went from allowing 252 yards and 11 points per game to allowing 257 and 17, respectively. When he left Auburn the (other) Tigers went from allowing 292 yards and 14 points per game to allowing 298 and 17. These stats are all Ibid. one way or another. So it seems his defense made a difference, especially in scoring (the one stat that counts). But: a difference substantial enough to build your program upon?

Too, he has never been a head coach. And chest-bumping players may get them fired up for the next play, but it might be perceived as weird when visiting with a high-school kid's parents. Just saying. . . .

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