Indiana / Cignetti are legit

[SalUteopia]

Just trashed a decent Nebraska team 56-7, and off to a 7-0 start. They have an exciting O that is yet to trail this season. I wouldn’t be surprised if they end the regular season at 11-1, with their only loss to tOSU.
Cignetti will likely get poached away. Dude is a proven winner.

[2008 National Champ]

and not an in-house hire who spent multiple years as the Head Coach in Waiting. I keep saying that there are good coaches out there if you are willing to find them.

[22Ute22]

Yup, Scalley becoming HC will likely be the final nail in the coffin for Utah.

[Ute Dub]

Ugh. Even if it is the “nail in the coffin” it isn’t because the portal allows for quick turnarounds.

[SalUteopia]

I agree, but how do you differentiate between a Cignetti and a Napier? Frost seemed like a great hire at the time, but we saw how that unfolded. Dabo and Day were promoted from within and have thrived. Whether hiring internally or externally, there are only a handful of truly great coaches out there.

[The Miami Ute]

You think Cignetti will get poached? By whom? We had a conversation about him recently here. He’s almost as old as Whitt and is in his first year of a contract that runs through the 2029 season. He’s also never coached west of the Mississippi (except for two years at Rice almost 40 years ago), so that kind of limits his appeal and reach. Personally, I think that he stays at Indiana and continues to build them up. They’ve never been known as a football school but they have a national brand, huge fanbase, and get a B1G payout. With NIL and good management, any team in the P2 can turn around their fortunes quickly.

[2008 National Champ]

If I knew the answer, I’d be getting paid a lot more and I’d be in the coach hiring biz. The main difference between Napier and Cignetti is the latter had unprecedented success at a couple of places that hadn’t had much before, then transitioned a top FCS team to FBS without a drop in performance. He’d achieved every where he’d been given a chance and then got a promotion to a school that had been bad for about as long as anyone can remember. Whereas Napier had success in his first spot and then went to a place where a lot of seemingly good coaches had failed. Maybe Indiana is a place that’s been down so long they are willing to listen to a good coach while Florida is a place where everyone knows better than the coach?

Day is in a no-win situation. Anything short of winning a title every year (which Urban didn’t do) is considered a failure. He’s lost 9 games in ~ 6 seasons. If that’s failure, please sign Utah up for some of that disappointment.

But you are absolutely correct in that there is no magical algorithm for picking out the right coach. The same coach is just as capable of failing at one spot as they are at succeeding at another. Which is why you should always do a true hiring search. If the guy you already have in your system is the best fit, run with him. But just because he is currently in your system doesn’t mean that he will be the best available option when you are ready to make your decision.

[The Miami Ute]

Sunbelt Billy should have never gotten the Florida job. Florida always seems to go for the next big thing and really have only gotten it right with Meyer.

[2008 National Champ]

McElwain, Muschamp, Mullen.,, maybe they should have avoided coaches whose names started with M, Napier. Am I missing any since Meyer quit? Not exactly murderer’s row of coaching resumes. Even Meyer was a reach that worked and they’ve been trying to duplicate it since.

It takes about 20 seconds of listening to Meyer to realize how driven he is. The rest don’t quite have that. They may say the right words in the interview but they never had the level of success Urban did prior to Florida. No matter what you think of the guy personally, Urban could coach ’em up. And the best thing that may have happened for Utah was that he left early before the program got caught up in it’s own jetwash.

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