While we joke about being paid millions to not coach football, and while there are some who seem to appreciate that for what it is without stressing out about it (Orgeron), the main thing that makes a coaching job bad is the stress that it can cause. Frost just got fired from his dream job. He won them a national championship as a qb, and coached a school on a different tier to an undefeated season. The stress of his dream job seems to have undone him. Wherever he goes from here, what he's been through is worse imho.
If you can approach coaching like Orgeron did, and somehow get to the place where they pay you $17M to walk away, then great. But for most coaches, the stress is real. Some jobs produce more stress than others. Some jobs seem to produce stress for coaches that seemed calm, cool, collected, confident,
and successful elsewhere. How does that happen?
I don't think there's any one answer for every coach and every job, but there are principles in play here that are the same for coaching as for any other profession. The first and most obvious principle here is the Peter Principle. Some guys who are great position coaches are promoted to being bad coordinators. Some great coordinators are promoted to being bad HCs. It happens. Any time you hold a job for which you are not qualified, there is stress. If you are completely comfortable with who you are and your limitations (Orgeron), great. But any illusions about what you should be able to accomplish cause stress.
But how does a guy who goes undefeated at one school turn into a stressed out mess who appears to have cracked under the pressure and flamed out at another school? It seems to me that the answer, sometimes, lies not with the coach, but with the school. Some schools have illusions about who and what they are. More to the point, they harbor illusions about what their coaches should be able to accomplish.
This is most tragic with programs like Nebraska, who not so long ago were on the top tier of the sport. But the sport has changed, and there may not be a place for them on the top tier anymore.
It's not that the requirements for the top tier have changed. It's that Nebraska's ability to meet those requirements changed.
We could probably debate what the requirements are forever. I'll just state what I think they are and then let it go. Debate away.
- Administrative commitment to excellence - Check
- Fully endowed scholarships - Check
- Top-Level Facilities and the funding to keep them at the top level - Check
- Multi-generational fan base for whom your team is a family tradition, not just a sport they follow - Check
- EITHER: Access to truly elite-level recruits - This used to be a checkmark. Now, not so much.
- OR: Membership in a conference where no one else has access to recruits better than what you get - At UCF, yes. At Corn, no
Could the right coach get Nebraska elite recruits? Maybe. But Scott Frost is certainly not a guy with the kind of charisma that would be necessary to do that. If you want to talk about whether it's even possible at Nebraska, debate away. In my opinion, the changing of the game has given access to the top-level recruits primarily to teams that reside in cities that are big enough to be attractive to recruits, but not big enough to have pro sports teams. It appears that hockey doesn't count, because Columbus checks that box pretty hard. Lincoln, not so much, for reasons that might be more about location than about size.
This brings us to Arizona State. I moved to Maricopa County in the late 80s. There were billboards for ASU football season tickets. That was as unimaginable in Columbus then as it is now. They do not have the multi-generational fan base, and that might be foundational to much else that is on that list. The point is, if ASU brings in a coach and asks him to be more than an occasional contender for the PAC-?? title, then that could be a high stress job. If they accept who they are and what they can reasonably expect of a coach, then maybe it would be ok. But if a guy is driven to compete for championships the way most coaches seem to be, then ASU is tailor-made to be a high-stress environment, because being a contender every year like the Ohio State's of the world is not a reasonable expectation there.
