Manuel Begins Search For New Football Coach

Today, UConn Athletic Director Warde Manuel begins the most important task of his young tenure at the school: finding a new coach for his football team. This should have been Manuel’s second time making a crucial hire in a revenue-positive sport, as he also oversaw a critical coaching transition for the men’s basketball team. As you no doubt know, Manuel was robbed of his autonomy, first by Jim Calhoun’s stubborn and arrogant meddling, and then by Kevin Ollie proving Calhoun right.

This is a little different. First of all, Manuel doesn’t have a football version of Kevin Ollie, both extremely qualified and enthusiastic for the job. He also doesn’t have a plum job with loads of prestige, capable of attracting elite coaches from successful universities. He’s going to have to look a fair bit harder than he would have for a new basketball coach, and also a lot harder than Jeff Hathaway did to find Paul Pasqualoni.

The other day, my sister said to me that the football team needs to find their Jim Calhoun/Geno Auriemma. In other words, they need to find a qualified, relatively unknown head coach who will take over the program, lead it to success, and then stick around. I know a lot of UConn fans feel this way, probably due to watching Randy Edsall leverage his success at UConn into the head coaching job at Big 10-bound Maryland.

Unfortunately, candidates like this are hard to come by, especially in football. We aren’t likely to see a football coach who sticks around for 20 years at UConn, at least until they’re both more-established and in a better conference. At this point, if the coach is really successful, he’ll be a target for a bigger and better job. Unless you’re an elite program, if you have a candidate for whom your job is his “dream job,” it probably means that he isn’t good enough for it.

We give Hathaway a hard time for Pasqualoni’s embarrassing failure as head coach, but that serves to really illustrate how hard it is to find a head coach to run a major college football team. Hathaway had his own set of obstacles at the time, not the least of which was Edsall’s not-so-timely exit, which came after Steve Addazio, Hathaway’s rumored first choice, had already been hired to take over at Temple. After that, the top available candidates included Mike Leach, who had always demonstrated ample potential to embarrass his employer, Garrick McGee, who has since floundered at UAB, and Eric Mangini, who doesn’t need me to explain why that wasn’t a good idea.

- Advertisement -

Furthermore, we need to not expect the kind of immediate success that the school saw following Edsall’s hiring. The biggest factor in UConn’s quick development wasn’t Edsall’s coaching so much as it was an influx of money into an exciting new program, and a local NFL talent at the quarterback position who decided he wanted to stay close to home. As much as I’m excited about Casey Cochran, let’s not start lying to ourselves about his future.

That all being said, these last three games showed us what this team is capable of, provided it has adequate leadership. I don’t think that Cochran is Dan Orlovsky, but he’s definitely good enough to win in the AAC (and probably the ACC, when we finally get around to making that move). Add talented running backs Lyle McCombs and Max DeLorenzo and wide receiver Geremy Davis, and it’s clear that, whoever coaches UConn next year, he won’t have a bare cupboard to work with. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the candidates:

The first, and most obvious candidate, is interim head coach TJ Weist. I don’t know Weist, but he seems like a genuine, hard-working guy, and he’s gotten the team to play together down the stretch. Furthermore, he seems to really want the UConn job. That being said, he was also the offensive coordinator and/or head coach for the 0-9 start, and his resume isn’t particularly substantive. This job is the best job he might have a shot at, and I’m not sure that’s where we want to turn again.

My personal favorite candidate is Michigan State defensive coordinator Pat Narduzzi. He’s the coordinator for one of the best defensive units in the country, and his stock is on the rise with yesterday’s Big 10 Championship win over Ohio State. He’s lauded as an excellent recruiter, and he’s a Connecticut native, having been born in New Haven. No, he’s probably not a permanent choice, being only 47, but Narduzzi is the kind of guy who could put the program back on the right track, establish UConn as a northeast recruiting power, and win a few bowl games before he snags a head coaching job at notable school in the Big 10. I also like the idea of bringing in a defensive-minded coach because it leaves open the option of keeping Weist around and in control of an offense he seems to have fixed.

Towson head coach Rob Ambrose is another option. Towson, you may recall, made UConn look awfully bad on opening day this season, and after two rough seasons after he was hired, Ambrose has guided Towson to a 27-9 record over the last three years, as they’ve started to establish themselves as one of the top teams in the FCS. More relevantly to UConn, he served as the Huskies’ QB coach and then offensive coordinator for 7 seasons (2002-2008). Given his ties to the region and Towson’s status as an FCS school, Ambrose would likely be a much easier get than Narduzzi.

I’ve heard several other options, such as Ball State head coach Pete Lembo and UCLA offensive coordinator Noel Mazzone, but Narduzzi and Ambrose are definitely the two best options from where I’m standing. Regardless of who ends up taking the job, Manuel needs to make an exhaustive search, or we could be looking at a middling athletic program for a long, long time.