Thu 7 Dec 2006
Randy Shannon, Come On Down!
Posted by Trick Daddy Doubloons under Hurricane Football, Coach Shannon, Angered Criticism, Coaching Search
[2] Comments
As profiled here, Randy Shannon has apparently been hired as head coach of the University of Miami. From the profile, if you get the feeling I like Randy, you’d be right. That being said, this strikes me as a catastrophic mistake.
One of the key errors when Butch Davis left, and the most widely understood one, was hiring as a head coach someone who had never held the position. To rectify the problem, we go out and hire a coach… who has never held a head coaching position at any level?
The past four years, post-Dorsey and Willis McHeisman, our average scoring offense ranking has been 54 out of 117 and then 119 1-A teams. This season, we’ve averaged 19 points, good for 88th in the nation. And we played a freaking 1-AA team! So, of course, our interviewed candidates for the position include two defensive-minded coaches, a guy who only became a candidate when he went public with his desire for the job, and a guy targeted by a school with money to burn that has much better support. And, of course, the winner was the dude with no head coaching experience!
Allow me to reiterate: Coach Shannon is, in my estimation, at worst one of the top three defensive coordinators in college ball (and that’s counting Chizik, even though he’s technically now a head coach). His hire, though, doesn’t fix the problems this team unquestionably has, and certainly pisses the hell out of a large and vocal portion of the fanbase.
