Jimmy Johnson was 29-25-3 at Oklahoma State before he was hired by Sam Jankovich. You can’t expect Butch to be killing it at FIU with 2-Star recruits.
He’s a proven program rebuilder, and a great talent evaluator and recruiter. Things that have been missing from Miami since he left.
Also, Nick Saban is 69 years old, too.
The only way Butch would work is if we spent millions on our assistant coaches and infrastructure and he could pull the mack brown former coach charm/and market himself as the creator of the most talented team ever.
At this point in his career our administration would have to hire elite assistants and add like 5-10 more player personnel analysts, recruiting guys,
My college coach preferences (not including Campbell or Fickell):
1. Mike Gundy- Go get him. He has to be getting bored, alumnus or not, being at Oklahoma State. Since 2005 he’s won 67.6% of his games in a power five conference and constantly playing second fiddle to Oklahoma and Texas (had been Texas A&M, too). He would be so interesting, personality wise, in south florida too. He’d fit in with the rest of the crazies. Plus he knows how to hire a staff. Stop looking for the uber **** flavor of the month hire and go for a guy who’s been very good for a very long time and still younger. I don’t know if he peaked a decade ago or not but I really think he just needs a change of scenery.
2. Neal Brown-three straight double digit winning seasons at Troy. Very underrated coach and this season will tell a lot about him but WVU looks very good this year and have gotten better each year. Has a very tough schedule relative to what WVU used to have.
3. Napier-An interesting coach who learned at Clemson, Todd graham and Saban (awesome recruiter there). Has paid his dues at a g5 program and they’ve looked great the past two years with two seasons of double digit wins.
With Napier one interesting thing is he’s played power five teams very tough: Texas this year, Mississippi State two years ago, they beat Iowa State last year.
The guy doesn’t just do a solid job because he has a massive talent or
Budget advantage (Golden had the top budget in his conference and could still never win it). He goes toe to toe in some cases with bigger programs. That tells me a lot. I like coaches that do more with less.
4. Mario-Has had some gameday issues but overall checks off a lot of boxes. If they invest in a great staff with him like he has at Oregon we could be cooking here. It depends on the administration and infrastructure they are willing to build. He knows the culture, has coached here and at FIU, and can recruit. Can we overcome his gameday problems and can we get him the staff and infrastructure he will need?
5. Lane-would make us either the baddest team on the planet in a good way or be a disaster/get us on probation. At the very least he would raise interest in the program in ways we haven’t seen here in decades and we would be incredibly fun to watch. The outcome, however, would be up for debate. Lol. High risk and high reward.
Honorable mention 1: Dave Clawson-do people know how difficult it is to win at wake forest? I had a relative that went there years ago and the school is tiny with as limited resources as you can find in power 5. He would be the least **** hire of anyone but we would overall be a lot better coached and he has done well at Bowling Green, Richmond, and Fordham too. Would he be good enough for our expectations? We’d probably, in every 5 years have 2 or 3 double digit win seasons. Is that enough?
Honorable mention 2: Chris Klieman, KSU. Awesome in FCS. Solid at KSU so far.