What Really Happens in a College Coaching Search? Put Yourself in an AD’s Shoes.

Put yourself in the athletic director’s chair. It’s 2022, and you’ve decided to fire your coach. Coaching hires are hard to make and even harder to get right. Good coaches have bad years and bad coaches have good years. There are no sure things, and there are always coaches who surprisingly pan out.

The success of a modern AD hinges on three things: 1. Hiring a football coach 2. Raising money 3. Building facilities. People can quibble about pillars two and three, but there is little doubt that No. 1 is the most important in major college sports, considering how the football program’s success has a knock-on effect on the university side as well. So you have to nail this, because you may not get another opportunity to make a hire—rightly or wrongly, AD tenures are increasingly tied to the success or failure of their football coaches, and there are dozens of other sports to pay attention to, as well as various fundraising efforts and potential responsibilities on conference or NCAA committees. But you’re in the seat, so you make the call.

College athletics sits between its amateur roots and its professionalized reality, especially at the Power 5 level, and how ADs use external assistance in hiring is part of that. An AD has worked their entire career to get into the position to hire a football coach. A good selection can make their career as an administrator from a public perception standpoint. So how do you go about it?

First, you’ll probably call a search firm.

An AD may have a search committee of trusted alumni or top lieutenants involved, but they will likely still solicit the help of a search firm in some way.

Sometimes it can just be for the logistics of setting up interviews to keep the process extremely close to the vest. Some other commonly cited reasons to hire a search firm have to do with plausible deniability, confidentiality and to cover your bases on a background check—lest you become a cautionary tale like Notre Dame and George O’Leary. And there’s certainly plenty of those services rendered, according to DHR International’s managing partner of global sports practice, Glenn Sugiyama.

“We have 13 FBI agents, a former director of Homeland Security, six psychologists on our staff, people that do leadership assessments, psychological profiles,” Sugiyama says. “We can do to the very minutest detail of booking all the travel, so that no travel is booked in a college athletic department, so nobody knows where our athletic directors are going because we book everything. We front all the expenses so that no coaches, no candidates, nobody’s going to see expense reports. We front every flight, every expense that happens. Everything’s in different names. And let’s face it, you have to be a big firm to do that. I mean, you’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fees, airfares, that we have on our credit card every given month.”

Search firms can also help surface surprising candidates, like Biff Poggi at Charlotte. Charlotte athletic director Mike Hill hadn’t used a search firm before and was an assistant AD at Florida when former AD Jeremy Foley led a search in 2014 that had such little discretion, fans and reporters were able to track the university’s plane and stake out then candidate Jim McElwain, taking pictures of Foley through the window. This year Hill went to search firm TurnkeyZRG with a blank slate, and they helped him fill it with applicants including Poggi, at the time Michigan’s chief of staff.

“We identified what we were looking for in terms of characteristics,” Hill says. “We were very open-minded. We were not predisposed to it has to be a coordinator, or it has to be a P5 or FCS head coach. We really [said], here were the characteristics. And we talked about that a lot. And we developed our pool.”

There are around seven or eight major players in the college athletics search business, and mileage can vary on how involved a search firm can actually be. For instance, if requested, they can speak to key boosters to make sure they feel included, even if only to a nominal degree.

“We like to call them listening sessions,” one search firm executive says. “Anyone you want us to check a box with, let us know. We’ll get them off your plate; happy to do it.”

Boosters add a Wild West element to searches, but their actual influence on them can be overstated, mostly by the boosters themselves. Part of organizational alignment is empowering an AD from the university chancellor level to act with autonomy—so hopefully you have it. That certainly aided Tennessee in its search that ended up with seemingly outside-the-box hire Josh Heupel.

In the NFL, interview information is more readily available. For instance, teams announce it on their own websites, because they have to formally request the candidate’s club to interview anyway. There is much more cloak and dagger in college football searches, which means market information is a tool unto itself in addition to insight into a coach’s background. Did coach X really interview with school Y, or is his agent just saying that he did? If an AD has a good enough relationship with school Y’s AD, they could call them. But perhaps they don’t want to, in order to keep the circle of information tight.

Another layer to candidate culling can include the services of communications and branding firm Anachel, which has assisted college and pro teams as well as clients like the Big Ten conference. As far as coaching searches are concerned, the main service Anachel provides is key insights into how a coach is viewed by the public.

“There’s three constituents that hire us for searches: either a search firm, agent, or the university,” Anachel CEO Carrie Cecil says. “One unique way we help them is by launching online listening tools to collect data that provide the client with insights—the good, the bad and the ugly. Based on what we learn from the data, the client has more robust information to make a decision, and once that decision is made, we help prepare them to win the presser—be it speeches or questions and answers.”

Anachel runs keyword searches with a “candidate’s name + school name” or “name + hired,” which brings up social media mentions and news articles using artificial intelligence to sort good and bad. Cecil’s team then combs through each to figure out what’s actually positive or negative and who’s saying what. A fan with 20 followers is different from a local beat writer. Their tools can also compare one candidate’s overall sentiment to another.

“When you get down to the wire there’s a lot of chatter on them online, a lot of mentions; you could have up to 4,000 mentions in two hours,” Cecil says. “You have to have trained human beings behind that artificial intelligence to verify clickbait headlines from vanilla articles or “Dick” from Dick Clark. AI perceives “Dick” as profanity, when it is an iconic figure’s name.”

Search firms are not perfect (you can easily find various stories of checks they’ve missed and things that slipped through the cracks). Their efficacy can also depend on the client. If an AD doesn’t think search firms are necessary, they don’t use them and likely won’t have positive things to say about that part of the industry. It also depends on which agent you talk to about whether they would rather deal with a search firm or not. Some find them helpful, while some would rather deal with the AD directly. Firms are also certainly expensive, with the price tag easily exceeding six figures per search. A CBS study found that of the 28 jobs that opened in the 2016 cycle, 16 used search firms. And of the 11 searches for which public information was available, the cost totaled $767,167 at an average of $70,000 per search.

There are other ways athletic directors can arrive at a pool of candidates beyond the list an AD has in their desk drawer just in case. First, they might call Stephen Prather, chief customer officer of SportSource Analytics.

What started as a fake business plan in 2005 became real after the ’08 financial crisis, when Prather and his brother Scott decided they weren’t making money in real estate and wanted a change. They started thinking there had to be a better way for schools to hire coaches beyond who’s popular and who interviews well. The profile of the common AD has shifted over the years from former coach to MBA-having, business-minded executives who are more receptive to analytics due to their backgrounds.

Now, SportSource Analytics works with about 100 different programs, according to Prather, and has assisted in more than 60 head coaching searches and more at the coordinator level as well. The company assists agencies as well as the College Football Playoff committee.

“We have a four-dimensional analysis that we utilize in our coach evaluations,” Prather says. “Scheme, recruiting, culture and player development. Then we provide a risk rating from 1 to 10 on the potential hire—1 being the least amount of risk, 10 being the most. And we usually have a pretty good write-up that goes into detail.

“Now, there’s part two. We say, ‘A risky hire isn’t necessarily a bad hire.’ A guy could be risky, but why is he risky? Is he risky because he’s never been a head coach? Is he risky because he’s never coached at a certain level? Or is he risky because this guy’s not that good a coach? So not all risk is created equal. There’s some coaches we say have a high floor, but a low ceiling. Like, we feel confident this guy’s going to get you to six wins, but we don’t feel that confident that this guy gets to 10 wins.”

There are different use-cases for their data beyond hire this coach because his score is high. You may get a higher-risk profile for a potential hire and then use that as an input to structure the compensation in a different way. A riskier hire could mean less guaranteed money offered from the school’s end, for instance. Prather ran Sports Illustrated through a demo of SportSource’s tool. Going back to the early 2000s, the system can deliver profiles on coaches by numerous categories, including age, whether they’re a minority candidate or not, alum status, NFL ties. If you’re a G5 school and want a detailed history on how FCS coaches have done at that level, they can give it to you. They can also try to determine what they refer to as “coordinator dependency syndrome” to try and suss out how much of a head coach’s success was due to a particular coordinator they had for a certain number of years. The number of different searches is seemingly unlimited, and the time saved is part of the value.

There is a strawman regarding analytics and how data is used: It’s that as more teams embrace it, it replaces the human element of the sport or the business. That can be seen most notably in the public debates around fourth-down or two-point conversion decisions in the NFL: The coach has a chart and bases his decision solely on that.The chart—or in SportSource’s case, the score it provides to an AD—is just one of many factors that go into the decision. Prather believes in gut decisions, but it’s helpful to inform your gut.

“We always say, one thing that’s worked in our favor is ADs don’t always listen or take our advice,” Prather says.

Prather says they offer services search firms can’t and don’t provide from their four-person outfit. Their competition comes from search firms, but more in the budgetary sense because yes, their services cost money as well—anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000, depending on how involved a school is. A profile might be requested on three coaches, but some ADs request 30. Some call at the drop of a hat after firing someone; others are in an ongoing relationship over multiple years before making a change. One AD got a 1,000-page document for a search; another just wanted a few interesting names beyond their shortlist to kick tires on. Prather admits that it’s tougher to build a profile for a coordinator, but not impossible. Also tough? Taking a swing at defining what program culture really is.

“Can you have a good culture and lose? Can you be a losing program and have a good culture? And to the other end, can you be a winning program and not have a good culture? You can have a crappy culture and you pop a couple really good players, your schedule [avoided certain teams] or whatever.” Prather says. “In a world where so much of the results matter, I do think if you’re doing things right on the culture side, it’s going to show up in the performance. I think so much of what we call culture today is not culture; it’s performance art. It’s the hype videos. I’m not saying I have a problem with that stuff, but where are we seeing the performance, and what kind of consistency in results do we have? And I think that’s been one of the ways that we found a decent way to see the type of culture a coach has been around or that they’ve created.”

When it comes to whether to hire a school alum or not, there are fallacies and biases that SportsSource tries to poke holes in using data, such as there being no correlation in hiring an alum and winning games. The company also asks ADs to think about whether the candidate would still be on their list if they weren’t an alum. Much of what SportSource tries to do is to serve as a balance sheet or an income statement, which means they try to reflect the performance of a coach, and how he does against his peers beyond just raw wins and losses.

“Warren Buffet will always tell you he’s not going to buy a company that he doesn’t feel really, really good about the integrity of the leadership,” says Prather. “He needs to feel really good. However, he’s not even looking at the company if he doesn’t love their book and their financials, right? So I always tell ADs, if the soft stuff becomes a deciding factor, don’t overvalue the interview with a guy that may not be a good coach and shouldn’t be on your list and then crushes the interview.”

Say the search firm has helped set up the interviews. Armed with Prather’s profile data, it’s time for the school to hire the guy.

Some ADs may prefer what Sugiyama’s firm brings to the table, which is essentially to act as your agent in the negotiation. A key piece to what a search firm can do is to work as a layer between the coach’s camp and you. There is a sense of decorum when representation is involved.

“If I can’t come to a deal with the coach—me—if I can’t come to a deal with a coach on compensation and terms, then the school won’t offer the coach the job,” Sugiyama says. “Nobody’s going to turn down my university. That will never happen. The coach may turn me down or may turn down the terms that might not be to that coach’s liking or that agent’s liking. They may not like that, which is fine. And then they could go their own way, and we’ll continue our search and go hire somebody else.”

When it comes down to the literal negotiation of the deals, sometimes ADs don’t want to negotiate directly with agents because they may feel stretched too thin, or they may feel like they’re at a disadvantage at the negotiating table. An AD without a legal background may be relying more on their university’s in-house general legal counsel, who may not be well versed in sports-specific legalese. They also may not have the bandwidth to negotiate at the speed of a college football coaching search. At some schools, the literal contract templates can be outdated if the university hasn’t made an external hire in years. If the hired search firm was more on the side of just handling the logistics, they may want to enlist outside legal counsel as well.

“What I found was a lot of the in-house counsel, they might do one coach contract every five years,” says one lawyer who consults with ADs. “And I think there’s a lot of scrutiny on those contracts and a lot of public attention. I think some of the in-house people are fans of the school and they like it, but they’re not really experts. And they preside over so much from a university system, I don’t know how you could expect them to be.”

There is no secret that emotion plays mightily on the school side in combination with the speed of the search. It can be a very pricey cocktail when your coach beats a rival or goes on a timely winning streak to “save his job” and earns an extension (ask Auburn how that works out). An AD may negotiate broad economic terms, but it can help to have outside legal counsel get into the real nitty gritty to keep goodwill on both sides.

And due to the churn of athletic directors becoming a trend in recent years, inheriting a coach you’re soon to fire means you’re inheriting a contract an AD didn’t play any part in negotiating because they were at another school and coaching contracts are detailed and go far beyond even basic compensation. For instance, a tax code change made in 2017 affected college coaching compensation because schools and coaches saw a benefit from using split-dollar life insurance policies to defer compensation. The tactic was popularized by Jim Harbaugh’s contract at Michigan, but packages like it have been around for a while. As the money has exploded in coaching contracts, there’s been more of a need for it. A university’s in-house counsel may not have the expertise to work within that structure.

“A lot of times [I’d get hired] because at the same time they’re making the firing they’re asking us to help with the contract with the new guy. They’re asking us to help them understand, ‘Hey, I’m reading my contract and I’m calculating my buyout to be this,’” says another lawyer who provides legal counsel to ADs in searches. “Do you read it the same way?’ Or, ‘I’m reading my contract; I calculate my buyout to do this. Can you help us come with some creative ways to negotiate this or mitigate it to some degree?’”

It is not uncommon for a search firm to place an athletic director in a job and then help that AD with their highest-profile searches (football and men’s basketball coaches) or to consult on every search in the athletic department, and the relationships that build over time can help during the time crunch of a normal football search. And while an AD may be contacting a coach for the first time, all of these different parts of the college coaching search business have familiarity with each other through relationships and working together over the years.

If all of this sounds like layers of lawyers and legalese and red tape, that’s because it is. But is it needless? The proliferation of these executive style searches has been around for about two decades now, and where this part of the industry is now is commensurate with what’s at stake by making the hire in the first place. College sports has long gone corporate in many other ways—the coaching market can seem like the last outpost of a simpler time.

“In today’s world, coaches are sometimes the highest-paid employees in the state,” Cecil says. “They are de facto CEOs. Good athletic directors and even general managers understand the importance of having a coach who understands, and is prepared to be that public-facing CEO. It is more than the X’s and O’s. The X’s and O’s are why they’re in the room, however, staying in the room can be impacted overnight by a reputational fumble of their public persona. Progressive ADs or GMs want to do everything that they can to make sure that that their football CEO is not only representing their billion-dollar business but their constituents, which are thousands of student-athletes, [players], alumni, donors, boosters, legislators, and supporters who where their logo across the globe. The business has changed.”

All the hiring professionals and consultants don’t guarantee a national championship. Sports are a results-driven entity, and on any given Saturday half the teams will win and half the teams will lose for myriad reasons. But as a certain notable coach is famous for harping on: It’s the process that matters. In the college sports world, assistance in that process can be vital. How much an AD uses it is up to them.