Is Danny White the best AD at hiring coaches? From Buffalo to Tennessee, he just might be

Is Danny White the best AD at hiring coaches? From Buffalo to Tennessee, he just might be

Andy Staples
Dec 1, 2022

Lance Leipold developed a nice Monday morning routine after winning five Division III national titles at Wisconsin-Whitewater. Leipold figured if Bob Stoops could coach Oklahoma and take his kids to school, then he could do the same. Leipold would drop his daughter off at the high school — the dog got to come along — and then return home, drop off the pooch and take his son to school before heading to the office to continue dominating D-III.

On the morning of Oct. 20, 2014, Leipold got two very interesting phone calls during that drop-off routine. Both asked the same question: Would you have any interest in the job at Buffalo? This seemed strange. Buffalo was an FBS job. The Bulls played in the Mid-American Conference. Leipold had crushed competition at Wisconsin-Whitewater for years and got nary a sniff from the MAC schools nearby.

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Later that day, Leipold got a call from someone at a search firm. The person asked Leipold if he’d be interested in the Buffalo job. Sure, Leipold said. He’d explored moving up in competition. He’d interviewed at Gardner-Webb. He’d turned down Austin Peay because even though it was an FCS job, the Governors paid their assistants less than Leipold’s assistants made at Wisconsin-Whitewater. But no one from the FBS had expressed interest until now. Later, the same person called back.

“Danny White would like to come meet with you,” the person told Leipold.

Leipold figured that meant he’d meet Buffalo’s young athletic director in a few weeks. White had fired Jeff Quinn a little more than a week earlier, but there was still plenty of time to fill the job. Besides, ESPN’s Gene Wojciechowski was coming to Whitewater that Wednesday for a feature on Leipold that would run on the show Saturday.

“He’d like to come this Thursday,” the person told Leipold.

That’s when Leipold realized this Danny White guy’s hiring process was a little different.


White did hire Leipold at Buffalo, and Leipold did such a good job that he was hired in 2021 to resurrect Kansas. He inherited a program that had gone 18-99 the previous 10 seasons and was viewed as the most hopeless in the Power 5. This year, the Jayhawks are 6-6, headed to a bowl game and Leipold is on the short list for every national coach of the year award. He’s joined on those lists by Tennessee’s Josh Heupel, who inherited a daunting situation in Knoxville in 2021 and just led the Volunteers to their first season with double-digit wins since 2007.

White hired Heupel, too. In fact, he hired him twice.

“He’s kind of got a Midas touch,” Leipold said.

Danny White, 43, started as Tennessee’s athletic director in 2021. (Phelan M. Ebenhack via Associated Press)

Through tenures at three schools (Buffalo, UCF and currently Tennessee), White has hit big with nearly every coach he’s hired in the revenue sports of football and men’s basketball.

He’s also enlisted some help from connections built through a family business spread throughout college sports. Father Kevin was the athletic director at Tulane, Arizona State, Notre Dame and Duke. Brother Mike is Georgia’s men’s basketball coach. Brother Brian is Florida Atlantic’s athletic director — and just embarked on his own football coaching search. Sister Mariah Chappell is an assistant AD at SMU.

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White’s “Midas touch” has produced the following hires:

Bobby Hurley, Buffalo men’s basketball

Hurley was an assistant for brother Dan at Rhode Island when White hired him in 2013 to revive the Bulls’ basketball program. Hurley went 42-20 at Buffalo and led the Bulls to the 2015 NCAA Tournament before being hired by Arizona State.

Lance Leipold, Buffalo football

After six Division III titles at Wisconsin-Whitewater, Leipold inherited a Buffalo program that felt stuck. It took time, but Leipold led the Bulls to three consecutive bowl games (2018-20) before being hired away by Kansas.

Nate Oats, Buffalo basketball

Oats was two years removed from being a high school head coach in Michigan when White elevated him from assistant to head coach following Hurley’s departure. Oats went 96-43 with three NCAA Tournament appearances in four seasons before being hired at Alabama in 2019. In Tuscaloosa, Oats has made the tourney each of the past two seasons — reaching the Sweet 16 in 2021.

Scott Frost, UCF football

What happened to Frost at Nebraska isn’t relevant here. He was a smashing success in the job White hired him to do. In December 2015, the Knights had just finished an 0-12 season in which players tuned out former coach George O’Leary. Frost went 6-7 in 2016 and 13-0 in 2017, allowing White to sell many national championship T-shirts.

Johnny Dawkins, UCF basketball

Dawkins probably has the least success of White’s revenue-sport hires, but he’s still outperforming his predecessors in the job. Now in his seventh season, Dawkins is 117-74 with one NCAA Tournament appearance. (Yes, the one where Tacko Fall and the Knights almost beat Zion Williamson’s Duke team.)

Josh Heupel, UCF football

Nebraska hired Frost after that 13-0 UCF season, and Frost took his entire staff to Lincoln. To replace him, White chose Missouri offensive coordinator Heupel, who went 28-8 the next two seasons.

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Josh Heupel, Tennessee football

The process of hiring Heupel will be explained more thoroughly below, but after inheriting a depleted roster because of losses to the transfer portal, Heupel stopped the bleeding with a 7-6 season in 2021. He has followed that by going 10-2 in 2022.

So, how does White do it?

The reasons for hiring each coach were different, but White followed the same pattern every time. With the football coaching carousel about to spin fast, White gave The Athletic a guided tour of his search process, one that identifies the unique circumstances of each job opening, produces unconventional candidates and heavily emphasizes success in Year 1.


1.  Take the pulse of the team

First, White convenes a meeting of the players on the team for which he is hiring. He ignores existing captaincies and tells players to elect a group of teammates they respect most. White then meets with that group to assess the program.

In sports he knows well, such as basketball — White was a walk-on at Towson and Notre Dame — White focuses on player-coach dynamics and locker room culture. In sports he’s less familiar with, such as soccer, he might ask players about the style of play and if they felt the teams’ skills were being used properly. He’s not necessarily asking the players to pick the coach.

“I’m not going to a bunch of college kids and saying, ‘Tell me who you want,’” White said. “It’s, ‘From your perspective, help me understand what’s going on.’”

Ever since his first meeting, with the Buffalo women’s basketball team before the search that landed former Syracuse star — and current Syracuse coach — Felisha Legette-Jack, White has promised the players that he won’t publicly reveal anything they say in those meetings. So he declined to comment when asked what input Tennessee football players provided when he met with them upon his arrival in Knoxville. But during the spring before his final season at Tennessee in 2021, cornerback Alontae Taylor discussed what he and his fellow players talked about with White.

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“I feel like the No. 1 thing we wanted to make sure we honed in on was a coach that was going to hold everyone accountable,” Taylor told reporters in March 2021.

2. It can help if the coach also happened to be a really good player

Other than Leipold and Oats, the names on that list above have something in common: They all excelled at their sports at the college level. Heupel helped Oklahoma to a national title as a quarterback. Frost did the same at Nebraska. Dawkins started at Duke and was a first-rounder in the NBA Draft. The aforementioned Legette-Jack was a star point guard at Syracuse. Hurley was the starting point guard on two national title teams at Duke and was an NBA first-rounder.

“I do think it’s easier with a lot of the coaching hires I’ve made that they’ve been elite players themselves,” White said. “I think it’s easier for the people who have walked in their shoes to connect with them.”

It’s not a coincidence that the coaches played similar positions. Leipold was a quarterback at Wisconsin-Whitewater. Oats was a point guard at Maranatha Baptist in Watertown, Wisconsin.

“I like point guards, catchers and quarterbacks,” White said.

3. Understand what kind of coach you need for the team’s particular circumstances

When White hired Hurley, his biggest challenge was letting people know — even in the city of Buffalo — that Buffalo had a basketball team. So after firing Reggie Witherspoon, White sought candidates with immediate name recognition in the sport.

Hurley was a star point guard at Duke for coach Mike Krzyzewski in the early 1990s. Hurley also is the son of high school coaching royalty — his father, Bob, won 26 New Jersey state titles at St. Anthony High in Jersey City. But Bobby didn’t have a lot of coaching experience. He’d been an assistant for two seasons on brother Dan’s Wagner staff, and he’d followed Dan to Rhode Island.

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With White’s dad working at Duke, White had plenty of access to Coach K and other close associates of Bobby Hurley. That allowed White to determine whether Hurley was ready for the responsibilities of being a head coach.

When White fired football coach Quinn 18 months later, he had a different problem. The Bulls’ football team had a fan base, but White couldn’t afford any of the FBS assistants he thought would be capable of building the program into something better.

“We couldn’t afford a coordinator in the Big Ten,” White said. “Not even close. We’d be lucky to get a position coach from that part of the world. And then you’re just guessing. That’s why I think there’s so much transition on the coaching staffs in football in the MAC. Given the circumstances, we needed to find someone who had been a head coach before. That would make them stand out among their peer group.”

So White began looking at head coaches from lower levels. None had been more successful than Leipold. When Leipold received those phone calls, he was 100-6 at Wisconsin-Whitewater. (He’d finish 109-6 with six national titles.) A day after Wojciechowski visited Leipold, White was in Leipold’s living room.

In that meeting, White did most of the selling. Leipold didn’t get hired for another month, and during that intervening time, it was his turn to sell White on his readiness to jump so many levels. Leipold pitched Kansas assistant and former Notre Dame recruiting coordinator Rob Ianello as his second-in-command. Ianello had been Akron’s head coach between those two stops, and he had been at Notre Dame when Kevin White was AD. Though Ianello hadn’t actually agreed to the job yet, Leipold sold Ianello’s experience as a former head coach and as a recruiting coordinator. He could be a sounding board and a Sherpa of sorts for a coach who hadn’t had to deal with football scholarships at the Division III level. (Ianello did take the Buffalo job, and he serves as Leipold’s general manager at Kansas.)

Lance Leipold was the head coach at Buffalo from 2015 to 2020. (Matthew O’Haren / USA Today)

Leipold’s strategy for convincing White to give him the job might have impacted White’s next basketball hire. After Hurley left, Buffalo’s players overwhelmingly supported assistant Oats as Hurley’s replacement. But Oats had only two years of Division I experience. He had been the head coach at Romulus (Mich.) High from 2002 to 2013, and while Hurley was recruiting a Romulus player, Hurley was impressed by Oats and decided to offer him a job.

White sought the advice of his brother Mike, who at the time was Louisiana Tech’s basketball coach. Mike assured Danny that Oats was universally respected as a high school coach and that Danny should trust what he had seen from Oats the previous two seasons. Oats, meanwhile, wasn’t sure if that experience was enough.

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“It was a little bit of a long shot,” Oats said. “But I had recruited most of the roster.”

White also had another issue to consider. If he chose wrong and there was a mass exodus of players from the program, Buffalo’s academic progress rate — a statistic the NCAA uses to determine whether players are progressing through school in a satisfactory manner — would have plunged. The Bulls might have faced a postseason ban. Because Oats often had been the good cop to Hurley’s bad cop, he was a favorite among the players on the roster. That gave him a shot.

Hurley left on a Thursday. The next morning, Oats presented a group of potential assistants. Oats remembers White was particularly interested in two: St. John’s assistant Jim Whitesell and Rider assistant Donyell Marshall. Whitesell had been Loyola-Chicago’s head coach for seven seasons. Perhaps he could be a sounding board for Oats. Marshall had been a star player at Connecticut before playing 15 seasons in the NBA. Perhaps he could help replace Hurley’s name recognition.

After Oats told this story, he was reminded of Ianello’s relationship to Leipold at Buffalo. Oats chuckled.

“Danny’s got good perspective on what you need,” Oats said. “In hindsight, I did need somebody that had been a head coach in Division I. Jim gave me a lot of wisdom.”

And when Oats left, Buffalo athletic director Mark Alnutt made Whitesell the Bulls’ head coach.

4. Forget Year Zero. Year 1 matters a great deal, so you’d better pick a coach who can find success quickly

White is adamant about this. He cares a lot less about how the hire is publicly received than about how quickly the hire can win.

“The success you have in Year 1 matters in a coaching trajectory,” White said. “If I hire someone who is a terrible fit for that group of team leaders, that’s who you’re winning or losing with in Year 1. People talk about winning the press conference. I talk about winning Year 1 more than winning the press conference.”

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Both of White’s football hires at UCF embody this. But here’s the wild part. Hiring a coach to a program coming off an 0-12 season was much easier than hiring a coach to a program coming off a 13-0 season.

White arrived at UCF in November 2015 knowing his first order of business would be finding a new football coach. O’Leary had stepped down as interim athletic director in early October and announced his retirement — effective immediately — two weeks later after a 59-10 loss to Houston dropped the Knights to 0-8.

At the time, White felt his options were plentiful. “TCU and Baylor were setting the world on fire,” White said. Those programs had similar traits to UCF. “Talent-rich state, but beating big-brand schools by getting that kid who is 2 inches shorter but just as fast and running that style of offense.”

By “that style of offense,” White meant an up-tempo spread. He was less concerned with the schematic coaching tree — Air Raid, Veer and Shoot, Oregon’s Blur — than with the coach’s fit. He chose Oregon offensive coordinator Frost, who quickly identified the talent buried on UCF’s roster and also landed the QB he’d wanted the Ducks to sign. Frost had loved Hawaiian slinger McKenzie Milton in camp, but the second QB spot in the 2016 class (alongside Terry Wilson) went to some local kid from Eugene named Justin Herbert. With Milton in Orlando, Frost had his muse.

Frost improved the Knights by six wins in Year 1. Then, with Milton firmly in control of the offense, UCF rewrote its record books in 2017. Though the Knights were never given serious consideration for the College Football Playoff, they went 12-0, beat SEC West champ Auburn in the Peach Bowl and declared themselves national champs anyway. But going into an instant classic Black Friday game against South Florida, White knew he was going to lose Frost to Frost’s alma mater in Lincoln.

Seemingly everyone wanted the job that few had wanted two years earlier, but choosing a coach had become significantly more difficult because most of the team was returning, all of the staff was leaving and no one wanted to stop the momentum UCF generated in 2017.

“We didn’t just lose the head coach. We lost the entire staff. There wasn’t a (graduate assistant) left,” White said. “You’ve got an undefeated team and almost everybody’s back. It almost would have been easier if it had been a bunch of seniors and you had to start over.”

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Meanwhile, every coach’s agent in the country saw opportunity in Orlando.

“Everybody wanted the job,” White said. “You had all these big names, retreads, all these brands. But who is going to fit this offense and be able to keep it going without having to reset?”

Kevin Sumlin, who had been one of the most successful head coaches in Texas A&M history but had been fired to make way for Jimbo Fisher, was in the mix. Other names reported to be interested in UCF included then-Ohio State co-coordinator Ryan Day (whatever happened to him?) and Toledo coach Jason Candle.

One name that never appeared on a published candidate list? Josh Heupel. White’s interest in Heupel began after someone pointed out that Missouri had gone from No. 125 in the nation in total offense to the top 10 in the two seasons Heupel had been employed as the offensive coordinator. This kernel of information intrigued White, and he knew exactly who to call to dig deeper. His brother Brian was an associate AD at Missouri at the time. Brian reported to Danny remarks similar to the ones that Tennessee players and staff have offered publicly about Heupel since he started coaching in Knoxville. No discernible ego yet fiercely competitive. Players love him. Danny White decided he needed to talk to Heupel.

In the interview, Heupel claimed the job. He had studied UCF’s offense thoroughly. He explained exactly how certain players would fit within his offense. He explained that to ease the transition, he and his staff would incorporate as much of the old staff’s terminology as possible so the players didn’t have to learn a new language in an offseason.

“That was a unique scenario,” Heupel said. “You’re taking over a program that had a ton of success. How could you transition what you’d done and make them feel comfortable and confident?”

Comfortable and confident players who already knew what success felt like could win in Year 1. White had found his man. And it probably wasn’t an accident that when Heupel was introduced as UCF’s coach, he noted that he’d already found his defensive coordinator: Former Miami head coach and longtime state of Florida recruiter Randy Shannon. Sound familiar?

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Year 1 went splendidly. The Knights went 12-1. But change was coming.

5. Trust your gut, even if it makes you do something uncomfortable

Just like when he took the UCF job, White got to Tennessee knowing he needed to hire a football coach. This time, it was his list that didn’t include Heupel’s name. Why?

“I was starting a search for Tennessee and feeling incredibly guilty for leaving UCF,” White said.

So White searched elsewhere. It is here that details and names get a bit scarce. White said he talked to sitting head coaches, but he has not named names. Current Virginia coach Tony Elliott told reporters in 2021 — while still the offensive coordinator at Clemson — that he interviewed with White. White said he talked to multiple coaches, but he kept coming back to the same thought.

This dude wouldn’t even come close to Josh.

After having that thought on several occasions, White realized he needed to make three phone calls. He needed to call Heupel. He also needed to call UCF interim athletic director Scott Carr and president Alexander Cartwright to tell them he might offer Tennessee’s job to their coach.

Before he did, White wanted his new boss to meet his old coach. White set up a Zoom call between Heupel and Tennessee chancellor Donde Plowman.

“Danny was feeling a little embarrassed,” Plowman said. “I think maybe the first time was, ‘OK, I’ll set the call up for 6:30 tonight.’ And then Danny got back to me and said, ‘You know what, we’re gonna have to move it back because Josh really wants to tell his coaching staff, so they don’t hear it from anyone else.’”

Then the call got pushed back again.

“Danny goes, ‘Oh, we need to move it back, he needs to talk to his wife first.’ And I tell people kind of jokingly, at that point I knew (Heupel) was the guy,” Plowman said. “Because he’s thinking about other people.”

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White knew Heupel was the guy in December 2017, long before most of the college football world even registered him as a head-coaching candidate. How did White know then?

Because just like the coaches he hires, White has a process. And that process hasn’t failed him yet.

— The Athletic’s Joe Rexrode contributed to this report.

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos: Steven Branscombe / James Gilbert / Ethan Miller / Michael Chang / John E. Moore III / Getty Images)

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Andy Staples

Andy Staples covers college football and all barbecue-related issues for The Athletic. He covered college football for Sports Illustrated from 2008-19. He also hosts "The Andy Staples Show." Follow Andy on Twitter @Andy_Staples