Smart should follow McElwain's path:
http://www.saturdaydownsouth.com/alabama-football/kirby-smart-should-follow-mcelwain/
In addition to a loaded recruiting class in ’08 and the presence of head coach Nick Saban, many outside of Tuscaloosa overlook an important detail of how Alabama re-emerged as a national power that season, one that would win three national titles in four years.
Before the ’08 season, Saban had to hire two coordinators, lifting Jim McElwain from Fresno State and promoting coordinator-in-waiting Kirby Smart. Three years later, the Tide polished off LSU, 21-0, in the BCS championship game.
Alabama’s only loss came against the Bengal Tigers in the regular season, as the Tide held LSU to 6 points in regulation but still couldn’t muster a single offensive touchdown, missed too many field goals and lost 9-6 in overtime. That year, Bama fielded one of the best defenses in college football history. (
Check out these names on defense.)
After the season, McElwain accepted the Colorado State head coaching job, while Smart stayed. One of the most respected coordinators in all of college football at the time, taking a middling job in a conference like the Mountain West, C-USA or Sun Belt seemed beneath Smart.
Alabama fans felt like they retained the more important guy, a thought confirmed when the team won yet another national championship in 2012 with Doug Nussmeier as offensive coordinator. After that season, Smart came up in almost every major coaching opening, interviewing with Auburn and drawing cursory interest from Tennessee and Arkansas.
Two years later, his defenses have struggled against up-tempo, no-huddle offenses. No one is intimidated or afraid of Alabama’s defense any more. The team’s secondary play fell off a cliff the last two seasons, and opponents have been able to carve up the Tide on the ground with a fast pace and faster, smaller players.
Smart’s offseason interest the last two years has dwindled, at least publicly, to the Georgia and LSU defensive coordinator jobs. Meanwhile, McElwain, after engineering an impressive turnaround at CSU, now is back in the SEC — as a big-time head coach at Florida.
This isn’t to say Smart needs to be a head coach. Or even that it would be the best thing for his career. He’s worked with a few guys, like Joe Kines and Kevin Steele, who failed in their head coaching opportunity. And there’s another big-time defensive coordinator in the state who flamed out in his first big-time head coaching job in Will Muschamp.
But if the man
wants a head coaching opportunity, perhaps he should consider McElwain’s path. Smart is just 39 years old. McElwain didn’t become an FBS head coach until he was 48. There’s plenty of time, whether or not his stock continues to dip or it skyrockets again.
But there just aren’t many big-time programs willing to hire a coordinator now, now with the baseline salary something like $4 million per year. And if a team is going to give an unproven, hot coordinator a job, it will be a fast-riser, not someone moving closer and closer to being a career assistant. Coaches who shoot up the ranks in five years or so are much sexier hires, easy to sell to the fan base because of the buzz, but also the “unlimited” future potential.
When Muschamp took the Gators job, he fit that profile.
Smart probably won’t be that, ever again. He’s a household name as a defensive coordinator, and there’s a great chance the best defenses he’ll ever coach already have come and gone. (In fairness to Smart, it’s hard to outdo “best in college football history,” as some of his units can argue.)
If Smart really is interested in becoming a head coach, and in the long run the main goal is to coach a big-time program, perhaps he should follow the path laid out by his former co-worker in McElwain.
Getting paid well more than $1 million per year as a coordinator is nice. In fact, Smart’s 2014 salary was
very close to McElwain’s, only his potential of getting fired and his day-to-day responsibilities with the media and the rest of the football staff were much less.
But, as McElwain probably learned traveling from Tuscaloosa, Ala., to Fort Collins, Colo., sometimes you’ve got to get through Kansas (empty, irredeemable landscape) to get to Colorado (gorgeous mountains), so to speak.
Again, I’m not here to say that Smart needs to be a head coach, as if he has some sort of moral obligation to continue to seek more responsibility and more money. He could retire tomorrow and claim a very successful career. But if he wants to be a head coach, maybe he should consider taking a lesser FBS job, and then trying to parlay that into a big-time gig within five years.
Troy, for example, was looking for a coach following the 2014 season. The Trojans hired former Kentucky offensive coordinator Neal Brown, a former Troy assistant who runs the Air Raid offense. But don’t you think the school would’ve been just as happy to land Smart, who has spent the last eight seasons building strong relationships and name recognition within every corner of Alabama?
There will be other opportunities. Memphis coach Justin Fuente is an up-and-comer, and could leap up the totem pole with another good season in 2015. That would open up a spot in the recently-formed American Athletic Conference, which lost Louisville to the ACC last year, but remains respectable. Get a job there, compete with East Carolina, UCF, Cincinnati and Houston, and you’ll have even greater opportunities.
The Smart story arc has gotten anti-climactic, with the fan base seemingly more worried about the possibility of losing Lane Kiffin after the ’14 season than one of the longest-tenured and most successful coordinators in the SEC. Football people still have a lot of respect for what he’s accomplished, but one has to wonder if he’ll eventually pass the point of no return, perhaps due to the sheer number of years that have gone by or perhaps because up-tempo offenses continue to get the best of him.
The time for holding out to become the next head coach at a job like Miami or Oklahoma is over. If Smart wants to be a big-time head coach one day, he needs to be more aggressive in the next few offseasons, and be willing to accept a less-sexy first head coaching job.
Alabama fans shouldn’t root for him to be gone, even if the Tide never recaptures the brutal dominance of that ’11 defense. Smart remains one of the most coveted defensive coordinators in the sport and one of the top commodities as both a recruiter and defensive teacher.
If Smart wants to stay as Saban’s right-hand man until the day the head coach decides to retire, Alabama should let him.
Only Smart knows whether he’d have taken a big SEC job if offered that year. Coaching is a difficult profession in which to raise a family, and he surely has enjoyed the stability of staying in Tuscaloosa since ’07 with his wife and now two young children.
Although Smart has said
he’s in no hurry to become a head coach, he also
always has maintained he’d be interested in “the right job” at “the right time.” Reading between the lines, it seems fair to say the man has some sort of ambition to be a head coach someday.
