I Was Thinking Last Night That the Only Time UTEP Has Gotten Good Coaches It Was

[kyyote]

by accident.  Haskins was coaching the girls high school basketball team and driving the bus when we hired him to babysit the dorm where the football team was having too much fun-NOT to coach basketball.  He accidentally broke the rules and we won a National Championship!  The UTEP/TWC head honchos had no idea he could coach basketball!  They didn't just stumble onto the Hall of Fame basketball coach, he did it in spite of them!  Then they lost him to Defuckingtroit!  Luckily for us, he hated Detroit and came back to El Paso where he could hunt and drink and not have to worry about the press!  He could raise his kids here and the people of El Paso loved him.  They never really paid him the money he deserved, because he didn't demand it.  He coached and lived the life he wanted.  They instead built the Don and he made them tons of money.  Since then, the coaches that could have been good were hired by accident and allowed to escape, Gillespie to A&M and then Kentucky, Barbee to Auburn, and Sadler to Nebraska.

How about football, because that won't take long.  Once upon a time we had Bum Phillips.  We got a head coach from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  Let that sink in for a minute.  He accidently showed that he could coach, had what, three NFL Hall of Fame to be coaches on his staff, and he was gone to Mizzou.  Did we offer the job to any of those Hall of Fame caliber assistants?  Nah!  My guess is we spent a bunch of money to find our next loser.  Thank God, Mike Price was so humiliated in such a public way that nobody would touch him.  So we offered him the job, and since his two sons were coaches who also had lost their jobs in the fiasco Price was willing to come coach the Miners.  And as soon as they got a chance, he was fired!  For our next loser who was so bad he quit in disgrace halfway through a standard UTEP season of football where winning zero all the way up to 2 wins is what is common and expected!  Next up on the train of losers is our current head coach who has won one game against a single FBS opponent in two years AND we got a real steal so we got him for 5 fucking years!

We could do better with the Palmist of Mesa Street picking coaches!  And she could do it for a 10 dollar bill.  Hell, she could coach us to more wins than Dimel the Dummy!  Meanwhile, Senter collects a damned good monthly paycheck for his hires.  Including the fucking Fresno State throwaway!  If we put a fucking Aggie in charge and told him or her to see if they could make UTEP worse, they couldn't-and that is an aggie trying, but we pay good money to be this bad at it.  Amazing!  Astoundingly beyond belief insanely ridiculously amazing.  The only thing maybe more amazing is the belief that El Paso is such a bad place that no one will come here.  Stop and think about that.  Have any of you ever been to Fresno?  Just think of the places where other universities are and tell me about how horrible El Paso is.  Sorry, that is pure Grade Triple A bullshit in a can.  There are millions of kids who come from places where you can't step outside without having to duck the flying bullets, the neighborhoods are tarpaper shacks, and they are asshole deep in dirty snow half of the year.  Nope, El Paso ain't it.  I'll admit it.  I don't know what it is.  It isn't that the Sun Bowl is built on Indian burial grounds, either.  The powers that be at UTEP, have multiple ways year in and year out of finding ways to bring fuckedness to UTEP.  Other universities have degrees in studying the ways we find to be bad and offer doctoral programs in it.  Jeopardy could have an all time champions face off of how to make UTEP win and not have to pay a dollar to the winner.  They wouldn't even have to plug in the buzzers.  But any one of us could step outside, pick up a branch with a fork of two twigs and divine a coach better than what we damned near always pay search companies to find us.

[SisyphusMiner]

I feel like there's a little hyperbole here, but you're basically right.

Our history in both sports largely consists of hiring coordinators / assistants from fairly big name programs, hiring former HCs with mediocre records, and hiring people with dubious resumes that have some kind of tie to the program.

El Paso in my opinion has a long long history of self-harm.  There is an aversion to risk, and in a weird way an aversion to success.  If things are going well, El Paso will find a way to shoot themselves in the foot.  It's kind of like the poverty mentality.  Agree, there are much worse places than EP.  For crying out loud, what does Spokane have going for it?  Tulsa?  Or in our own conference, Hattiesburg? Ruston?

In my opinion, our best bet moving forward would be to hire very successful head coaches from lower tier programs.  These are guys that are probably innovative with the Xs and Os, and know how to adapt to what they have. 

Then you give them a 3 year contract.  At the end of 3 years it is possible to tell whether or not a program is heading in the right direction and if they have what it takes.  To make 3 years more palatable, I have no problem with giving them a higher salary or really good incentives like a piece of the gate, because it gives you the option to salvage things in a timely manner without costing too much.  If they are looking so good at the end of 3 that we want to extend and they want more money, then fine.  We extend another 3 and re-evaluate again at the end of that.   If they are successful and they leave then we look at the assistant vs bringing someone up from the minor leagues again.

BTW, a couple years in to the Price era, we should have worked with Mike and Eric on a transition plan for Eric to take over.

[kyyote]

Me, hyperbolic!?    

I am doing just a little research on coaches and what they cost.  Mark Few of Gonzaga makes 1.6 million a year up from 1.37.  The Zags play in McCarthey Athletic Center a 6,000-seat indoor arena in the northwest United States, located on the campus of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.  Oklahoma State plays in a 10k seat arena.  Their coach, Mike Boynton makes 1.6 million.  The population of Stillwater is 50k.  I believe Rodney Terry makes $500,000+.  The Don seats approximately 12k-double the size of Few's MAC.  I am sure that if the Miners were playing for National Championships the Don would be packed to the rafters.  Increase ticket prices by half, and for National Championship challenging teams that wouldn't be a problem.  The population of Spokane is 217, 000.  El Paso is three times that.  Point being, if Gonzaga can pay for it, UTEP could.  Easily.  And make money doing it.  How much does Gonzaga get from the Dance every year as a bonus!

How about football, where the real money is.  Boise State's Bryan Harsin makes 1.75 million a year.  The Broncos play in Albertson Stadium, built in 1970 and it seats slightly over 36k.  El Paso has shown it will pack the nearly 50k seat Sun Bowl if the team is any good at all.  Dimel makes 700k+ to coach losing football in an empty Sun Bowl. Todd Dodge at Westlake High School in Texas makes 150k a year.  We could double his pay and bring him and his assistants in for what we pay Dumbel!   Now, let's see if the math professor can jump in here and tell us whether the 10 thousand paying to see the Miners lose could pay the other million with another 30-40 thousand paying customers?  What do you think?  By the way, Boise has a population of 225,00.  Again we have three times that.  So Boise State bites the bullet and pays a coach double what we do and is a national powerhouse and UTEP pays half that for us to rent the basement of the C-USA outhouse!  Skip Holtz makes 700k base with incentives for bowl games.  That is in Ruston, Louisiana!  Stadium holds 28k and Ruston has a population of 22,234!  Come on!

Here is what rags me to the fucking bone.  We act like we don't have the money!  The money is sitting there just waiting for us to pick it up and we whine about being too poor.  Hat in hand, we poor folks have no money!  That is just some more of the Grade AAA Bullshit in a can!  The people of El Paso would pack the fucking Sun Bowl for a winning team!  Has anyone noticed that when the damned Sun Bowl brings in two teams the Sun Bowl is packed with El Pasoans starving to watch good football-And the teams aren't even ours!

UTEP acts like it is the damned Goodwill looking for other people's thrown away junk, while other places have some damned pride and shop for new clothes and it isn't like they are going to shop at Sach's 5th Avenue or Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.  We seem to enjoy being poor at UTEP and it really is just plain stupid!  And unnecessary!  Please, sir, can you spare some change for our poor children to hire a coach?  Just fifty or maybe seventy-five cents would help.  We are poor, hard working peasants and our children need shoes with the, cleats, I think.  Oh, thank you, thank you so much!  Next year we hope to be able to buy them some socks at the Savers-only slightly worn ones.  Such bullshit.  Hey Doctor whatever your name is, Wilson.  Do you have a fucking clue?  We are a university of Texas!  How about acting like it instead of accepting us being the shithole of Texas football and basketball.  We have the damned money.  We have the most beautiful campus in the damned state of Texas!  We have a student population of 30 some thousand students.  We aren't podunk teachers college!  We are shitty by choice!  That should be our motto!

[UTEPDefense]

Only speaking about the money part of this, I don’t believe that the size of stadium/attendance is really what drives the financial success of most NCAA Athletic Programs.  The big difference is TV revenue.

Each Big 12 schools receives $34.7 per year from their TV contracts.  While each CUSA school only receive about $400,000 per year.  So Oklahoma State is receiving over $34 million dollars more every single year from their conference than UTEP is and this is before the first ticket is even sold.

https://footballscoop.com/news/the-power-5-schools-made-how-much-in-2018-conference-distributions-acc-big-ten-sec-big-12-pac-12-b1g/

https://www.sunherald.com/sports/college/conference-usa/university-of-southern-mississippi/article205238879.html

Gonzaga is a more comparable example, as they have found their own Coach Haskins in Mark Few.  But while Gonzaga is in a more comparable conference situation to UTEP, there are very few Gonzaga examples out there....mid majors who have consistent top ten success.  Gonzaga seems to be more of an outlier.

I tend to agree with Sisy, that hiring a solid FCS might be a good philosophy for us.  For example, UTEP would likely be in a MUCH better situation today had we hired Willie Fritz when we had the chance.  Mike Houston also was a favorite of many fans back when Dimel was hired.

[kyyote]

Skip Holtz coaches in C-USA.  I also understand that Oklahoma State is in the Big 12 and gets lots of money.  But I also understand that we have been on a fast elevator to the bottom of conferences for years.  Maybe, just maybe if we had not been such idiots we would not have been ditched twice in the last few years, and can anyone see that we are probably about to be ditched again!

Sam Houston State's KC Keeler had a base salary of $250,000

North Dakota State's head coaches make 300k a year!

But we got Dana Dimel a proven loser!  For twice that plus!

How about instead of defending the crappy hires or making excuses for why we can't, we look at who we might have gotten instead!  You know, a proven winner! You make my point, though.  You, have much better sense than the geniuses at UTEP who found us an old loser ready for retirement and gave him a golden parachute to come be a loser at UTEP! I don't know.  Maybe I am wrong, but sonofabitch I couldn't be more wrong that the people making hundreds of thousands of dollars have been!  I mean just tell me how anyone could defend the 5 year hiring of a head coach who has one win in two years over another FBS school?  How is it that it is ok?  How is it that the UTEP football fans aren't holding FIRE DIMEL AND THE JACKASS THAT HIRED HIM banners at the games!  Because there aren't enough there to hold a big enough banner!  Because El Pasoans are too polite?  Too beat down!  Too used to it!  Tell me where else in the United States that Dimel wouldn't be run the fuck out of town for his stupid assed coaching and record!  Tell me were else he would dare to collect a check!  I'm sorry, but I don't want to hear any more excuses!  I don't want to hear any more bullshit about class and integrity.  CAN"T A TEAM WIN and have class and integrity?  Can't someone say that to Dimel to his fucking face with the shit eating grin on it!  Can't someone ask him if he has to lose every damned game to have class!  I am sick and tired of the lowered expectations and worthless explanations for why we can't win!  And the oh, its just the way we do things here shit!  NO FUCKING EXCUSES!  I am just an old teacher, but I wouldn't tolerate a teacher that failed to teach.  I would kick someone smack in the nuts if they tried to tell me that my kids had to fail, but were doing it with class!  How about you?

[SisyphusMiner]

I'm still holding to my theory that Natalicio was all about minimizing risk.  Make the safe hire.  Make the hire that will keep the donors off my back for a while.  Make the hire that won't have a whiff of scandal.  Don't hire someone young and hungry.  Too much noise.  Too much risk.

It remains to be seen what Heather Wilson will do.  I am not encouraged that she didn't find money to fire Dimel.  I'm even less encouraged that she didn't demand the OC and DC's heads on a platter from flippin Senter.  If she has any concern at all she should clean house at the end of the year.

BTW, I don't think either Gonzaga or Boise started paying top dollar before they were successful.  Boise States first head coach after moving up to Div 1A was Houston Nutt who had just won the Ohio Valley Conference two years in a row with 11-1 and 11-2 records.  He left almost immediately for Arkansas.  Then they hired Dirk Koetter from Oregon, who had been Stull's OC here at UTEP.  After him, each subsequent HC was an internal promotion.

While I don't know what Few made his first years as HC at Gonzaga, his predecessor said he made more in 2 years at Minnesota than he would have made in 15 years at Gonzaga.  So I don't think they paid him a lot.  And I think they stumbled into Few much like we did with Haskins.

[kyyote]

I'm still holding to my theory that Natalicio was all about minimizing risk.  Make the safe hire.  Make the hire that will keep the donors off my back for a while.  Make the hire that won't have a whiff of scandal.  Don't hire someone young and hungry.  Too much noise.  Too much risk.

It remains to be seen what Heather Wilson will do.  I am not encouraged that she didn't find money to fire Dimel.  I'm even less encouraged that she didn't demand the OC and DC's heads on a platter from flippin Senter.  If she has any concern at all she should clean house at the end of the year.

BTW, I don't think either Gonzaga or Boise started paying top dollar before they were successful.  Boise States first head coach after moving up to Div 1A was Houston Nutt who had just won the Ohio Valley Conference two years in a row with 11-1 and 11-2 records.  He left almost immediately for Arkansas.  Then they hired Dirk Koetter from Oregon, who had been Stull's OC here at UTEP.  After him, each subsequent HC was an internal promotion.

While I don't know what Few made his first years as HC at Gonzaga, his predecessor said he made more in 2 years at Minnesota than he would have made in 15 years at Gonzaga.  So I don't think they paid him a lot.  And I think they stumbled into Few much like we did with Haskins.

I have seen her tolerate a 2-22 record for the past two years while saying the football program is the front porch of the university.  It doesn't remain to be seen for me.  Ask yourself which other university would stand by idly and allow that.  Nope.  I have seen enough to see what she sees and allows.  The past was on Natalicio, but Dimel is on her.  Allowing another year to happen tells me that she has absolutely no concern for the university at all.  Same old same old, without even the appearance of concern.  She is the new president.  There should have been unambiguous public notices that the past two years are flat out unacceptable.  Instead she is silent.  She is silent when Senter and Dimel tell the world they are building a program!  Meet the new boss.  Same as the old boss. We will be fooled again!

As for BSU and Few, my point was and is that the money is here in El Paso if we wanted to spend it, but we never do, and when we do it is insanely, stupidly spent!  There is absolutely no damned way Dimel should have been given a 5 year contract.  It isn't like he was the hot coach that we stole from the world and needed to lock him in.  At least Kugler was a Miner, had won a few games, and was one of Stull's players.  Bad nepotism is better than sheer idiocy.  At least it has an excuse.  But Dimel for 5 years, completely unproven, or worse yet proven in the past to not be all that and a bag of chips is just ridiculous!  Wilson should have stepped in on that as the president.  But she allowed it so now Dimel looks like the worst hire in the entire US, Senter gets a pass, and she is the head of the university that allowed it.  Showing her leadership or lack thereof.  Cher singing, "And the beat goes on, and the beat goes on..." in the background.

[SisyphusMiner]

Another thought on this, applies to both sports.
I don't know the answer to this, maybe someone else does.  But I am curious how many successful turnarounds at any level of college football have required 5 years to see fruit?  How many programs continued with 0-3 wins per year for the next 3 or 4 years and then suddenly won a conference championship the 5th year.  On the other hand, how many turnarounds have been evident by year 3 that it was at least an improvement?

I am also curious what history shows regarding other programs that have significantly upgraded a sport over the course of a decade.  What was the records and backgrounds of coaches they hired to begin the process?

I seem to recall Haskins said that he wanted players from winning backgrounds because winners know how to win.  I would think the same applies to coaches.  I would like someone that has demonstrated a consistent winning history as a HC at some level.  IMO, it's a total coin flip whether a coordinator from a successful program can turn that into HC success.  I'm sure in the business world we have all seen someone that was incredible on the shop floor and a horrible manager when they got promoted.  But a successful manager at some level has a better chance of being a successful manager at a higher level, though certainly not guaranteed.

But someone that was not a successful shop floor manager is not likely to be better at it in the future.  This is why I was so pissed about Kug bringing in Higgins.  He already proved he wasn't competent to be an OC at our level.  And why Dimel was a stupid hire.  He already proved at Houston he wasn't going to be successful as HC at a school of our stature.

[kyyote]

There is a word.  Culture.  Some create it.  Some come from it.  Some are creations of it.  Haskins was a creator of a culture.  Bill Snyder was a creator of a culture.  Mr. Iba was a creator.  Coming from a culture is not a guarantee.  It is an a trait.  It is a tendency.  It can be overcome, both in a positive way and in a negative way.  UTEP football had a well established culture of losing football.  Stull with great assistants overcame it.  Price on the strength of his own personality was able to overcome it.  Haskins' sheer will established it.  Players and assistants are subject to it, but it has to be their own creation to establish it or continue it.  Players can come from, rise above a poor culture.  But culture is strong.  A poor culture can also bring down a good player or coach if the aren't strong enough and average players and coaches can become great in a strong positive culture.  If you want to break a culture of losing it can be done by a single strong willed coach and maybe even a single player.  Michael Jordan and the Bulls comes to mind.  But, Jordan hasn't been able to impose his will off of the floor.  Snyder didn't make Dimel strong enough and Dimel showed long ago that he didn't have his own strength.  Terry has nothin to show he has the strength to create a culture.  He has shown before that he doesn't have it.

That is what you look for.  It is strength to create the culture.  It can be seen.  It can be easily seen.  It is seen at different levels.  Just as the lack of can be seen.  Once established it can be held or kept by a good manager.  But it can also fade or just be lost entirely.  Assistants to creators may or may not have it.  It can be hard to tell, because like Dimel or Kugler, their head coaches were able to be the strength.  The culture gave them the appearance. 

[stanman505]

The money is here in El Paso, kind of. You have the five families of El Paso, but what emotional ties do they have to UTEP? Did they graduate from UTEP? Their Kids? I believe the answers are no. It is up to UTEP alums to pick up the slack then. The problem with this is that most UTEP alums are hard working people with not a ton of extra cash to give to UTEP. In addition, more recent graduates have massive student debt. Would be great if UTEP could start an endowment for athletic coaches. If UTEP has trouble getting graduates to join the alumni association then how can we expect people to give large sums of money for athletics. That leaves it up to conference affiliation and CUSA sucks major ass when it comes to money from television deals. When UTEP did not push to get in the MWC a few year back we almost doomed ourselves to the situation we are in.

[SisyphusMiner]

who are the five families of El Paso?