Looking back in my swiss cheese memory, I think that at the time we hired Dimel we all felt that it was a very uninspired vanilla hire. There was also some thought that the job was so undesireable that our pickin's were pretty slim. Given that the criteria was obviously "hire someone with D1 experience at least at a similar level to us," he was probably as good as we were going to get with that constraint. We probably have marginally better talent now, but unless something dramatic happens this year, we will be looking again.
With basketball, UTEP was probably a more desirable destination than for football, even though we were pretty bad. But we still had the same criteria -- "hire someone with D1 experience at least at a similar level to us," and that didn't really work out either. I do have to say that I think CRT left us in much better shape from a talent perspective than Floyd did, or than Kug did in football.
Golding represents a departure from that mentality. Not everyone was excited about the hire, but at least it wasn't hire an unsuccessful retread. Any coach may not work out, but on paper he appears to have a whole lot more upside than Terry or Dimel. With the previous mentality, there was no meaningful upside, just an expectation that the potential downside wasn't so bad. The Golding hire represents a willingness to take a risk for the upside. I hope the next time we hire a football coach we can take a risk. Hell, there is no downside from UTEP football for the last 5-6 years. We can't get much worse. I still think if we took the D2 national champs in football intact (coaches and players) we would win more CUSA games than we have. I don't know if the players Kug left us with would have started for North Dakota State
