Charlie Weis was only good as an OC in the NFL. His approach to recruiting is what truly crippled the program. Nothing before Weis did the long term damage that Weis did trying to use KU as a spring board to a better job.
Mangino got complacent after the Orange Bowl and didn’t recruit as hard because he expected to get a better job, but obviously that didn’t happen. I never had an issue with Mangino getting fired because that 2009 team quit on Mangino after the investigation was announced. Mangino lost the locker room so he had to go. What I was never a fan of was Perkins publicly announcing the investigation midseason because it was bad publicity and meant he could hire a task master style coach that cycle. I would’ve much rather seen Perkins fire Mangino after the season and paid the buyout.
Perkins then further screwed up the situation by not being patient enough to wait for Stanford to finish their season and allowing Jim Harbaugh to finish his season there. Perkins further screwed up that search by not modifying the contract he gave to Turner Gill. He straight up gave Gill the contract meant for Harbaugh and put unrealistic expectations on Gill with that contract. That was a win now contract for Gill when he should’ve had a contract half that size with incentives because KU was in rebuild mode at that point. It was also a bad contract because Perkins never viewed Gill specifically as anything more than a transitional coach after “missing out” on Harbaugh. Obviously we know that situation bombed spectacularly and Perkins ended up fired for the ticket scandal and not Gill because Perkins wasn’t going to fire Gill after 2 years.
Zenger comes aboard and decided Gill isn’t a fit and fired him with $6 left on the contract. There were two names that most people wanted at the time. Mike Leach was the best case scenario and Larry Fedora seemed the most realistic option at the time.
Zenger goes out on his search and brought back Weis for $2.5 million per season. I don’t remember any knowledgeable person praising the hire. Even Weis himself pretty much said he was looking for a quick fix. That was a strong sign that he it viewed KU as a spring board job. His recruiting obviously reflected that mentality and he crippled the program for multiple recruiting cycles. He booted a bunch of Gill players killing the number of upper classmen his first year. He replaced them with JuCo players further crippling the depth of the program at the freshmen level.
After Weis was fired, KU was still paying Gill as well so Zenger crippled his budget for the next hire. As much as we all wanted a big name coach, such as Brent Venables, it was never going to happen because of budgetary issues. We all know Zenger settled on Beaty who was a name brought up from the beginning because of his ties to Texas recruiting, KU, and his price tag.
Beaty inherited an absolute mess of a roster. KU did not have much P5 talent, ridiculous amount of class imbalance from Weis, but he had a contract that could afford him time to rebuild. Even after his extension, it was still a very KU friendly contract that allowed him more rebuild time despite most people’s thoughts. Rumors that began swirling after his third year (Jeff Long’s hiring is why) killed recruiting for the 2019 cycle and was a setback that Miles will have to deal with. Prior to that, there was real progress being made both on the field and with class balance. KU was a handful of plays away from going to a bowl game last season, that’s progress.
As much as people crap on Beaty for the W-L, he did genuinely have KU moving in the right direction just not at the speed people wanted, including Jeff Long.
I don’t think David Beaty will ever get the full credit he deserves for the job he did here because he inherited arguably the worst roster situation in a major conference program in the modern era. If Les Miles gets KU to bowl game within the first 2-3 years, hopefully Beaty will get some of the credit for the foundation he left Miles.
