What the Plunge Protection Team Said about KU Football
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Here there is no untraceable bail out money but only alumni deep pockets,
Deep pockets and no untraceable monies and a yellow brick road,
The road winding above among red roofs on Mt. Oread
Which are mountains of alumni deep pockets without untraceable bailout monies,
If there were untraceable monies we should hire a coach in a wink,
Amongst the alumni deep pockets one cannot stop or think.
Thought is cheap and feet are made of clay,
If there were only untraceable bail out monies amongst the alumni deep pockets,
Mt. Oread mouth of dead oligarch’s teeth that cannot spit.
Here one can neither wink nor hire nor obfuscate
There is not even silence on Mt. Oread,
But slippery track grease without skill .
There is not even solitude on Mt. Oread,
But red, liquor swollen, tail gate faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mud cracked SUVs.
If there were untraceable bail out monies,
And no alumni deep pockets,
If there were alumni deep pockets,
And also untraceable bail out monies,
And monies without strings–
A spring–
A Chicago Merc laundered fund, a pool of black capital among the
alumni deep pockets,
If there were the sound of untraceable bail out monies only,
Not the cicada of alums,
On dropped tail gates singing,
But sound of untraceable bail out monies over an alumni deep pocket,
Where a sweet bird of asymmetric bail out sings in the elm
Tree growing only for the rich with friends at the central bank,
Untraceable, untraced, valve on, valve off, valve on, valve off, on, off, on, off, on, on, on, off.
But there are no untraceable bail out monies…
Not for KU Football.
(Note: my apologies to T.S. Eliot and “What the Thunder Said.”)
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PHOF, but that’s nothing for you Mr. Jaybate.
I don’t know if Wikipedia is reliable, but it shows KU’s endowment has more than a billion than KSU has. Even it it is a 10th of that. Say a hundred million more. I once read that a KSU alum hit a big lottery in western Kansas and threw 30 million in to fix KSU football. So if we have money why can’t we dig ourselves out of this hole as if a couple of million here and there aren’t available?
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It is hard to explain. KSU began a long, fitful climb to football success by signing an absolute Caliban of southern football in Vince Gibson. “We gonna win” was embraced. And Gibson brought the deep south approach to KSU football. He reputedly built wooden chutes with chicken wire over the top. Football players were placed at each end and told to fight each other crawling on hands and bellies with not enough room side to side to get buy. One player had to climb over the top of the other. And the one that made it over the top of the other was said to have won. The coaches reputedly stood on top of the chutes and screamed and yelled and spit down on the players for not fighting hard and dirty enough to get by each other. This was in the Lynn Dickey years, when KSU climbed out of the Doug Weaver decade of winless seasons. They built a football stadium for Ol’Vince and he got them o 6-4, or something and they beat OU at Manhattan once and they thought they had died and gone to heaven. Then they slid down hill and there were some more lean years, because Gibson was basically judged to be the sadist that he was rumored to be. He finished 33-52. I left the state not so long after that, so I looked it up and they went through Ellis Rainsberger (27-42), an old KSU guy with little D1 experience, Les Moon (one season), Jim Dickey (a guy that had been coordinator at KU and went 24-52 at KSU), Stan Parrish (who had missed his Marshall team’s plane crash and survived only to come to KSU and go 2-30), then hired Bill Snyder who had been the OC for Hayden Frye at North Texas State and then at Iowa.
The thing to glean from all of the KSU futility before Snyder was that they hired a long series of coaches to rebuild their program that had never been part of a successful rebuilding program at a D1 major. When they hired Snyder, he had already helped an eventual Hall of Fame Coach, Hayden Frye, rebuild North Texas State and then rebuild a poor Iowa program in the then rugged Big Ten.
For some reason, someone at KSU realized that if you want a coach to rebuild your program successfully, you ought to hire some one that actually knows how to do it.
If you wanted to rebuild your home after a tornado blew half of it down, would you hired a cabinet maker that had never rebuilt a house, or would you hire a contractor/builder that had built a lot of houses and maybe even rebuilt some from storm damage?
This is not rocket science.
Fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.
You want to rebuild your D1 Power 5 program? Hire a guy that has done one or two successful rebuilds, or been a coordinator in successfully rebuilding one or two.
There are many things to know about successfully rebuilding a football program and one very important thing is where and how to get players that can enable you to rebuild successfully. Why is this so critical? Because you cannot rebuild with the best players recognized by all the recruiting combines, because 90% of those guys are going to long established programs. This means you have to understand the kind of second tier players you can coach up and the kind of schemes those kinds of players need to be successful in. And you have to have been recruiting lots of those kinds of guys for several years, so you can take a healthy number of them with you when you leave your old job. This is just common sense. You don’t want an assistant that has only been at a Nebraska, or Florida State, USC, and OU, and Texas, because they have been recruiting nothing but the top tier guys for years and they won’t be able to bring those guys with them. And they won’t have had to learn to make due with the second tier guys. And they won’t been recruiting them. And they won’t know how to coach 'em up in what schemes.
Intelligence is not as vital as experience, when rebuilding a program, but intelligence and experience are an unbeatable combination, if the Chancellor and AD will spend all their time supporting the coach and giving him what he knows best that he needs.
KU hired Mangino, who had come up with Snyder’s rebuilding program. He just pit stopped at OU. He knew how to win with second tier players. He knew what they looked like and he knew where to find them. Mangino learned from Snyder, a genius, who had learned from a genius, Hayden Frye. the Fat Man wasn’t much to look at, but he knew what he was doing, knew where to get second tier players and sloppy seconds from elite programs, and knew how to scheme for their lesser abilities.
Why can’t KU get its act together? Because there are not enough persons in key positions inside and outside the university that are realists that can think clearly about what kind of candidate to hire. They don’t know successful football. They don’t even know they need to find a coach that has previously successfully rebuilt, or been part of a successful rebuilding of a D1 Power Five program. It is embarrassing. No one at KU really undersands what you need to rebuild a D1 Power Five school in a hop, or Turner Gill would never have have hired. He didn’t know shizz about successfully rebuilding a D1 Power Five school. And Perkins had never successfully rebuilt a D1 Power Five school in football himself. And guess what? Sheahon Zenger has never successfully rebuilt a D1 Power Five football program before either. And he apprenticed as assistant AD at KSU at a time, when KSU was long since rebuilt. Zenger has no experience of what Snyder went through early. None. Zenger learned to be an asst AD in a successful program. You hire Zenger to maintain a successful football program, not to build one. And Zenger has no insight into building a winning basketball program, because KSU wasn’t a successful basketball program when he was asst AD.
KU has to go find an OC, or DC, that has assisted in a couple successful rebuilds, at least one at a Power Five D1 school, and he has to have recruited in an area that he can attract to KU. They guy has to have a recruiting pipeline brimming with second tier talent that he can bring in in large numbers immediately. He has to know how to scheme for them, not for super stars. He has to be a very demanding person in order to quickly build a culture of excellence. But he has to know how to set achievable goals for his second tier talent so the team wastes no time with unrealistic goals that are self defeating exercises.
KU doesn’t lack any financial resources.
It is fighting ignorance.
It needs player housing.
The stadium can wait.
It has a lightweight AD that has never rebuilt anything. It probably needs to replace him with an AD that has rebuilt a D1 Power Five program. It then needs to let him hire a football coach that fits the template I have outlined.
Its that simple.
Why it doesn’t happen is due to a complex web of persons contributing to the decision making process and their collective ignorance about what kind of man is required for the job.
The above is my opinion, anyway.
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What a great read. Thanks for your time,and effort. I will sober up, and read, better yet re-read tomorrow. .
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PS, do you know Anshutz (sp) maybe you two can talk.
Knew the Ward boys at KU bet have zero clout there.
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Someone like Anshutz could probably get it done, but he would have to cut through a lot of deep pockets that don’t, plus a Chancellor and her AD that have no clue, or have unseen agendas that marginalize solving the football coaching problem.
Which ever constellation of persons hired Charlie Weis to be head football coach of KU just didn’t know diddledy spit about management or football. That was obvious from the moment he was even under consideration. From the moment he was mentioned as a candidate, I was waiting for him to disappear quickly from consideration, because he didn’t come close to the template I described. When he was hired, I was certain from that moment that either no one then involved at KU knew what they were doing, or else, they wanted a broom for two years of house cleaning during a discovery period where they went looking for further skeletons in the closet. Now, I still don’t know which it was. We won’t know until the next coach is hired. If the next coach does not fit the template I described, it means it was just ignorance and inexperience. Oh, god, I don’t like football because of the head injury issue, but, oh god, how I hope BGL and Zenger surprise us all with a coach that fits the template.
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