When is it too early to fire a coach?
God, I wish there was a clear-cut answer.
If you ask the University of Washington’s football program, there is no time too premature — Jimmy Lake was fired after a 4-5 (3-3 Pac-12) start this season. This after a 3-1 showing during the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season, which would have, absent a slew of COVID-related player unavailability, granted them a spot in the most ridiculous conference championship game this side of the 21st century.
Why they even bothered having a championship game for such an abbreviated “season” is beyond me, but that is besides the point.
LSU “agreed” with Ed Orgeron that he would not return after this year. Two years ago, Orgeron, with some assistance from Joe Burrow and Co., led the Tigers to an undefeated season and a national championship, LSU’s fourth ever and first since 2007, temporarily ending an era of complete and total subservience to Alabama in the SEC West.
Neither team was even guilty of putting up Kansas or Vanderbilt-like records, they were just mediocre. And both coaches were fired before an actual season was complete. One debatably illegitimate, COVID-impaired season, rife with cancellations that the notoriously stingy NCAA didn’t even count as a year of eligibility for student-athletes, and half of the season following that travesty – that’s all both coaches got.
But if you’re the University of South Carolina men’s basketball program, your bar can be so unbelievably low that one Final Four appearance can forgive a decade under Frank Martin’s otherwise absent of tournament presence. They did beat High Point in the 2016 NIT. So there’s that!
Point being – there’s no real uniformity as to when a coach gets the boot.
So what to do with Josh Conklin?
Wofford football just capped off a dismal 1-10 (0-9 SoCon) season with all ten of its losses; after squeaking by Elon 24-22 in the season opener it was literally all downhill from there.
It’s hard to get worse than that. And this follows a shortened spring 2021 season where the Terriers went 1-4 and eventually had to cancel the remaining games on the schedule. If Washington and LSU were any accurate indicators, Conklin should have been fired back in mid-October.
What goes into the decision to fire a coach is obviously not limited to the field — relations with donors, administration and fan bases can make or break a coach on the hot seat.
It would be erroneous to say off-field issues may have not had at least partially to do with Lake and Orgeron’s (albeit unrealized) terminations.
Orgeron was added as a defendant in a June 2021 Title IX lawsuit, which alleged he covered up rape allegations against then-LSU star Derrius Guice.
Two days after a Nov. 6, 2021 loss against Oregon, Lake shoved one of his players and was suspended without pay; less than a week later he was fired, but notably not-for-cause. Although off-the-field concerns (re: player relationships) were listed as partial reasons, Washington will still have to pay Lake a $9.9 million buyout.
Let me be quite clear in saying off-the-field issues are perhaps the most justifiable reasons to fire a coach; if the Orgeron allegations are true, he should be gone now, not at the end of the season.
I won’t make any pretenses as to know what donor and alumni sentiments are towards Conklin, though I’m sure they’re not overly fond given the crime against humanity this season was.
Maybe there are off-the-field hangups that administration hasn’t taken kindly to.
I’d warrant a guess that a prolonged hesitation to get vaccinated against COVID probably didn’t do Conklin any favors — and the inner workings of athletic department politics are a mystery to me, so if you want to know who likes him and who doesn’t, then I don’t have much to offer you.
But when all is said and done, at the end of the day the most surefire way to stay coach is to win. Pat Forde, writing for Sports Illustrated, testified that Washington football program observers said that if Jimmy Lake had won more, he would still be coach.
Does Wofford believe in second chances for Conklin? Many students I’ve talked to attribute his initial success — a shared conference title in 2018 followed by a playoff win, and an outright SoCon title in 2019 — to the leftover talent from the Mike Ayers era, and claim Conklin has proven unable to recruit and win on his own merits.
If Wofford wants to follow in the footsteps of the Washingtons and LSUs of the collegiate football world and fire Conklin after this travesty, they can go right ahead. They might actually win some football games.
But sometimes, I think it’s worth giving coaches a chance to redeem themselves.