Random coaching rant

Two weeks ago, CBS Sportsline writer Tom Dienhart ranked the football coaches in the Big 12. His conclusion? Ron Prince is the second-worst coach in the Big 12, ahead only of Gene Chizik, who has yet to coach a game at Iowa State.

I'm not here to claim Ron Prince should be considered among the top coaches in the conference. He's only coached one year, has no prior head coaching experience, and was the coordinator of a very average offense at Virginia. But to look at some of the coaches he's behind, you have to scratch your head at the criteria used.

First of all, how is Dan Hawkins (#7 on the list) ahead of anybody? He was a fairly successful coach at Boise State, but we saw this year that Boise State didn't lose much without him. Yeah, I know he walked into a disaster at Colorado, but did less than nothing with it. Sorry, but a 2-10 season with a loss to a D-IAA team should not be grounds for any sort of decent ranking. Dienhart defends this ranking by saying Hawkins is a "zen-master." Wow, great support for your argument.

Now, on to Dennis Franchione (#6 on the list). I watched a few A&M games (one in person) last year, and this guy is not that great of a coach. He is a whopping 25-23 at A&M, including a 4-8 season his first year (2003) and a 5-6 record in 2005.

Further, this guy makes some horrible coaching decisions. We'll get into Prince's poor decisions later, but his coaching at the end of the OU game (the one I attended) was pitiful. He had the biggest running back in the conference, and he didn't use him on short yardage, and went for a field goal inside the red zone, down 4, with very little time left in the 4th quarter, and a defense that was gassed from OU pounding the rock all game long. Sack up and go for the touchdown, at least it's more honorable to go down swinging. His team also imploded late against Nebraska, at home.

I'm not going to make the argument that Prince is better than Mark Mangino at KU yet, not after the debacle in Lawrence last year. But how in the hell is Mangino ranked #5 in the conference. Did Dienhart even look at Mangino's record? He's 25-35 in his time at KU. He's had one winning season. One .500 season. I'll grant you he's an improvement over Terry Allen, but that's kind of like being a little better looking than Roseanne. He is not a top half coach in this conference.

Like I said, Prince has made more than his share of mistakes. The fake punt against Texas...bad call. Losing a lot of assistants after one year? Not a good sign (not the end of the world, either). He's a first-year coach, he's going to make mistakes.

But here's how I look at it. Here we have a first-year coach, who walked into a program that had finished below .500 and last in the North the prior two years. He finished with a winning season and took us back to a bowl for the first time since 2003. Tell me how your first year coach did in 2004, Nebraska? That worked out pretty well. What about Colorado this year (2-10)? Or KU in 2002 (2-10)? Texas A&M in 2003 (4-8)? Missouri in 2001 (4-7)? Oklahoma State in 2005 (4-7)? I won't bother to mention Iowa State and Baylor because they had sucked for a long time when their current coaches took over. The only current Big 12 coaches who did better in their first year than Prince are Mack Brown and Bob Stoops. Mike Leach did as well as Prince (7-6).

I'll take what's happened so far as a sign things are looking up. What's that? We're recruiting a bunch of players with average rankings by Rivals? First of all, recruiting rankings are a bunch of wild projections about 17 year olds by people who don't have much faith in the system. Second, K-State has never landed highly ranked recruits. Terrence Newman? Two-star recruit out of Salina. Darren Sproles? Nobody wanted him because he was too small. Bill Snyder won by getting decent players who were willing to work hard and then unleashed his amazing corps of assistant coaches on them. It remains to be seen if Prince and his staff can improve players like Snyder did, but it will certainly be their key to success in Manhattan.