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Heisman
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RE: OT: UC President Search
(11-17-2016 03:43 PM)crex043 Wrote: People are just saying he's absent because he hasn't fired Tuberville yet. He certainly surfaced long enough to make a statement in support of Tuberville when he went off on a fan.
Bohn doesn't need to be present, at least not until Dec 8. If that day passes and nothing happens, it's likely because Mike Bohn has his hands tied by the BoT.
FWIW, i have been extremely disappointed in Bohn's performance so far. The hope is that he's operating behind the scenes. That being said, i saw this from espin. i found the bolded section interesting, simply because i made a similar comment on how i wanted a program builder that didn't come directly from a blue blood. Again FWIW:
http://www.espn.com/blog/pac12/post/_/id...paying-off
Quote:Best way to describe Mike MacIntyre's rebuild at Colorado? Stunning
Nov 16, 2016
Kyle Bonagura
ESPN Staff Writer
Just after Christmas, Colorado coach Mike MacIntyre was talking with his brother, Matt, on a porch outside the nursing home in Nashville, Tennessee, where their father lived, when he realized the significance of the moment. The brothers looked at each other and both understood. Mike was set to return to Boulder a short time later, and the next time he heard from Matt, he knew what it would be about.
"I got home, and about seven days later, Bryan McGinnis, our football ops guy, says, 'Hey, your brother is on the phone,'" MacIntyre said. "As soon as he told me that, I knew."
George MacIntyre, 76, died on Jan. 5, after a 20-year battle with multiple sclerosis.
The disease had a crippling effect on his body that left him bedridden for the last decade of his life, but he maintained a relentless positivity. Communication, especially at the end of his life, was hard, but when family members visited, he would raise up a fist when they entered the room. "Doing great," he would say.
His spirit was infectious and provided valuable perspective.
"When I looked at him like that, what do I have to worry about?" Mike MacIntyre said.
It was one of George MacIntyre's final lessons in a lifetime full of them.
The elder MacIntyre was a well-respected football coach who spent more than 30 years in the profession. In 1975, his first head-coaching job, he took over a Tennessee-Martin program that had won two games the season before he arrived and quickly turned things around. He led the team to consecutive eight-win seasons in 1976 and 1977 before Vanderbilt hired him to engineer a similar turnaround.
In the first three seasons, Vandy won just seven total games and only one in the SEC, but there was obvious progress: one win in the first season, two wins in the second, four in the third. In 1982, MacIntyre's fourth season in Nashville, the Commodores went 8-4 and made their only bowl appearance between 1975 and 2007. He was named the SEC Coach of the Year and honored with the Bobby Dodd Coach of the Year Award.
More than 30 years later, his son, who carries around a Bobby Dodd coin that commemorates his father's achievement, has followed a remarkably similar path in garnering his own national coach of the year recognition, having revived a once-proud program into a serious title contender in the Pac-12.
No. 10 Colorado, at 8-2 overall and 6-1 in the Pac-12, hosts No. 22 Washington State (8-2, 7-0 Pac-12) on Saturday in an unlikely matchup of division leaders. A Colorado win combined with losses by No. 13 USC and No. 12 Utah this weekend would clinch a division title for a program that over the previous 10 seasons had the worst winning percentage among Power 5 teams and won just five conference games since joining the Pac-12 in 2011.
When David Cutcliffe hired Mike MacIntyre to be the defensive coordinator at Duke before the 2008 season, he knew he wouldn't be able to keep him long. It had long been clear to Cutcliffe that MacIntyre was destined to become a head coach.
"I actually coached against Mike when he was a collegiate player when he was at both Vanderbilt [where he played for his father] and Georgia Tech," Cutcliffe said. "I wanted to hire him then just because of the way he played the game."
MacIntyre bounced around at some smaller programs (Davidson, UT-Martin, Temple) as a defensive assistant before Cutcliffe finally came calling with an offer to join his staff at Ole Miss in 1999. Cutcliffe didn't have a defensive position to offer him, but thought highly enough of MacIntyre's coaching prowess to let him coach the receivers. After two years, MacIntyre moved to defense to coach the secondary, and two years later Bill Parcells, who served as an assistant coach with George MacIntyre at Vanderbilt from 1973-74, hired him to the same role with the Dallas Cowboys.
With five years of NFL experience under his belt, MacIntyre returned to college football when Cutcliffe was hired at Duke and, as Cutcliffe predicted, quickly began fielding head-coaching interest. After two years in Durham, MacIntyre landed at a surprising destination: San Jose State. He had recruited California for both Ole Miss and Duke, but other than that he did not have strong ties to the area.
"I think a bunch of people turned it down, then I finally took it," he said.
San Jose State isn't the place to go when you have options. The Spartans went 2-10 the year before MacIntyre arrived, are invisible on the Bay Area sports scene, had serious APR issues and appeared in the AP poll in only one season, 1975, in the previous 60.
It was, however, the opportunity to become a head coach, and he grew up watching his dad have success in two similar situations.
"Both programs that he went to, they were terrible when he went there and he rebuilt both of them," MacIntyre said. "So I saw it as a son. I saw how he handled it -- how he handled people and how he treated people."
The Spartans went 1-12 in his first year, their worst season in school history, but progress quickly followed. They went 5-7 in 2011 and finished the regular season 10-2 in 2012. By then, MacIntyre's name was popping up as a candidate for bigger jobs.
California was one school that made sense. Berkeley is just up the road from San Jose, but athletic director Sandy Barbour, who is now at Penn State, was intrigued by the exciting offense Sonny Dykes ran at Louisiana Tech and hired him to replace Jeff Tedford despite the fact that SJSU had just beaten the Bulldogs in the regular-season finale.
Colorado brought Butch Jones, then the coach at Cincinnati, on campus for an interview and was close to hiring him before Tennessee came in late and brought him to the SEC. At that point, then-athletic director Mike Bohn turned his primary attention to MacIntyre. He also is believed to have interviewed Dave Clawson, who was then at Bowling Green and is now the coach at Wake Forest.
Bohn recognized how difficult it was to win at San Jose State and understood it would take something similar for things to get turned around in Boulder. In two years under Jon Embree, the Buffaloes won just four games and were becoming less and less competitive. They lost their final eight games of the 2012 season and did so by an average of 34.6 points per game.
The more people Bohn talked to -- NFL general managers, coaches he had worked with, etc. -- the more he believed MacIntyre was the right fit.
"Everybody talked about professionalism, dedication, competitiveness, fundamentally sound aspects of his leadership and vision and why that was a fit," said Bohn, now the athletic director at Cincinnati. "The first time we sat and visited with him that came out clearly, because that's exactly who he is."
Three days after Jones was hired at Tennessee, MacIntyre was introduced as the 25th head coach in Colorado history.
Despite how it might seem, MacIntyre said he didn't want to leave San Jose State at first, especially considering it was understood he would have to miss the team's appearance in the Military Bowl against Bowling Green. The Spartans, with Kent Baer serving as the interim head coach, would go on to win 29-20 to secure a school-record 11th win, propelling them to a first-ever finish in the AP poll at No. 21.
Another complicating factor was how it might affect MacIntyre's family, which was happily settled in the Bay Area. His oldest son, Jay, now a redshirt sophomore wide receiver at Colorado, was in the middle of his junior year of high school and his youngest son, Jonston, was in eighth grade. Their sister, Jennifer, was then a student at Baylor.
"He told us he wouldn't take it unless the family wanted him to," Jay said. "But how could we not? This was his dream."
MacIntyre admits now that he had a very poor understanding of the situation he was getting into from a talent perspective. Based on the results and the limited opportunities he had to see the team play, he knew there was an uphill climb ahead, but to what degree was mostly unknown.
"Once I saw us practice the first week of spring practice, I knew it would be tough," he said. "And then I said, 'Well, here we are. We're going to get this done.'"
After that first spring, Bohn, the man responsible for hiring him, was forced out and Rick George, then the chief operating officer of Major League Baseball's Texas Rangers, was brought in to replace him. George has an extensive football background, having played at Illinois and having been a part of legendary Colorado coach Bill McCartney's staff for four years. That first stint in Boulder included the 1990 national championship season, when he was the assistant athletic director for football operations.
MacIntyre was stunned by the change, but he hit it off with George right off the bat. The idea that a new athletic director might want to bring in his own guy is valid, but that's not the approach George took. It became apparent to George right away, based on his own observations and conversations he had with people he respects, that the program was in good hands with MacIntyre.
Maybe more important, George's background allowed him to recognize just how devoid of talent the program was. There would be no quick fix. Not with those players, not in the Pac-12 South.
"We didn't have as a good of talent as our opponents," said George, who occasionally watches film of players Colorado is recruiting. "Coaching is great, but if you don't have the talent, you're not going to win many games."
Colorado went 4-8 in MacIntyre's first season, 2-10 the next and 4-9 last year. Despite what those win totals indicated, there was notable progress each season. In conference play, the Buffaloes' average scoring margin dropped from minus-23.9 to minus-12.8 to minus-12.7, and they held second-half leads in losses against USC, UCLA and Arizona. It wasn't the type of success they were looking for, but for those paying close attention, there was a lot to be encouraged about.
The flip side, of course, is that they were 2-25 in Pac-12 games in MacIntyre's first three seasons. At some point, progress needed to manifest itself in the form of victories.
"When you're a college head football coach and you don’t win games, there's a chance you get fired," MacIntyre said. "I've been around it my entire life, so I understand that, but if you sit there and focus on that it doesn't do you any good."
Besides, he was confident a breakthrough season was on tap.
MacIntyre openly talked about the idea of a Pac-12 title before this season began, but it was easy to write it off as one of those things every coach says. As in, he doesn't really believe that.
Some of the players talked about that same goal, but there was also a healthy amount of internal skepticism.
"We knew that we could come in and win games. We had lost some close games," Jay MacIntyre said. "Not everyone totally believed we could [play for the conference title], because we hadn't even gone to a bowl game. We won two games. We won four games."
But as the team started winning -- and kept winning -- belief spread, and a look at how the Buffaloes are winning makes it even more impressive.
They rank No. 1 in the Pac-12 in scoring defense (17.9), No. 1 in yards margin per game (157.4), No. 1 in yards allowed per play (4.56) and per game (307.4) and No. 3 in first downs per game on offense (25.0). This is a team that has won with two quarterbacks, Sefo Liufau and Steven Montez, re-entered the national rankings for the first time since 2005 and is undefeated at home with no road games remaining.
If they beat Washington State or Utah, the Buffaloes will have six more wins than they did in conference play last season, which would be the biggest season-over-season improvement in the conference since 1940.
"I thought it would take us about five years to come from where we were," Mike MacIntytre said. "We were in the ashes, and now we're coming out."
Because of his health, MacIntyre's father never got to see him as a head coach in person, and when they talked later in life, it was rarely about football.
"He would always tell me he was proud of me," MacIntyre said.
Not that he needed to see this season to further develop that feeling, but it certainly would have made him smile, because Colorado's rise, as made popular by an online hashtag, is most definitely real.
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OT: UC President Search
