Kansas football wants you to believe it just solved its Les Miles problem.
The truth is they are retaining their Jeff Long problem.
A week ago, the program’s problems looked like this: a winless season with losses by an average score of 46-16 and a questionable leader losing assistants to lateral moves to non-Power Five schools.
Today, the program’s problems look like this: national embarrassment from a fired head coach that brings additional expense as revenues have diminished, and the athletics director who just fell on his face is the one leading the hiring of a new coach at an awful time to be looking.
I cannot think of a single reason KU fans should be confident in Long’s ability to get this right. Not one. So I asked. Here is what he said:
“I’ve been involved in college football my entire professional life. I’ve worked in a number of institutions. I’ve worked in a number of conferences. I’ve worked in many different ways in college football. I think I’m uniquely prepared having been a college football coach at the Division I level at a Power Five school early in my career and having worked at a number of Power Five institutions along the way. So I’m confident in my knowledge, I’m confidence in my experience, and I have no doubt that we can find the next great leader for KU in the best interest of our student athletes.”
Convinced yet?
Long’s case to you, KU fan, is essentially, “I have an extensive record of consecutive employment.”
Congrats on the streak of paychecks, but there are a lot of people who’ve worked around college football who shouldn’t be trusted to hire a head coach.
Long’s claim of being “uniquely prepared” because he was a low-level assistant more than 30 years ago is literally a qualification that his fired and overmatched predecessor often touted.
Except, at least with Sheahon Zenger, his seven years as a Kansas State assistant saw more success and more relevant experience to KU than Long’s time as a Michigan grad-assistant in 1987.
Every so often, KU football appears to hit rock bottom. Long was hired to stop that trend. Three years in, he’s continued the digging.
There is no joy here. This space does not traffic in takedowns just for takedowns’ sake. This space does aim to traffic in honesty, though, and honestly, how can KU credibly sell Long remaining in charge of athletics?
We can debate the failure with Miles. Maybe you see a big swing that at least was building the right way with high school recruits instead of the chosen path of KU’s previous two coaches, overloading with junior-college kids and turning one bad year into more.
Long essentially said Miles twice lied to him directly when asked if there was anything in his past that could embarrass KU, and there is no reason to doubt him on that point.
But the logical counter is that Long consciously tied himself personally and professionally to Miles, playing on their experience at Michigan together and their lasting friendship. You don’t get to pull all of that back, blaming your friend and now sadly and desperately trying to downplay the friendship.
“We did not work closely together or know each other well from that time in Michigan in the early 1990s,” Long said. “I think much has (been said) about the friendship. It’s a friendship that was certainly not the reason behind why we were hiring him to be the head coach.”
Thanks to Long’s destructive unforced error in judgment in trying to bully David Beaty out of money he was legally owed, we have enough reporting and depositions to know his entire search focused on Miles from the beginning.
Long ran the search himself. He did not hire a firm to expand the pool or, notably, run background checks. He had control. Anyone he talked to aside from Miles was at best a safety net. Under oath, he could not correctly identify a single human he interviewed for the job other than Miles.
Long doesn’t get to erase all that. That’s not how this works.
When a hire you owned from start to finish brings shame on the university that pays you very well to do the opposite, you don’t get to shrug your shoulders and say, “He said he was cool, so what was I supposed to do?”
But, fine. We can keep going back. Long hired Bobby Petrino to coach Arkansas in 2008. Petrino took over a successful program and had consecutive double digit-win seasons in 2010 and 2011.
But here I have to tell you that I have never heard — unsolicited — some of the nicest and most positive people I know tell horror stories about Petrino.
Normally, I would not bring this up, but four years after Long tied his professional reputation to Petrino’s, the football coach was fired after a motorcycle accident began to unravel a significant ball of lies: He was not riding alone, as he originally said, but with a young woman he hired and was cheating on his wife with.
Long blamed it all on Petrino and his lies — this is where the narrator clears his throat and asks if anyone sees a pattern — but that’s not how big-boy jobs work.
If you take the credit, you must also take the blame. Arkansas didn’t get out of its image and fund-raising problems by playing the victim.
Arkansas went 4-8 the next year, then made a splashy hire with Bret Bielema, who had never before worked or lived in the South. Bielema was fired with a 29-34 record at Arkansas, including 4-8 in his last season.
Long talks a lot about his experience, but his most relevant hiring experience includes two coaches who embarrassed the university for which he worked and one who was overmatched on the field.
Is this a good history of hiring?
At Arkansas, Long was essentially in charge of protecting and growing a program built by Houston Nutt, who went 75-48 after taking over a losing program.
Long inherited a much better situation, and his coaches went 67-59 with an all-time scandal, and the program he left was in tangibly worse shape than the day he was hired.
When asked what he’s learned from past mistakes and why the University of Kansas and its fans should trust him now, Long ignored the part about mistakes and bragged about having worked for a long time.
This is the guy KU fans should trust?
Look, KU football has enormous problems, ranging from geography to money to facilities to recruiting base. These problems predate Long, and they will still be around for the next person.
KU football’s problems cannot be solved simply by finding a more credible AD.
But they sure as hell can’t be solved by keeping Long.
