Whipped Cream Difficulties

Charlie Strong officially out as University of Texas head football coach.

16-21 in three seasons: 6-7 in 2014, 5-7 in 2015, and 5-7 again this year.

Strong ran his program by his personal moral compass whereby players could lose their scholarship by violating one of his five core values, which included being honest and not using drugs. He kicked 10 players off the team that first year and doubled the amount of drug testing that went on under Brown.
Strong won universal praise from UT administrators and parents. That’s a primary reason how he captured consecutive top-10 recruiting classes the last two years. Dozens of recruits’ parents told the American-Statesman they wanted their sons to play for a man of Strong’s character.

That’s pretty much the saddest thing about this: it seems like he is a great guy, and everybody liked him. But his teams just were not performing on the field, and (this is also sad to say) there’s just too much invested in UT football to have three consecutive losing seasons.

The mildly amusing aspect of this is that UT has supposedly already hired Tom Herman, current University of Houston head coach and former Ohio State offensive coordinator. (Hello, my northern relatives who are currently watching the Ohio State game!) This is mildly amusing because earlier in the week ESPN was reporting that UT boosters were pushing hard for Herman. By the middle of the week, the reports were that LSU was going to hire Herman. By yesterday, the reports were that LSU wasn’t going to wait around on Herman and had made their interim coach (Ed Orgeron) the non-interim coach instead.

So almost everybody got more or less what they wanted: UT boosters got Herman, LSU got somebody who is at least familiar with the program, Herman gets a larger paycheck, more prestige, and less family disruption. And Charlie Strong gets a contract buyout (“Strong has two years remaining on a guaranteed contract worth $10.7 million.”)

Well, really, just one: Jurgen Klinsmann out as head coach of the United States men’s soccer team.

The drumbeat is getting louder: Charlie Strong is probably out at UT. The only question now is: do they let him finish out the TCU game and any bowl game UT might wind up in, or do they cut ties now? Waiting until after the TCU game gives them more time to line up the ducks…

According to family members, Kliff Kingsbury is also possibly in trouble at Texas Tech, but I’ve seen very little coverage of this.

Trent Miles out as head coach of Georgia State.

2-8 this season, 9-38 overall. The AJC article is worth reading, if you’re curious: apparently Georgia State has only had a football program since 2010, and maybe they really shouldn’t have one at all.

Tim DeRuyter out as football coach at Fresno State.

Heck, I didn’t even know Fresno State had a football team. They were 1-7 so far this season. DeRuyter was 30-30 overall.

Darrell Hazell out as Purdue football coach.

9-33 in “three and a half” seasons.

There was just a very slight chill in the air when I left work today. I drove all the way to my destination without having to use the air conditioner.

And in another sign that fall has arrived, we have our first major coach firing of the college football season: Les Miles out at LSU, along with offensive coordinator Cam Cameron. ESPN.

He was 114-34-0 overall at LSU. But the team was expected to be a national contender this year; they had a strong squad returning from last year. Instead, they started 2-2, losing to Wisconsin in their opening game and Auburn this past week. (Their two wins were against Jacksonville State and Mississippi State.)

Lawrence has been on the UT corruption scandal like flies over a cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation.

But I wanted to make note of this story, since I don’t think it has come to his attention yet, and it also sort of qualifies as a firing.

Backgroud: until a few years back, ticket sales for UT sports were handled by the Longhorn Foundation, “the official fundraising arm of Texas Athletics”.

Historically, the Foundation has been the primary fundraising arm for UT athletics. But an internal audit reveled Foundation employees were responsible for widespread abuses regarding tickets, rewarding favored donors and printing tickets to distribute without UT’s knowledge. School officials refused to even estimate how much money had been lost over the years.

More here on the audit, which was mostly completed by June 2013, but the report “was not sent to top university officials until two years later — after UT President Bill Powers and athletic director DeLoss Dodds, in office at the time of the ticket abuses, had moved on.”

I’m just going to give that one “well” for now, for reasons that should become apparent later.

Steve Patterson, who took over as athletic director after DeLoss Dodds, took ticket selling away from the Longhorn Foundation. The foundation still existed, but their fund-raising was charitable contributions – you know, donations from rich alumni who wanted good seats for football. Patterson hired a company called The Aspire Group to handle ticket sales, and they’ve apparently done a decent job: they exceeded goals for 2015. And they have a contract through August of 2017.

But. Steve Patterson isn’t the athletic directory any longer: he lasted two years. Mike Perrin is now the AD, and he wants to terminate Aspire’s contract by August 26th of this year.

Would you like to take a guess who Mike Perrin wants to handle ticket sales now?

“I believe the direction and tone of our relationships with our incredible donor and fan base needs to be adjusted, starting with the Longhorn Foundation once again leading those important relationships,” Perrin continued.
Perrin stated it was “my intention to come to an agreement to terminate our contract this summer. I am not interested in trying to figure out a way to keep this relationship active moving forward.”

So the new AD wants to turn ticket sales back over to the same crooked organization that had them previously.

And this is where we deploy the “Well. Well well well. Well.” Seriously, just how corrupt is the University of Texas these days?

Why not drop your news on one of the slowest news days of the year?

Sheryl Swoopes was fired last night as head coach of the Loyola University women’s basketball team. Chicago Tribune. Chicago Sun-Times.

Her record over three seasons was 31-62, and 14-16 last season. But the problem doesn’t seem to have been her record:

Five more players transferred after the 2014-15 season, and the university granted requests from 10 of the 12 returning players from last season’s roster to be released from their scholarships.

More:

Five former players told the Tribune in April that Swoopes was extremely difficult to play for, frequently threatening players with the loss of their scholarships, and that her unusual coaching style led to the player exodus.

…

Players said Swoopes cried during halftime of games and during practices while imploring the team to play better and stormed out of the gym during practice several times, frustrated at their lack of execution. At one practice, multiple players said, Swoopes sat on a chair in silence the entire time.
Swoopes also shared with teammates personal information told to her in confidence, sources told the Tribune.

Ms. Swoopes termination comes at what is apparently the end of a three month long investigation by the university, though no details of that investigation have been released yet.

University of Texas baseball coach Augie Garrido has been “reassigned to a role as special assistant to the athletic director”. Which basically seems to me like a nice way to fire him without actually firing him.

During his 48-year coaching tenure, he led his teams to the College World Series 15 times, made 33 NCAA Regional appearances, won 16 NCAA Regional Tournament titles and 25 Conference Championships, while being named National Coach of the Year six times (1975, 1979, 1984, 1995, 2002, 2005).

At UT, his teams won two national championships (in 2002 and 2005) and went to the College World Series eight times.