The more research I do on Texas A&M’s football program, the more I cannot understand why the Aggies fired Kevin Sumlin. Do you realize that in eight days the school must pay him a lump sum of $10.5 million just to be gone?
There are scads of football programs better than the Texas A&M Aggies. We’re not talking Hook ’em Horns here, not even TCU.
In the 10 seasons before Sumlin was hired at A&M, the Aggies went 64-60. I mean, Cal went 79-48 in the same period.
What did the Aggies expect? They had never played for life, limb and the national championship unless you go back to 1939. This isn’t Florida saying you’ve got to do better.
Either way, Sumlin was much better than his immediate predecessors, 51-26, and yet the Aggies fired him. That’s a winning percentage that gets you selected to the College Football Hall of Fame.
So I kept wondering: Did Arizona hire damaged goods when it appointed Kevin Sumlin its football coach? What do the Texas A&M Aggies know that Arizona doesn’t?
On Tuesday, Sumlin was introduced to donors, former Arizona Wildcats and a media group that even included some infrequent visitors from Phoenix. If you pull the Phoenix writers and broadcasters down Interstate 10, it’s a very big story.
The school staged the event with such ceremony and conviction that you almost expected a Hollywood director to say “Cut, that’s a print.”
Yes, it was impressive. So was Sumlin.
He could’ve sat out the 2018 season, worked for a TV network and handpicked the job of his choice. He’s articulate, thoughtful, photogenic and his pedigree includes multiple Heisman Trophy winners.
He has a recent history of recruiting Phoenix better than Arizona State.
“Good hire,” said Jim Young, Arizona’s Hall of Fame coach of the 1970s, who drove from his foothills-area home to watch the coronation.
Are the football gods giving this one to Arizona after all those years without a Rose Bowl?
Six years ago, December 2011, Arizona State, UCLA and Texas A&M were searching for a football coach simultaneously. All of them wanted the young coach from Houston who had gone 12-1 with an Air Raid offense that connected to the game’s top innovators, June Jones and Hal Mumme.
The race was on.
The man who beat ASU and UCLA to the must-hire-Sumlin scene was A&M athletic director Bill Byrne, who taught his son, Alabama AD Greg Byrne, most of what he knows about getting the jump on a good prospect.
“We just got our oars in the water a little sooner than ASU and UCLA did,” Bill Byrne said Tuesday from College Station, Texas, where he is now retired.
“Kevin’s a terrific football coach. I really thought he was going to get the job done here at A&M, but he did not meet the expectations of a few of our Regents. That’s OK, too. He’s absolutely first-class. He is level-headed, calm and professional and he treats people the way you want to be treated.”
Whether realistic or not, A&M’s expectations are such that a season-opening 45-44 loss to UCLA on Labor Day weekend was not survivable. On the day of that loss, Texas attorney Tony Buzbee, a member of the A&M Board of Regents, posted a Facebook message in which he said he would vote to fire Sumlin.
And so they did.
Sumlin’s football crime? He lost to LSU six times, five times to Alabama and three times to Auburn.
Does Texas A&M really expect that to change under anybody?
“Coaching here is no small task,” said Byrne. “Kevin led us to some big time victories, over Alabama and he tore Oklahoma a new one. But we are playing in the toughest division in college football, the SEC West, and when your ‘days off’ are against Ole Miss and Mississippi State, well, that’s a pretty big chunk to bite off.”
Expectations at Arizona won’t be quite as grand, but Sumlin is expected to re-engage the community and at least act like he enjoys being in Tucson.
On the day you are hired, it’s easy to sit on a dais between the school president and athletic director and say you are committed to a policy of inclusion and to a future that includes carrying yourself with dignity on and off the field.
Some say Sumlin already passed that test.
Arizona’s first-year swimming coach Augie Busch was new on the staff at Houston, his first head coaching job, during Sumlin’s time with the Cougars.
“You won’t find a better guy,” said Busch, who was in the audience Tuesday. “Kevin went out of his way at Houston to make me feel welcome. I was the new guy on the staff and he impressed me with his integrity and commitment to the department as a whole. He’s a total home run.”
Jeff Stevens, the UA’s most prominent athletic donor, spent time researching Sumlin’s days at Houston and Texas A&M. Two of Stevens’ contacts have Tucson connections; Houston’s former AD, Mack Rhoades, is a UA grad, as is Texas A&M’s current senior associate AD, Stephanie Rempe, who worked with Sumlin in College Station.
“Mack and Stephanie have high regard for Kevin,” said Stevens. “He comes highly recommended.”
Once the UA got past the character questions, it was just a matter of the attorneys putting the correct numbers together. Whether Sumlin was the school’s first choice, or 1-A behind Navy’s Ken Niumatalolo, we’ll probably never know, nor will it matter.
For the time being, Kevin Sumlin has blown out some of the flames from an athletic department that has been on fire, torched by multiple investigations against its basketball, track and football programs.
On Tuesday, Arizona put its football oars back in the water. It is a sinking ship no more.
