What are the odds of Brent Brennan being fired after one season at Arizona? They are astronomically low; let’s say 0%.
That’s because of the 253 head football coaches at Big 12 schools (and schools from the disbanded Pac-12) dating 50 years, 1973-2023, no head football coach was fired after one season.
Eight of the 253 coaches spent just one year at their school, but all left for what they deemed a better job, including Baylor’s Jim Grobe, Cincinnati’s Watson Brown, Stanford’s Rod Dowhower, Oregon’s Willie Taggart, Colorado’s Mel Tucker, Oklahoma State’s Dave Smith, and two Washington State one-year job-hoppers Jackie Sherrill and Warren Powers.
Has Brennan been so bad that he should be the first of 254 Big 12/Pac-12 coaches of the last half-century fired in one year? Not likely.
The last Arizona football coach to be fired after one season was Orian “Toad” Landreth in 1938. Landreth succeeded the highly successful Tex Oliver, coach of the famous “Blue Brigade.” Landreth came from Long Beach Poly High School, and, according to Abe Chanin’s classic 1970s book “They Fought Like Wildcats,” was not viewed as a qualified coach by many of the UA players.
Landreth stopped coaching at Arizona in the final two games of 1938, after what the Daily Star called a “mental breakdown.” Assistant coach Fred Enke coached the last two games of a 3-6 season.
Arizona head coach Brent Brennan congratulates defensive back Demetrius Freeney after his coverage on a punt put Colorado deep in their own territory in the fourth quarter on Oct. 19.
One more question: Should Brennan act now to fire offensive coordinator Dino Babers, or play-caller Matt Adkins? Again, it’s almost unprecedented.
Of the 208 assistant football coaches in UA history, only one, defensive coordinator Marcel Yates, was fired in midseason. That was 2019, when head coach Kevin Sumlin was in the process of bungling the entire football program with unprecedented ineptness.
In 2006, UA coach Mike Stoops diminished offensive coordinator Mike Canales’ role in midseason. After a 3-5 start, Stoops declared that tight ends coach Dana Dimel, former head coach at Houston and Wyoming, would help Canales call plays. Dimel designed running plays; Canales called passing plays.
It didn’t work, probably because quarterback Willie Tuitama had been injured and didn’t regain his form until 2007. By then, Stoops had fired Canales and hired Texas Tech’s Sonny Dykes to be Arizona’s offensive coordinator.
In retrospect, one troubling aspect to the hire of Babers as Arizona’s offensive coordinator was that he had not been a coordinator, or a play-caller, for 22 years, not since he was a Texas A&M assistant in 2002. After that, he was not an offensive coordinator in eight years on the staffs at UCLA, Pitt and Baylor. He then became a head coach for 12 years, and always hired an offensive coordinator at Eastern Illinois, Bowling Green and Syracuse.
Arizona’s first three games this season — sloppy victories over New Mexico and NAU and a loss at Kansas State — sounded the alarm. Babers had been away from play-calling for 22 years. Arizona’s offense did not work effectively.
Babers’ employed five offensive coordinators in his last seven years at Syracuse, which probably contributed to his firing last fall. Four of those five play-callers have bounced around at mid-to-low levels of the coaching industry.
Jason Beck is now coaching at New Mexico. Robert Anae is at North Carolina State. Sterlin Gilbert is at Cal. Mike Lynch is at Nevada. The only play-caller from Babers’ Syracuse years to advance his career at a higher level is Sean Lewis, now the head coach at San Diego State.
Adkins, who had been the tight ends coach at San Jose State for five years, had been an offensive coordinator for just one season, 2012, for the Carlstad Crusaders of the Swedish Football League.
Having Adkins call plays for Arizona in the Big 12 is a big ask. The competition from rival play-callers is overwhelming.
Colorado’s Pat Shurmur has been the head coach of the New York Jets and Cleveland Browns. ASU’s Marcus Arroyo has been the head coach at UNLV and offensive coordinator of the Oregon Ducks. Kansas’ Jeff Grimes has been the play-caller at BYU, LSU, Auburn and Boise State. TCU’s Kendall Briles has been the offensive coordinator at Arkansas, Florida State and Baylor.
These are big-time play-callers with outstanding résumés.
Whatever UA athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois decides to do with the football staff, firing Brennan or Adkins now isn’t going to help the Wildcats be competitive in remaining games against Houston, TCU and Arizona State.
