Why the best college coaching hires were the names you may not know (yet)

A funny thing happened a few weeks ago when North Carolina made the decision to part ways with four-star rhetorician Larry Fedora: They didn’t call the guy they probably should have called. Instead of reaching out to the best young coach in their own state, Appalachian State’s Scott Satterfield — who led the Mountaineers to 40 wins over the past four seasons as they transitioned from the FCS to FBS — the Tarheels made perhaps the most astounding hire of the offseason to date (if not in the recent history of college football), plucking an anodyne 67-year-old television analyst from the ranks of retirement to become their de-facto CEO.

It is not impossible to imagine that Mack Brown will succeed at UNC in the short term. But it highlights a strange divide of this busy college football hiring season, particularly for mid-tier FBS schools like UNC: Either you target someone with upward mobility who can energize a program with new ideas, or you hire someone based largely on nostalgia and hope the momentum carries over to alumni and recruits. Such is the case with Brown, and such was the case with a perpetually moribund Kansas program taking a shot at the metaphorical roulette wheel known as Les Miles . Toss Arizona State’s hire of Herm Edwards last season onto that pile, and that’s a honking mound of cash wagered on the sheer weight of experience.

Will one of those bets pay off? It’s quite possible. But I’m not sure it makes much sense to embrace that old energy right now. We’re at a moment of dynamic change in college football: an era where it feels as if the sport’s constantly evolving — when offenses are growing more dynamic and defenses are seeking innovative ways to respond to that evolution. Many of the best ideas are originating at the lowest levels and trickling upward to the NFL. And given that, it feels like UNC missed an opportunity here: A few weeks after they failed to reach out to Satterfield, he took the head coaching job at Louisville.

Satterfield’s was only one of several hires who plumbed the lower levels of the sport, seeking out the brightest minds. At Kansas State, the Wildcats replaced aging wizard Bill Snyder with Chris Klieman, who helped sustain an FCS powerhouse at North Dakota State. East Carolina hired Mike Houston, who’d built FCS James Madison into a national contender, to replace the fired Scottie Montgomery. And even Group of Five schools like Charlotte and Akron reached down to the lower levels to find new coaches — Charlotte’s Will Healy comes from Austin Peay and Akron’s Tom Arth from Chattanooga.

In other words, those schools chose to look from the bottom up, rather than the top down. And what might the rewards be for the teams that do so? Allow me to point you to the University of Buffalo, where Lance Leipold, hired from Division III power Wisconsin-Whitewater, won 10 games for the Bulls in his fourth season as coach.

Now, maybe Brown can do the same thing in his fourth season at North Carolina. Maybe he can legislate fresh energy from the top by enabling dynamic assistants. But let’s say he has the same Year 4 success as that of Leipold. By then, he’s in his 70s, and you’re already starting to wonder how much longer he can do this. And I’m not sure how that helps a program like North Carolina build any momentum over the long term. It feels staid and uninteresting; it feels, in other words, like exactly the opposite of what college football has become over the previous decade: a sport where the best and most innovative ideas take precedent over the sheer weight of personality.