Trophy Wives? Meet Trophy Coordinators

As 2008 dawned south of the Mason-Dixon line, Phillip Fulmer of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Auburn were the two longest tenured coaches in the SEC. Between the two, they had a combined 25 seasons at their current schools, 227 wins, two undefeated seasons, and three SEC titles. They also had something else in common, shiny new offensive coordinators who brought shiny new offensive systems to towns that had long played the same brand of football.

Dave Clawson, a boyish 42-year-old former head coach from Richmond, and Tony Franklin, a wonkish offensive coordinator from Troy University, whose spread offense helped lead the Trojans to back-to-back Sun Belt titles. Both men arrived amid much acclaim. And why wouldn't they? After all, they were the newest toys in a college football coach's toy chest.

They were trophy coordinators, college football's answer to trophy wives.
The term "trophy wife" has long been a fixture in American parlance; the term refers to the second or third wife of a successful man, typically much younger than her spouse, attractive, and a fixture on the arm of her husband at social events. But the husband has to be wary, trophy wives can turn disastrous. Expensive divorces are always lurking just around the corner.

Now the phenomenon has come to college football. And college head coaches have to be just as wary.

So what exactly defines a trophy coordinator? Here's my best attempt. A trophy coordinator is a younger offensive or defensive coach who has attained great success with a new system of football teaching. He has gaudy statistics, a reputation as a coaching genius, eccentric habits, and his hiring is met with universal acclaim by the fan base. From the head coach down to the youngest fan, everyone believes that the trophy coordinator offers the immediate jolt of life that will cure an ailing program. Most importantly, so does the coach who hires the trophy coordinator as a way to ward off critics. Typically, although not always, trophy coordinators will be offensive coaches (Will Muschamp, for instance, is a defensive coordinator at Texas but bears all the hallmarks of a trophy coordinator.).

What attracts seasoned college football coaches to these coordinators is the same thing that attracts a successful man to his trophy wife. They offer something unique and new that promises to make their life better, easier, and more exciting than it presently is. Trophy wives promise better sex, trophy coordinators promise something even more invaluable to the head coaches who hire them, a better way to move or stop the football.

It's hard to deduce exactly when the trophy coordinator first caught the eye of a head coach in a state of peril, but we can safely narrow down the date. Why? Because it's safe to assume that the launch of the Internet has allowed trophy coordinators to enter the mainstream conversation. The Internet guarantees the casual fan will know much more about assistant coaches than we did 15 years ago. Fifteen years ago, hardly any fans could name the offensive and defense coordinator of a rival program. Many couldn't name their own team's coordinators. Now, virtually any fan can rattle of the coordinator's name, stats, and has an opinion about their relative merit.

So it took the Internet to create and popularize the trophy coordinator phenomenon. Before then assistant coaches toiled in relative anonymity.

Next question, who was the first trophy coordinator? I'll give you a name: Mike Leach.

In 1999 Leach arrived at Oklahoma as the offensive coordinator of first-time head coach Bob Stoops, a hot but unproven name in coaching circles, with bona fides only as a defensive coordinator. Leach brought his offensive system from Kentucky (where later trophy coordinator Tony Franklin would succeed him). Leach made the hiring of Stoops even more palatable to Oklahoma fans, who were nervous about Stoops' offensive ability, not to mention pinning the historic program's legacy on a first-time head coach. (There's even an argument to be made that Stoops' was the first trophy coordinator, having been hired by Steve Spurrier at Florida in 1996 and given complete control of the defense. But Spurrier was hardly under pressure to prove himself and, before the overwhelming surge of the Internet, Stoops' hire wasn't the national story it would be 13 years later.)

The trophy coordinator Leach was at Oklahoma just one year before he bolted to Texas Tech to accept his own head job. But the guru talk was already beginning. The Sooners would win the national title in 2000. Leach was gone, but the trophy coordinator was about to take college football by storm.

Men like Al Borges, David Cutcliffe, Will Muschamp, Gus Malzahn, and Charlie Strong strutted across the trophy coordinator stage, plying their trade for wowed fan bases across the country. As you can see, sometimes these trophy coordinators go on to establish themselves as great coaches in their own right, other times, they take their head coaches down with them.

Such was the cautionary 2008 tale of Fulmer and Tuberville. In 2007, Tuberville's Auburn Tigers went 9-4, but their offense, under former trophy coordinator Borges plummeted to 101st in the nation. Meanwhile, Nick Saban's Alabama Crimson Tide roared back to life and Tuberville sought a new weapon for the Iron Bowl battle and the year-long war between the fanbases. Tuberville picked Franklin and to say Auburn fans were pleased with the hire is an understatement. They bid up Franklin's out-of-print book, Fourth Down and Life To Go, to over $200 a copy.

In Knoxville, Fulmer faced a different dilemma, his former trophy coordinator, David Cutcliffe, whose 2005 return brought back to life the moribund offense of the Tennessee Volunteers, accepted the head coaching job at Duke. Fulmer spent months searching for the right hire, eventually settling on Richmond's Dave Clawson. Upon arrival, Clawson announced that he intended to install a hybrid offensive system, not the west-coast offense, not the spread, and not Tennessee's pro-style attack. This system -- termed the "Clawfense" by delirious Vol fans -- utilized all the right buzzwords to make fans salivate. The Vols would take advantage of match-ups, exploit advantages, create space, get the playmakers the ball, score more points than any fan could imagine in his or her wildest dream.

Only it didn't quite work out like that.

At either place.



The offensive futility of both teams crystallized in an Oct. 3 slugfest at Auburn. The game set offensive football back two or three generations (Well, outside the Big Ten). Both teams should have played in leather helmets and actual sweater jerseys. It wasn't so much that the defenses dominated as it was the offenses were utterly incompetent. On play after play, after play. Tennessee rolled up 191 yards of offense to Auburn's 226. Auburn ran 67 offensive plays, averaging 3.37 yards per play.

It got worse as the game went on.

On their final 12 offensive plays of the game, Tennessee gained 12 yards. On the three series that immediately preceded the final one, Auburn gained, wait for it, negative-2 total yards. It was football as execution day, like watching Bambi's mom get shot on each snap. In the end, Tennessee ran 57 plays, averaging 3.35 yards per play.

Auburn eventually won 14-12, but both teams and both head coaches lost on this day. You could see it in their eyes.

Two weeks later, Tuberville fired its trophy coordinator, Tony Franklin. The Tigers, then 4-2, would finish 1-5 and Tuberville would be gone by the end of the season. Meanwhile, Tennessee stuck with Clawson's offense. At the end of Week 9, Phil Fulmer and his entire staff were fired.

Both trophy coordinators, geniuses just three months before, were without jobs.

The ascent of these two trophy coordinators had, in the process, ended the careers of the two deans of SEC coaching.

And birthed a new bit of college football lexicon.

Check back Wednesday for interviews with Franklin and Clawson and get their take on trophy coordinators.