How Does He Still Have A Job: Part 2

When the University of Colorado hired Dan Hawkins to replace Gary Barnett as the college football head coach, they did so in order to polish the tarnished image Barnett had left behind. While at Boise State, Hawkins ran a clean program whereas the later years of Barnett's tenure were filled with scandals ranging from players being undercharged for on-campus meals to luring recruits to Boulder with sex and alcohol to allegations of player sexual assault. One would hope that the University of Colorado athletic director, Mike Bohn, also planned on Hawkins putting together a team that was not only scandal-free, but actually won games and competed in the Big 12.

Although Barnett took a lackadaisical approach to monitoring what happened off the field with his players, there is no denying that he put together teams that were among the top in the Big 12. Out of the seven years Barnett spent coaching the Buffaloes, four of those years saw the University of Colorado in first place of the Big 12 North. Admittedly, the Big 12 North is the weaker part of the Big 12, but a title is a title and what Barnett did is a far sight better than anything Hawkins has accomplished during his five years at the helm.

In fact, the Buffaloes have regressed with Hawkins heading up the college football program, most noticeably on the offensive side of the ball. Barnett's teams never set the world on fire offensively, but they did enough to at least post a winning percentage of .563 (49-38). Since Hawkins has taken over, his teams are scoring an average of 5.8 fewer points per game (21.6 to 27.4, completing passes at a lower clip (53.7% to 58.7%), and getting fewer yards per pass attempt (6.0 to 7.0). What is even more of an indictment to the poor coaching job Hawkins has done is there does not seem to be even a hint of improvement on the horizon. Due to the fact there has been little change on the defensive side of the ball between the two tenures, it should come as no surprise that Hawkins's teams have only won 32.7% of their games (16-33). Not being able to improve on a predecessor's teams, especially when the predecessor was fired, is a talent only unemployed coaches should have.

Besides the fact that Hawkins has avoided bringing more scandal to the University of Colorado, he has done nothing else to warrant his further employment. The only thing that his teams are good at is being mediocre, a distinction that usually ends with a coach being fired. Furthermore, there are dozens of coaches in the football world that can manage both to win and keep their teams off probation. Dan Hawkins is not one of them and why he is allowed to continue to put a mostly losing product on the field every week during college football season is an unsolved mystery beyond any tale ever narrated by Robert Stack.