Job offers to older coaches rare in top college ranks
college basketball; a program in one of the six major conferences — the ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC — hired a coach who wasat least 55.
The sport is, in many ways, defined by iconic coaches like Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams and Jim Boeheim who are well past their 60th birthday. Very rarely, though, is a coach in that age demographic hired for a new position. In the past 20 years, dating back to 1998, there have been only 19 coaching changes (of a possible 187) in which a coach age 55 or older was hired by a major-conference school.
The experiment on which Pitt embarked isn’t unprecedented, but it’s uncommon. But why do so few coaches like Stallings get opportunities elsewhere once they’ve reached a certain age?
Does ageism, as it does in other aspects of society, have a foothold in college basketball?
“Generally speaking, if all things were equal, [athletic directors] would probably rather hire younger than older,” Stallings said. “But usually things aren’t always equal.”
A not-so-inexact science
One of the first things most any athletic administrator will say about the hiring process is it’s an inexact science. It’s governed by reason, sure, but there’s no specific list of instructions to be followed verbatim. Different schools want and need different things at different times, meaning there’s variance in who is ultimately selected.
Even still, reasons for the dearth of older coaching hires go deeper.
Perhaps the most obvious and oft-mentioned is the notion of “winning a press conference” — that is, making a hire that rallies fans from the moment it is revealed. That can be a coach with a long track record of success. In many other cases, it’s a young coach who provides excitement based on what he can potentially accomplish. Sometimes, as it was with rising stars such as Shaka Smart and Archie Miller, it can be both — or as Stallings put it, “Sometimes when you get to be my age, I guess you can be neither of those.”
Such arbitrary measurements can sometimes cost coaches. When passed over for a job several years ago, Stallings said he was told by a search-firm employee that he did not have “enough star power.”
For longtime coaches who haven’t had overwhelming success and who may have even been fired at one point, they can be branded with the dreaded “retread” label. That can scare off potential employers, or, at the very least, sour a customer base. What that word entails isn’t concrete — ESPN analyst and former Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg noted that even Bill Belichick was once a retread.
Nonetheless, it’s a stigma that can linger.
“I would say there might be, unfairly,” said Western Kentucky AD Todd Stewart, who hired 56-year-old Rick Stansbury as basketball coach in 2016. “A lot of times, people get certain labels or certain stereotypes that in many cases are inaccurate. I think that’s just a product of the world we’re in and the environment we’re in.”
Stallings became the notable exception to the trend because the man who hired him viewed age and experience not as a hindrance, but a strong bonus to the point of effectively being a requirement for the job.
“We wanted someone who could X and O it, along with the recruiting, because this is a big-time league with bigtime coaches,” Barnes said in an interview last year. “I wanted an experienced guy. Kevin had battled Kentucky and had battled some of the best in the country for years. That was a really good fit there. I didn’t even think about age. I think about energy, enthusiasm, experience and fit to what you’re looking for.He had all those qualities.”
Hiring decisions sometimes go beyond what happens on the court. Given that players are never active for more than four years, coaches are often at the center of a program’s marketing efforts, becoming the face of an athletic department and sometimes an entire school.
Their image isn’t quite everything, but a coach’s ability to bring in donations and what they project to others play a part.
“Having a young, aggressive image of how you play falls right into the associate athletic director for marketing’s lap,” said Marty Conway, a professor of sports marketing at Georgetown. “While they don’t get to choose necessarily who that new coach is, they certainly have an influence.”
Young coaches in these situations aren’t the only ones looking to build their reputations — it’s also those hiring them. AD who identify a relative unknown who morphs intoa sought-after commodity enhances their own resume and positions themselves for an upward move. That same upside doesn’t exist by hiring a more established name, short of someone from coaching’supper echelon.
Youth in coaching is also aided by the structure of college athletics itself.
In transient sports where the players are outlawed from being paid beyond a scholarship and a stipend, a head coach is the person most closely tied to a program’s success and an athletic department’s bottom line who can be compensated. In many respects, that makes these coaches investments. So, as an AD, why hire someone who may only be with your program for, say, six years, when you can hire someone younger who could be there for decades?
Then there are maybe the most searing questions, the ones about how age impacts one’s ability to do his job.
Is a younger coach, for example, better equipped to work with and relate to a group of college athletes? Conversely, is an older coach going to be up-to-date on technology, whether it’s various forms of social media or ways toanalyze game tape?
Harvey Sterns, a psychology professor at Akron and the director of the university’s Institute for Life-Span Development and Gerontology, stressed that there’s no uniformity in professional competence between people of a certain age; individual differences must be recognized and appreciated. According to Sterns, there’s virtually no relationship between age and job performance, and if there is a link, it usually impacts younger employees, not older ones.
Sterns does, however, realize that certain stereotypes exist, namely that older people may not be as good or productive in a certain job. As he sees it, those mindsets are examples of ageism, a damaging form of discrimination.
“People may not even be fully aware they have stereotypes; that’s what implicit and explicit ageism is about,” Sterns said. “In making a judgment, they may not realize that they have these attitudes. Objective measures present the smallest opportunity for ageism to creep in. If it’s all subjective, then subjective judgments can be influenced by stereotypes.”
A young man’s game
The cliche with coaching, especially in college athletics, is that it’s a young man’s profession. There are examples of those who endure the deteriorating grind of a demanding job, like many of the aforementioned stalwarts, but they largely exist as exceptions. Data suggests as much. Of the 87 major-conference coaching hires made in the past 10 years, 60 of them (69 percent) involved a successor who was younger than his predecessor, with an average age difference of 4.1 years (50.1 years old to 46 years old). That differential is actually larger in major college football, where the average age difference in that span has been 5.4 years (51.4 to 48.2), and 71 percent of coaching changes have involved a younger new hire.
It’s a gap that largely doesn’t translate to the professional ranks. Over the past 10 years, just 54.7 percent of coaching changes in the NFL and 54.2 percent of those in the NBA involved a younger successor. Additionally, in those leagues over the past 20 years, there have been 32 and 38 coaches, respectively, who were hired at 55 years or older. Even in college football, there were 32 instances of a coach 55 or older being hired in that period, compared to the 19 in college basketball. None of the coaching changes considered in those spans were retirements since such decisions are often tied to age.
In many ways, that chasm comes naturally enough. If someone has been in a profession long enough, particularly to get a head coaching position at the highest levels of the sport, it makes sense if the person pegged with replacing them is younger, especially if the predecessor had a lengthy tenure. It’s the circle of professional life.
That only explains so much, though.
The discrepancy between the college and professional ranks can be attributed some to the role of recruiting, the exhausting and seemingly never-ending process of traveling across the country to assemble a team. There’s also complacency, the idea that an entrenched coach of a certain age doesn’t feel like moving away from a comfortable situation to start over elsewhere.
As search firms have become an increasingly prominent part of the hiring process, some like Kansas State coach Bruce Weber have questioned what kind of factor they play. (Pitt used the firm Collegiate Sports Associates in its search that ultimately ended with Stallings, an arrangement that raised concerns of a potential conflict of interest, as the firm’s founder and president, Todd Turner, hired Stallings as Vanderbilt’s coach in 1999 while he was the AD at the school and was Barnes’ boss at the University of Washington from 2005-08).
“I’ve never been into a search thus far where somebody says ‘We need somebody that’s a young charger’ or whatever it might be,” said Pat Richter, a partner at DHR International, an executive search firm, and the former AD at Wisconsin.
In all, it contributes to what several people in the profession interviewed for this story see as an overall lack of opportunity for older coaches, fears they’ve either felt themselves or heard others express to them. Whether it’s the mid-major head coach who missed his chance to jump to a bigger school or the longtime assistant still waiting for his shot at a headcoaching position that may never come, there’s a belief that some coaches come with anexpiration date.
“I would like to think athletic directors are not looking at age as a factor, but I know it happens,” said Jim Haney, the executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches.
It’s all relative
When Keith Dambrot arrived at Duquesne in March 2017, he was welcomed less as a coach and more as a savior.
For the Dukes, hiring Dambrot was a coup. A onceproud program with six winning seasons in 37 years and no NCAA tournament berths since 1977 was able to land a coach who averaged 23.5 wins in 13 seasons at Akron. The move was almost universally praised, hailed as a reinvigorating jolt for a program desperately in need of one.
“If I stay at Akron, I probably win 20 games for the rest of my life,” Dambrot said. “Now, do I get the sense of fulfilment I need? Probably not. At some point, the competitive edge comes and hits you. That’s one reason I came. I wanted a more competitive deal. Maybe I’ll regret that, but I feel like I needed it.”
The scene that greeted the then-58-year-old Dambrot stood in stark contrast to the one Stallings faced one year earlier and it highlights what can be an important distinction in how older coaches are received.
Unlike Pitt, which was replacing the most successful coach in the program’s history, Duquesne isn’t drastically different from the majority of power-conference programs that have turned to coaches who are 55 or older.
Of the 19 times a coach that age was hired in the past 20 years, 10 instances involved a program that had a losing record in the preceding three-year span. Four additional schools had a win percentage below .600 in those three seasons.
Most interesting are the cases in which age isn’t a hindrance, but actually a valuable asset.
This happens most commonly with programs engulfed in scandal, a time when they’re in search of stability above all else. To many, according to Sterns, age and a belief in stability are closely tied. After firing Mike Rice in 2013 for abusive behavior toward players, Rutgers hired 58-year-old Eddie Jordan. Following the ouster of Billy Gillispie amid player mistreatment accusations, Texas Tech brought in 61-year-old Tubby Smith. Tennessee turned to 60-yearold Rick Barnes after going through two coaches in as many years, the latter of whom was fired for major NCAA violations at his previous employer.
In more dire situations, the notion of a coach as a long-term investment was pushed to the side.
“If you can get a coach in place for 10 years, you’ve done really good in this day and age,” said Florida AD Scott Stricklin, who was the AD at Mississippi State when it hired 57-year-old Ben Howland. “Regardless of the age of a coach, unless you’re hiring someone who is near death, you’re probably going to get somebody who can give you 10 years.”
For those like Stricklin who took a chance on an older coach, there has been some payoff. Of the aforementioned 19 hires, seven are still at that post, a number of whom have excelled. In 2016, five years after taking over a reeling program, 63-year-old Lon Kruger captained Oklahoma to the Final Four. Jim Larranaga, 68, went 139-69 in his first six seasons at Miami, the highest win percentage of a coach in program history. Rick Barnes, in his third season at Tennessee, has the Volunteers ranked for the first time since 2010.
There is, however, another side to that gamble. The average length of the 12 completed tenures was 4.6 years, below the major-conference, non-active average of 5.8 in that span. Seven were fired or resigned under pressure, four retired and one left for another job. Heading into this season, their combined win percentage in those positions was a decidedly mediocre .525.
When Scott Barnes hired Stallings, he saw a relatively successful coach with nearly two decades of major-conference experience, someone who could help a program still trying to find its way in the ACC. Stallings’ age, he said, was never a consideration and was never broached during the hiring process. Stallings, who in a 2010 interview said there is “zero chance” he will be coaching at 65, has backed off that statement, noting he will coach as long as he’s an asset to his players, has the requisite energy and isn’t a detriment to his family.
It’s something he and others assess based on how they feel, not what their birth certificate may read. Age, after all, is merely a number — even in coaching.
“I guess some people would equate rebuilding a program to bringing fresh blood in and bringing new energy in. Is that tied to an age? I don’t think so,” Greenberg said. “It’s tied to the person. There are very old 40year-olds and there are very young 60-year-olds. That’s the way it is.”