Dorrell to receive $18M for five years with Buffs
BOULDER» The Buffs have made it official: CU football is handing the keys to Karl Dorrell.
The university formally announced Sunday that the 56year-old Dorrell has been hired as the CU’s 27th full-time football coach, replacing Mel Tucker, who left the program Feb. 11 to take the head coaching job at Michigan State.
“I’m excited to be back. It’s like coming home,” Dorrell said in a CU release. “The thing that excited me about this job is that my experience in the past here for the most part has been very successful. We had a lot of good teams, went to a lot of good bowl games. It’s a top-caliber program that has a lot of potential, and I’m excited to return it to that level.”
Said CU athletic director Rick George: “I am excited that Karl
Dorrell has agreed to become our head football coach. Karl has had great success as a college coach, both as a head coach and an assistant, and he knows the Pac-12 Conference and West Coast well. It was important that our next coach have CU ties, and Karl has those ties having worked at CU twice previously. Karl shares my passion for Colorado and our vision for winning championships.
“He will be a tremendous mentor and role model for our student-athletes, and he will provide great leadership for our program going forward.”
Contract details were not immediately available, but Dorrell was expected to receive a five-year deal, the same as his predecessor, the maximum length allowed for a higher-education employee under state law.
A California native and a UCLA alum, Dorrell has served two previous stints with the Buffaloes as an assistant.
He worked as a wide receivers coach under Bill McCartney from 1992-93 and was an offensive coordinator/wide receivers coach for Rick Neuheisel from 1995-98.
Unlike his predecessor, Dorrell brings previous experience as an FBS head coach to Boulder — although that experience came more than a decade ago.
Dorrell coached the Bruins, his alma mater, to a 35-27 record over five seasons from 2003-07.
UCLA fired him in December 2007, and he hadn’t taken another head coaching job until the Buffs came calling.
The Bruins reached the postseason in all five of Dorrell’s campaigns in Westwood but won more than seven games just once over that span — a 10-2 mark in 2005.
Dorrell has spent most of his post-UCLA career in the NFL, save for a one-season stint as offensive coordinator at Vanderbilt in 2014 that saw the Commodores finish 3-9 (0-8 in the SEC) while averaging 17.2 points per game.
CU had reportedly interviewed former USC and Washington coach Steve Sarkisian, former Wisconsin and Arkansas coach Bret Bielema, Air Force coach Troy Calhoun and Buffs interim coach Darrin Chiaverini, among others, in recent days.
Tucker had left Boulder in stunning fashion after only 14 months on the job, becoming the first CU coach with a tenure of only one season since Bud Davis in 1962.
Dorrell is CU’s fifth fulltime coach in a decade and the third over the last 15 months, an unprecedented period of instability in the football program. Mike MacIntyre was fired by George in November 2018 and replaced by Tucker in early December of that year.
From 1982-2010, CU featured just four full-time football coaches: McCartney (1982-94), Neuheisel (199598), Gary Barnett (1999-2005) and Dan Hawkins (2005-10). The last time the Buffs had go through three different fulltime coaches in three consecutive seasons was 1961-63, when the school fired Sonny Grandelius in March 1962 during an NCAA investigation into recruiting improprieties. Davis was brought in as an interim in 1962 and was replaced by former Oklahoma assistant Eddie Crowder in January 1963.