General

Wait, Tim Brewster Got An Extension? This Happened?

Jan 25, 2010, 9:25 PM UTC

â†µThis is not actually news since it happened a month ago. But I just found out about it today thanks to a two-line blurb in the Star-Tribune that got thrown up in my feed reader and holy crap:â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥Gophers athletic director Joel Maturi said Sunday that football coach Tim Brewster has earned and will get a contract extension. The two already have had talks and those negotiations should pick up steam after Thursday’s Insight Bowl game against Iowa State in Tempe, Ariz.â†µâ‡¥

â†µâ†µâ†µTim Brewster is coming off an Insight Bowl loss to Iowa State and has gone 3-5 in the Big Ten each of the last two years. With the departure of Jedd Fisch back to the NFL, he’s working on his fourth offensive coordinator in five years. Fisch left for a position coach job after just one year (in which he drove the Minnesota offense to the bottom of the league) and got replaced by… the Detroit Lions’ quarterbacks coach. There is an organization that knows success. â†µ

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â†µSo, yeah, not firing Tim Brewster seems to be in order. It's just year three, after all. Extending him makes no sense unless you're really certain that coach Motivational Tourrette's is the long-term solution for your program, and this is basically the rationale:â†µ

â†µâ†µâ‡¥â†µâ‡¥Maturi acknowledged that a big reason for his announcing his plans for an extension is to not jeopardize recruiting going forward as well as to try to ensure stability in Brewster’s coaching staff. When a head coach’s future is uncertain some assistants often feel pressure to look for opportunity elsewhere. Maturi said he has also made it clear to potential recruits that he expects Brewster to stay long-term.â†µâ‡¥

â†µâ†µâ†µBut why would you think this? Brewster has marginally improved Minnesota’s recruiting but it’s come at a huge cost: the team has no idea what it’s doing on offense from year to year. They were a spread team. They weren’t a spread team. They were thinking about being a spread team again but then no. When Glen Mason was a round they may not have gotten a lot of recruiting stars but they knew what they were looking for and they got it. They had an identity. Under Brewster there’s so much chaos that it threatens to be an identity in itself.â†µ

â†µâ†µI don’t put a ton of stock in the idea that the Big Ten can’t compete based on demographics and geography because there’s a much more plausible explanation: the athletic directors have made a series of extremely dumb hires because they don’t want to shell out the money to pull away a Gary Pinkel or, hell, a Houston Nutt and instead go for guys like Brewster, who had never been anything but a tight ends coach, and national running joke Ron Zook. Even the guys who were hired away from existing jobs mostly had records of mediocrity: Mark Dantonio was a .500 coach at Cincinnati and Danny Hope got his I-AA team to the playoffs once. â†µ

â†µâ†µThat Brewster is going to be sitting on a shiny new extension is either a devious PR plot—one that lowers the buyout as ancient and unreliable Minnesota columnist Sid Hartman suggests—or another symptom of the Big Ten’s general complacency when it comes to coaching hires.â†µ

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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

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