Mike Price, the former UTEP, Washington State, and (very briefly) Bama coach, is back at UTEP as the interim head coach

Mike Price will be UTEP’s interim head football coach after the university parted ways with Sean Kugler, the school said Monday.

Price was UTEP’s head coach from 2004 to 2012, his most recent stop in a long coaching career. He spent 14 seasons in charge at Washington State before that and went 83-78 there, taking the Cougars to three top-10 finishes and two Rose Bowls. (They lost both.)

Price left WSU after 2002, hired away to be Alabama’s head coach. But Price never coached a game in Tuscaloosa. He was fired for some off-field shenanigans just four months after he was hired. It was a messy and embarrassing exit.

From the New York Times’ dispatch on May 4, 2003:

Today’s dismissal resulted from incidents that occurred when Price participated in a pro-am golf tournament in Pensacola, Fla., on April 16 and 17. Reports in Alabama newspapers said he bought drinks for an exotic dancer named Destiny Stahl and paid for private dances at a strip club, spending several hundred dollars on a night of heavy drinking and tipping.

The next morning, Price awakened in his hotel room, fully clothed but unable to explain the presence or remember the name of a woman in the room with him, according to Mac Bledsoe, a friend of Price’s. The woman later ordered $1,000 in room service, requesting one of each item on the hotel menu, news reports said.

A “date with Destiny, a stripper,” the paper called it, extremely literally.

UTEP is 0-5 this season.

It’s also an incredibly weird, challenging college gig:

UTEP is a stone’s throw from the Mexican border, and you can literally see into the country from the Sun Bowl. UTEP is roughly as far away from Los Angeles as it is from Houston. Its location hurts the perception of the program and is a reason why the school doesn’t sign a lot of players from the metro Texas areas. It hasn’t won a bowl game since 1967 and has had only one winning season since 2005.

The program has to fight in the bottom tier of Texas FBS programs, and that task isn’t getting any easier. UTSA, North Texas, Rice, and Texas State are the competition. UTSA already looks to be separating itself on the recruiting trail.

Further complicating things, the program will be bringing in a new athletic director, with longtime AD Bob Stull stepping aside as soon as a successor is named.

It’s a hard job, and it isn’t particularly lucrative monetarily. But it is an FBS coaching gig, and it’s open for the right guy.