Bowling Green Hired Their Head Coach By Googling "Best Offense in College Football" And Offering The Top Assistant They Could Afford. He Went 7-24 and Just Got Fired.
TOLEDO BLADE - …But we do know this: With apathy at an all-time high and the program at an all-time low — with boosters bailing on Jinks and the Falcons bailing water amid the worst three-year stretch in school history — Bowling Green could not let a badly misguided hire continue to set it back.
To allow what one top booster called a “total train wreck” continue off the rails would have done no one any good. Not a program that can now turn its attention the next six weeks to identifying and vetting a pool of candidates. Not Jinks, a good man we wish the best.
In the end, Jinks was a bad fit in over his head. Not a bad coach. Just a bad coach for Bowling Green.
Think back to Jinks’ bizarre appointment in December, 2015.
With Bowling Green fresh off a Mid-American Conference title powered by one of the country’s highest-flying offenses, then-AD Chris Kingston wanted to keep a good thing going. So he Googled which team had the best offense that year, noted it was Texas Tech, and essentially targeted the top Red Raiders assistant he could afford.
Conservatively speaking, it was the dumbest coaching search in college football history.
I honestly thought Barstool Sports had the most fucked up hiring system in America. Not just in digital media – the entire country. Absolutely no rhyme and reason to who ends up here with a paycheck. Just good old fashioned gut feelings and throwing shit against the wall. Thing is though we have like a 98% success rate. It’s a revolutionary employment strategy that results in some of the funniest, craziest, most interesting people on the internet. A system that Bowling Green found out first-hand: it’s tough to replicate.
While you can fully imagine Dave sitting in his dark office on his broken PC computer Googling “funny people on the internet” and extending offers to the first 20 hits – a D1 college football athletic department didn’t end up having the same success. Back in 2015, BGSU ran their coaching search in the following way:
-Bowling Green had just won a MAC title with an awesome offense.
-AD Chris Kingston wanted to keep the points rolling.
-He opened up his computer browser and typed “best offense in college football 2018″ into the Google search bar.
-He saw the answer was Texas Tech
-He offered the top Tech assistant he could afford the head coaching job.
-They signed that coach, Mike Jinks, to 5 years, 2.1 million.
Incredible. If you told me about this when it was happening, I would have been fully on board. That’s awesome. I mean schools make dumb coaching hires all the time despite like months and months spent searching, vetting, analyzing. Why not switch it up with a quick Google search and see what happens? Maybe it will end up being wildly successful and you’ll be credited with the newest trend in college football recruiting.
Unfortunately it turns out using an internet search exclusively to hire your coach did not, in fact, turn out that way.
Something that a lot of people who were actually paying attention kind of saw coming.
Never mind that Jinks — then the 43-year-old running backs aide at Tech — was a career Texas high school coach with three years of college experience, none as a coordinator. Or that Texas Tech didn’t even run the same scheme as Bowling Green — no small thing if continuity was the main selling point. Or that Jinks had never so much as set foot in Ohio. Or that one BG insider told me Jinks had given so little thought to becoming a head coach that he did not have the standard, ready-to-go list of assistants he planned to hire.
As the resident smartest man in the world, Kingston decided none of that mattered. He saw a sharp, well-respected assistant and charismatic recruiter, and, fit be damned, brought him to Ohio.
…Jinks threw together a wet-behind-the-headset staff that counted seven first-time Division I coaches, none with Ohio ties, and a program that won two of the last three conference titles set off on a one-way trip to the bottom.
Jinks went 7-24 in 2+ seasons before getting canned this weekend right after a 42-35 loss to Western Michigan in front of a half empty stadium. BG was #100 in penalty yards, 124th in defense, and had the same record over that span as Rutgers. Literally the worst 3 year stretch in school history.
Not a big enough sample size to determine the effectiveness of Google Coach Hiring. I’m still all-in on trying it out again. I mean it couldn’t go worse. If dating apps can help you find your future wife or at least somebody to fuck in the city you’re visiting for 24 hours, technology has GOT to be able to make this whole coach hiring thing work out.