As the coaching carousel ramps up, what do search firms actually do? (2024)

One day after firing his head football coach in late September, Rutgers athletic director Patrick Hobbs made it clear that this would be his hire. He’d consult with the chairman of the school’s board, but there would be no search committee, meaning no group of school officials going through the process with him.

But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have some help. He acknowledged that he was in the market for a search firm.

“They can be invaluable in the process,” Hobbs said that day. “They act as a funnel for information. Obviously, if football coaches want to reach out, either themselves or through intermediaries, I would rather not be handling that part of the process, because we want to use all of our efforts and our time to make a considered decision to bring the very best coach here to Rutgers University.‘’

Two weeks later, Rutgers contracted Ventura Partners to help with “leadership identification, market mapping and intelligence, outreach, internal search assistance, reference review, staff development and industry consulting.‘’

In November, former Rutgers coach Greg Schiano had become the leading candidate and direct negotiations were underway. From the day the job opened, many speculated Schiano could return to Piscataway. Schiano led the Scarlet Knights to their modern high points as head coach from 2001-11, reaching six bowl games in his final seven years.

Talks broke down, and the school released a statement saying the search was ongoing, still with the help of Ventura Partners. In the end, however, the conversation picked back up and Rutgers officially brought back Schiano, introducing him as head coach on Dec. 4.

Schiano was a known commodity, especially in New Jersey. Who needed a search firm to tell them that?

Nobody did. But that’s not the real goal. As the coaching carousel ramps up, jobs will open and fill quickly. Some schools will hire a search firm, others won’t. What exactly does that mean? What services do they provide? Why don’t some schools use them?

Three FBS jobs are currently open. Rutgers and Florida State have hired search firms, and Arkansas may use one for background checks. As things get moving, let’s address some common questions and misconceptions about the process and the role of search firms.

Do search firms bring candidates to the process?

It depends if a school wants them. Every athletic director says they have a list of potential coaching candidates in mind, and search firms are quick to say that they don’t make the hire.

“One thing people should know is that I’ve never hired a coach,” says Glenn Sugiyama, an executive consultant with DHR International. “I’ve been in this business for over 15 years. I’ve never hired a coach. I’ve assisted an athletic director in hiring a coach. But the athletic director is always in charge of what’s going on.”

“When people say that I placed someone, that’s really not an accurate term,” says Todd Turner, president and founder of Collegiate Sports Associates. “I facilitated in the hiring of that person, but I didn’t choose. My firm didn’t choose who that person was.”

Of course, search firms will still publicize their success rate in placing coaches who go on to be successful. It’s not hard to find a DHR press release from 2016 with the headline, “DHR International Taps Head Football Coach for Purdue,” when Jeff Brohm was hired.

Anyone who follows college football can cobble together a list of potential names. Everyone knows which coaches are having success. For a top-tier FBS job, there’s no shortage of interested candidates. Sometimes, an AD doesn’t need help with names, just someone to sort through what is legit and what isn’t. Sometimes, an AD will lean on a search firm’s expertise. DHR and Sugiyama are assisting Florida State’s search. Seminoles AD David Coburn doesn’t have much athletics experience, so that experience is useful to help sort through it all.

“I see this often, coaches just want to coach and they or their agents don’t take into account the difference in institutions and cultures and whether their experiences, skills and talent match an institution’s profile,” Turner says. “I see coaches apply for every job. One of the things we can help do is sort through who really is the right cultural fit for a particular institution.”

So how do search firms figure out who to bring into the mix? They already know the lay of the land. They do their own research with visits and conversations. They have more knowledge if they’ve worked with a coach before, and agents are always trying to highlight their client’s work over phone calls, texts and emails. This is a business where who you know matters.

“When I started, I didn’t understand how important that was,” one coaching agent says of the working relationship with search firms. “Their job of identifying candidates, that’s way overblown. Unless it’s like an FCS job where it’s seeing who is out there, the jobs not coveted by everybody are where they might do the most work in identifying candidates. But for other jobs, there’s only a certain number of people who are viable candidates.”

Sugiyama says his team spends two or three days on a campus and meets with the school president, AD and other officials to get a feel for what fits. That’s important because sometimes a coach gets hired before ever setting foot on campus. “Fit” is a broad term one can twist into meaning anything, but it matters.

One example another coaching agent brought up was Gary Andersen’s hire at Wisconsin in late 2012. Badgers AD Barry Alvarez had said proudly that he wouldn’t use a search firm and that search committees use him. He has a strong track record to back that up.

Andersen’s move from Utah State to Madison seemed like an unusual fit, given that he spent nearly his entire coaching career in the West. On the field, Andersen had leaned heavily on junior college players and lower academic standards at Utah State. Andersen went 19-7 with the Badgers, a successful run, but he abruptly left after two seasons. He cited difficult admission standards as one reason.

“Gary Andersen is a fantastic coach, Barry Alvarez is a good administrator and was a good coach. So why didn’t this work? Because it’s a bad fit,” the agent says. “Maybe had they used a search firm, they would have avoided that. Maybe. Maybe not.”

Alvarez then hired former Wisconsin player and assistant Paul Chryst, and the winning has continued.

Western Kentucky athletic director Todd Stewart also doesn’t use a search firm for football or basketball hires. He hired Bobby Petrino in December 2012. Since then, he’s hired former WKU assistants in Jeff Brohm, Mike Sanford and Tyson Helton. Brohm won big, Sanford didn’t and was fired after two years. Now Helton has WKU bowl-eligible this season.

“I didn’t really feel like the search firm would help us identify anybody that we didn’t already have identified,” Stewart says. “That doesn’t mean there won’t be a point in time when we will use a search firm because I do think, especially at some of the higher-profile schools, the advantages of a search firm is that they can have a lot of conversations with people under the radar. But we’ve always had our list and we’ve had a plan and we’ve been able to execute that and, and so far, haven’t needed outside help.”

If it’s not actually about candidates, what’s the point?

The biggest value is secrecy. Confidentiality. Plausible deniability.

It’s working as a third party so there are fewer university officials or boosters involved, which lessens the chance of leaks. It also means conversations about the search likely won’t show up in public records requests.

“It’s probably one of the reasons we’ve seen a proliferation of search firms in the hiring process more than ever before,” Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione says. “It’s not always because the search firm is bringing candidates. They’re helping facilitate the communication between the university and prospective candidates and, usually, they’re assisting in the process of background checks.”

The 2017 Tennessee coaching search mess happened without a search firm. Former athletic director John Currie ran the ship, until fans revolted over his selection of Schiano. Months after Currie was fired during the search, Tennessee released a trove of his texts and emails with coaches and agents in response to a public records request. If that had gone through a search firm, it wouldn’t have been available.

“Confidentiality is a large part of what we bring to the table,” Sugiyama says.

The partnership also lets coaches and athletic directors say they haven’t spoken to each other about a potential match, because technically they often haven’t. The AD talked to the search firm, the search firm talked to the agent and the agent talked to the coach. It makes for an easy non-answer when pressed by reporters. If word gets out, a sitting coach has to do damage control in recruiting.

“You can have some deniability you don’t have the need to personally be in contact with every potential candidate,” Purdue athletic director Mike Bobinski says.

The adoption of the early signing period in 2017 caused a speed-up in coaching search windows because schools want to have a coach in place to save a recruiting class in mid-December. As a result, there is more back-channel communication during the season, and nobody wants that to leak while games are being played. For the schools that fire a coach early, they want that head start.

“When you make a change midseason, a search firm is paramount because they can have conversations that you can’t,” says Miami (Ohio) athletic director David Sayler, who made a midseason change in 2013. “A lot of people won’t want to talk to a sitting AD during the season. I respect that, but they or their agent might have a conversation with a search firm, and that’s a little more innocuous.”

The smaller the circle of people involved, the less likely a leak will come from the university’s side. A search firm makes that very small, compared to an AD running the search.

“When you’re dealing with an AD, even if you’re planning clandestine meetings at airport hotels and that kind of thing, somebody on campus is going to know about it,” a coaching agent says. “The way this thing works, so many people want to say they’re involved, whether that’s a booster, an alumni person, they love to say, ‘We had a hand in getting this new coach, let me tell you that story.’ It’s crazy how important that is to some people. When you deal with a search firm, you don’t run that risk. All the communication is you and the search firm, the firm talks to the AD, and that’s it.”

What else is there to the job?

All the logistics. The background checks. The aforementioned flights and the meetings, often in discreet locations.

Is it really a coaching search if fans on a message board aren’t tracking flights? A common tool is to find a neutral location. That’s often an airport hotel. It keeps people off the trail.

Background checks are vital. How deep it goes depends on what schools are willing to pay. That could be a basic criminal background check. It could be an investigation. Even if a school doesn’t hire a search firm, it may still contract for background checks. Nobody wants the embarrassment of George O’Leary’s hire and resignation at Notre Dame within five days for lying on his résumé.

“We give our clients the ability to have special investigations done by former law enforcement personnel, FBI agents, etc. that we can put into the field and execute to do it in-depth background check on any individual that we’re hiring,” Sugiyama says. “The service that we use isn’t available to any other university and not available to any other search firm that I know of.”

In 2014, a background check led by Eastman & Beaudine discovered Manhattan basketball coach Steve Masiello had not actually graduated from Kentucky, and his offer to be USF’s basketball coach was rescinded.

That doesn’t mean things don’t slip through the cracks. In 2013, Parker Executive Search was criticized when details of alleged verbal abuse of volleyball players at Tennessee came to light only after Julie Hermann was hired as Rutgers’ athletic director. Other similar situations have come up in searches.

Hiring a football coach is arguably the most important job of an athletic director. A winning football program brings in more money than anything else one can do. Enough losing will get the AD fired. Some ADs will block out everything to do the search work and don’t need a firm’s help with the logistics. Others may feel it’s too much work to add on top of everything else and want a search firm to handle the busywork, like Hobbs mentioned in September.

Before he led a search firm, Turner was an athletic director at Washington, Vanderbilt and N.C. State. He’s led searches with and without the aid of a firm. He knows the work involved.

“I can remember when I was at Vanderbilt, we were hiring a head coach, and I spent an incredible number of hours, me and a couple of my staff members, on the telephone, talking to people trying to decide who would best fit our situation,” Turner says. “It took hundreds of hours, and a lot of people don’t have the time to do that. So I think search firms can really help reduce that kind of investment and energy.”

How much does this cost?

From tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands. How deep do schools want the background check to go? Do they want a firm to simply accept the applications? Do they want a firm to bring names into the mix?

There are considered to be seven major search firms that handle most FBS jobs, though all are not equal in size, and there are other smaller firms. Some work only in college sports, but a place like DHR is on the other end of the spectrum as a multinational company that does executive searches in North America, Europe and Asia in a variety of fields.

The price for a coaching search could be $25,000, which happens with some Group of 5 schools. It could cost $267,000, which Texas paid to Korn Ferry for its search that ended with Charlie Strong. It could cost $320,000, which Colorado State paid to Spencer Stuart in 2011 for a search ending with Jim McElwain. Rutgers’ minimum guaranteed payment to Ventura Partners is $88,000, according to NJ.com. It’s notable that last time Hobbs hired a football coach at Rutgers, he used a different firm, Eastman & Beaudine, which cost $75,000 in a six-day search that ended with Chris Ash.

In 2016, CBS calculated more than $750,000 total spent on search firms in the previous coaching carousel.

For smaller schools with budget constraints, that cost matters. For top programs paying millions to a head coach, it’s almost insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Get the right coach, and a school will make that money back quickly.

How does a school select which firm to use? In some cases, there’s a bidding process with plans and costs presented. In others, it comes back to those prior relationships.

That DHR search that ended with Brohm at Purdue in 2016? DHR helped run the Purdue AD search that landed on Bobinski a few months prior. Iowa State has used Parker Executive Search for various hires, both on the academic and athletic sides. The school used Parker to find current AD Jamie Pollard, and Pollard used Parker to help land football coach Matt Campbell. Relationships like that are everywhere in college athletics, and with more money coming in from television deals, there’s more money to spend. As far back in 2012, it was estimated that half of all athletics administration vacancies were filled with help from a third party.

Though the field is growing, the number of firms is still relatively small, especially if schools want prior experience. Different individuals handle different searches, but there can be some overlap. It makes some people question who is really calling the shots. The world of search firms and agents placing candidates — from presidents to ADs to coaches — can be murky.

“There are times when one search firm is actually managing multiple searches in the same sport,” Castiglione says. “That can make it kind of interesting, but it’s just a different marketplace than it was even just a few years ago.”

So is it worth it?

Most ADs who don’t use search firms say no. Those who do say yes.

The view from agents is mixed. Some like the clean organization that comes with dealing with a firm. Others prefer to work directly with an AD because only that AD knows exactly what they want.

But in the end, does the coach win? That’s all that really matters. An athletic director can’t afford to be wrong.

— The Athletic’s Nicole Auerbach contributed to this report.

(Top photo of Pat Hobbs:Noah K. Murray / USA Today)