Coaches like CKS & Gary Pattersons of the world are very rare. Most will leave for the bigger programs once they gain recognition. I would have been ok with hiring the next best up & coming coordinator looking for an opportunity to be a coach. In this day & age in CFB it’s all about gaining as much recognition as soon as possible to prove you belong. Once that recognition happens then maybe you get a Mattress Mack or anyone with deep pockets that will help the program take those steps further, but the mentality of tryin to retain a coach too much has really hurt the program in my opinion. I’m not saying CWF can’t be the next CKS but can we afford to wait 3 to 4 years down the road considering how fast CFB is changing by the year. Not to mention, his time is limited due to age. At least 4 years older than when we hired CKS…
On an individual level, without a generational change in the way that people consume college football, this is a deeply naïve take. The highest-rated Big 12 Conference game this year was Colorado vs. UCF, which drew 4.17 million viewers. It was also the highest-rated game not featuring a P2 team after Week 1. That sounds good, until you realize that it would hardly be a top-quartile SEC game. Take the Coach Prime circus out of it and the next-highest is Arizona vs. K-State at 2.58 million viewers. That same week, it got cleared by five SEC games. In other words, one of the highest-rated Big 12 games is a bottom-half SEC game. The math simply isn’t there.
There is, at this point, nothing that we can do. I’m not going to convince literal millions of people to watch the Big 12 on a week-in, week-out basis. If you think you can, then godspeed to you. But the proof’s in the pudding at this point; we’re a second-tier TV product. We’re hurtling toward a P2 environment, and there’s nothing that can be done to stop it. Whether that’s formalized not is largely irrelevant; we simply cannot put on the show that they can. The largest Big 12 stadia, at BYU and Iowa State, aren’t even in the top 25 nationally. We don’t have the fanbases to compete.