Paul Daugherty at the Cincinnati Enquirer is feeling a bit jilted:
When coaches with options say they’re staying – when they talk about loyalty as they ink the contract extension – there’s only one move to make, and that’s for your coat.
[...]
Now, he’s just like everyone else. Almost no coach in quasi-amateur college sports finishes what he starts. Either he's fired or he leaves.
Loyalty is a fine word, spoken with the same sincerity found in college coaches' contracts. Given a chance to be king here, Kelly opted for the uneasy throne at Notre Dame. The kingdom is bigger there.
Matt Hinton responds to the complaint, summarizing, well, every coaching change ever:
That's about it: The kingdom and its potential spoils from South Bend are too great to pass up, especially when you're the type of person with nothing in your professional history to lead you to focus on the potential traps that have entangled the last three coaches there. When you go undefeated at Notre Dame, you're not dispatched to a consolation game against a half-interested national championship reject in the Sugar Bowl. At this point, if Kelly goes undefeated at Notre Dame -- as he has now at two of his three stops as head coach, having also built a consistent, national title-winning power at Division II Grand Valley State -- the boosters will spring for a stained glass window of the guy in the other Notre Dame, on the Seine.
Now, I was there for the abrupt end of the Mack Brown era at UNC, so I understand what Bearcats fans are going through. And even if I didn't, the hatred my West Virginia rooting girlfriend has for RIch Rodriguez and Michigan would clue me in pretty quickly. But even at the time I could understand Brown's departure, if the not the manner he announced it. Texas was his dream job from childhood, he could no more turn it down than Roy Williams could Carolina[*].
But let's put aside the Bearcats' lament and hypocrisy towards contracts – if Brian Kelly had gone 0-12 I doubt Daugherty would have recommended anything but paying him off and showing him the door – and focus on Hinton's comment:
When you go undefeated at Notre Dame, you're not dispatched to a consolation game against a half-interested national championship reject in the Sugar Bowl.
Is there more coach-hopping in college football than college basketball? After all, if Brian Kelly was coaching Cincinnati on the hardwood, being an upstart Big East team wouldn't keep him out the Final Four. True, teams like UNC, Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana and UCLA are always going to lure top coaching talent with the pageantry and the tradition and the big sacks of money, but Bob Huggins didn't jump from Manhattan to Morgantown for the better status. Do more coaches stay for long haul in basketball than football because there are more opportunities for true success?
I don't particularly think so. Every career has their highest prestige position, and you're never going to stop people from chasing that brassier ring, but I'm willing to entertain the idea.