Don’t just fire Karl Dorrell, Todd Saliman.
Fire everybody.
If Saliman, the CU president who lost the ‘interim’ tag earlier this year, is serious about getting Buffs football — the university’s front porch — back in order, he needs to start at the top.
Chancellor Phil DiStefano, whose loyalty to the Pac-12 and fealty to the Pac-12 Network has chained CU and its fans to a pair of sinking yachts?
Gone. Thank you for your service.
Athletic director Rick George, who green-lit handing the keys to Dorrell when literally no other Power 5 program would? Who negotiated a contract that cost Michigan State $3 million to snap up Mel Tucker but required CU to fork over more than twice that — approximately $8.5 million, the university announced Sunday — to cut ties with Dorrell after the Buffs’ 0-5 start?
Also gone. And also, thank you.
There were a dozen reasons to bail on The Dorrell Era before things went even further off the rails. A handful turned up in Tucson late Saturday during the Buffs’ 43-20 drubbing at the hands of Arizona. An Arizona bunch CU pummeled 34-0 at Folsom Field a year ago. Jayden de Laura, the Wildcats’ sophomore quarterback, threw for six scores and 484 yards on the Buffs — the latter tying Nebraska’s Joe Ganz in November 2007 for the most a CU defense had ever surrendered in a game.
Whether judging talent, play-calling, charisma, experience or entertainment value, Dorrell’s program suffered on every front.
The Buffs are 4-15 since Dec. 12, 2020. They’ve lost five consecutive games by at least 23 points to open the year for the first time in program history. CU appears to be on a collision course with its seventh season of eight or more defeats over the past 12 years.
The simple/convenient answer was to eat the money and excise Dorrell, who posted an 8-15 record in two-and-a-half seasons as CU’s coach, from the mix. The Buffs (0-5, 0-2) are off this week — the Bye opened as a 17.5-point favorite — and the voices who snapped at George on Twitter after his open letter to fans two weeks ago weren’t getting any quieter.
Alas, the rot in Buffs football runs deeper than that. It goes higher.
If I’m Saliman, and if I’m truly serious about turning Ralphie around before she goes careening into a ditch, I don’t want DiStefano or George anywhere near the process of finding Dorrell’s replacement. Or vetting them. Or, Heaven forbid, bargaining with them.
You can’t truly fix the front porch without cleaning the house first. DiStefano’s public support for a set of matching boondoggles — former Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott and Scott’s TV network — was confounding at the time. Given the league’s precipitous state, some of those sentiments look completely out of touch. With reality, especially.
As for George, his heart was in the right place when he went after Dorrell. But that heart was broken to the point where it clouded some of the logic inherent to the process. In the Buffs AD’s defense, Dorrell was a panicked, left-field buy at a panicked, left-field time. Tucker dumped the Buffs in the middle of the night, in the middle of February, well after the traditional hiring cycle had wiped the shelves clean of conventional options. Most Hail Marys chucked at the end zone don’t land where you want ’em to. Dorrell went out of bounds at the 12.
In a world of transfer portals and Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) liberties, George’s takes on both have registered as noble, ethical, altruistic — and, in the context of how the SEC runs things, more than a little anachronistic. Big-time college football is a dirty game, and empowering players, while long overdue, has only made that game dirtier.
The Buffs need a full-time coach who’s comfortable as a part-time salesman. Someone who knows he’ll have to recruit not only someone else’s kids, but will have to devote serious time and energy into re-recruiting his own. Every dang year. Every dang month. Every dang day.
Dorrell, who spent nearly all of his 2008-2019 autumns coaching on NFL staffs, didn’t sign up for that. And it showed.
Hindsight makes geniuses of us all. If we knew then — namely, that a global pandemic was going to shake 2020 like a snow globe — what we know now, perhaps we’d have done it all differently. Maybe we’d have given the reins to then-offensive coordinator Darrin Chiaverini on an interim basis that winter and let the chips fall where they may.
And maybe in that parallel universe, we might have wound up limping to this same, sad point by the first week of October 2022 anyway. But I’ll promise you this much: We sure as heck would’ve gotten there cheaper.
