At the beginning of Vanderbilt’s search for a new head football coach two weeks ago, Athletic Director Candice Storey Lee said that she was looking for an offensive-minded coach with head coaching experience.
And then she went out and hired Notre Dame defensive coordinator Clark Lea, who’s neither of these things. And everybody who was looking forward to an exciting offense was disappointed.
But! Is hiring a defensive-minded coach really such a bad thing? Well, let’s try to see what some data tells us. I looked through every SEC head coach since 2000 (that’s counting head coaches who were employed in the league in the year of our Lord 2000 even if they were hired prior to that) and found 58 non-interim head coaching tenures — not 58 head coaches, with seven different coaches leading two different schools during this time period (plus an eighth, Tommy Tuberville, whose Ole Miss tenure predated my arbitrary cutoff.