And that's it...Jinks is fired

Two years and seven games into the Jinks era, it is over.  Mike Jinks has coached his last game at Bowling Green, just one game past the half-way point of his contract.

It is one of the most disappointing periods in our football program.

So let's go back.

When Chris Kingston was filling this vacancy, BG had made millionaires out of Dave Clawson and Dino Babers in three years.  This would have been a very attractive opening for aspiring coaches.  We would have had a lot of guys who would have climbed over themselves to take this job.

Let's just say that Kingston took that in another direction.  He went deep into the well for a Coach whose success had come in high school football, with three years as a position coach at Texas Tech.  I don't have any way of knowing what he was thinking when he did this.  The track record of high school coaches moving into the FBS is poor, almost to a man and more proven coaches would have been thrilled to come here.

Commenters came onto this blog from Texas and told me that coaching in high school was as hard or even harder than coaching college.  That Mike Jinks was a legend in high school coaching in Texas.

My only idea was that Kingston wanted to show how smart he was by finding the unknown coach who could succeed.  He wanted Jinks to be his Urban Meyer.  Remember the quaint moments of Jinks and Kingston arguing about whether BG or Tech had run more plays the year before?  Or Kingston saying the "best predictor of future success is past success?"  Or Kingston smugly saying that he looked forward to the day when people would stop saying "who's he?" in reference to Mike Jinks and realize the "kind of man" that was coaching the program.

And then, to compound the error, Jinks was given a contract with a buy-out befitting a proven commodity and someone who had other options as coach, neither of which fits this situation.  You didn't need to give Jinks the kind of buyout he was given.  You didn't even have to give him a five-year deal.  But he did, and it will cost the University a significant amount of money.

I feel like this blog was on it from the beginning, which was that this was a dubious hire that took unnecessary risks, especially when much higher percentage options were available.

It went wrong right away.  You might have expected him to bring in experienced assistants to help compliment his own lack of experience, but he did not.  He brought in coaches with even less experience than he had.  Most of them had been graduate assistants or quality control assistants.  At the time, I said it was the least distinguished group of assistants we had ever had.

Further, Jinks himself had never been to Ohio.  You would think you might get some assistants who knew the territory.  We did not.

Here's the thing.  From the beginning, I think he underestimated what you have to do to win at this level.  I think he believed it wasn't any harder than winning at Steele and it is.  I think he sealed his fate right from the beginning with the assistants he hired.  It was just not going to happen.  (As a comparison, when Nate Oats was hired at Buffalo with a similar background, he had two assistants who had been in college coaching for multiple decades).

So we have the most underprepared Coach in our history and he hired an even less experienced group of assistants.

And then he went back to coach Texas Tech in their bowl game, something that he has admitted was a mistake.  And then he and the staff didn't evaluate the returning talent well and tried to force feed the Air Raid on them, something he has admitted.

Then, he gave up 70 in two of his first four games.  That's the two worst defeats in our history, right out of the box.  One was to OSU.  One was to Memphis.  He said that he told his staff that they were lucky to still be working, and they were.  At a larger school, he would have been gone after year one.

Meanwhile, he's talking about making BG the next Boise...that that was his vision, just like he had told his young men at Steele, when the school was being formed, that they would be on the cover of some high school football magazine.

There were a lot of visions and a lot of changes to our "identity," each of which actually showed that he didn't have a real idea of what we could do.

At no point did it look like it was going to succeed.  There was a little winning streak against some badly beat up teams at the end of year one, then a 2-10 season in year 2 and then the 1-6 start this year.  But, never did he provide any reason to think he was going to turn it around.  He talked about the team making progress, but we just didn't beat anybody we weren't supposed to beat and we didn't beat all of the ones we were supposed to beat.

Plus, there were the arrests over the summer and transfers....so you are losing and doing it without dignity.

OK.  So there's been plenty of debate about how empty Babers left the cupboard.  There's no doubt, Dino Babers did not expect to be here long.  My contention has always been that a better coach maybe goes 6-6 that first year and wins some of those games in the second year and makes in-game adjustments and develops players and you might struggle but you're not bottoming out in the first month.  Babers left a bad situation and Jinks made it worse.

Yes, Jinks had two good recruiting classes, at least on paper.  This year's class was shaping up to be less good, to be sure.  But as important as recruiting is, you can't recruit into our level of failure because even if players like the Coach, it's hard to imagine playing for him your entire career.

You wanted to see some progress.  Four wins in year 1.  Then six.  Then 7 or 8.  But it was moving in the other direction.

Ultimately, today falls on the shoulders of Chris Kingston, who isn't here to face the music.  It shows how much damage you can do with one wrong decision, and he made one of the worst decisions in the history of our athletic department.

I'm a little surprised at the mid-season move.  Having said that, it does allow BG to begin to look for the next Coach right now and hit the ground running when the season ends.  That December signing day looms big in the front window.

It is not a time to celebrate or be happy.  First, a lot of families are impacted by this.  Second, Jinks is a decent man who is a stand-up guy and put the institution first in everything he did.  Letting him go was the right thing to do but these are people involved, and their lives have been upended and it's not something to enjoy.

Also, as a program we are in deep trouble.  This team is not good.  A rebuild still looms.  This is not the job it was when Jinks was picked.  It is now a long slog to get back to respectability.  We will probably have player retention issues and commit retention issues, possibly including the QB.

A lot of pressure falls onto Bob Moosbrugger.  He's got to get this one right.  Coach Pelini will serve in an interim role and then I would expect a wholesale new staff when the season starts next year.

We can only hope that this decision is the beginning of a relatively quick resurgence.  Both Miami and Ball State suffered (or are suffering) long years in the wilderness following a bad coaching hire.

This had to happen, and I think everyone knew it.  Now, the next steps can begin.