It’s no secret in these parts that Texas A&M head football coach Dennis Franchione had a bad season, not something to take lightly in terms of job security in the football-dominated culture of College Station, Texas. So, after Franchione fired his defensive coordinator at the end of the season, the conventional wisdom was that Franchione would hire a big name coach as the new A&M defensive coordinator, particularly given A&M’s willingness to pay top dollar for an assistant coach who would revive the long-dormant Wrecking Crew defense.
Well, suffice it to say that Franchione’s hire — his old friend and oft-fired coach Gary Darnell — is not exactly what most Aggie fans had in mind as the solution to revive the flagging A&M program. Darnell has been out of football entirely the past year after being fired as head coach at Western Michigan. Moreover, Darnell was previously the source of much angst among Texas Longhorn fans when his unaggressive “read and react” defense that he instituted while serving as Longhorn defensive coordinator from 1994-96 was one of the primary reasons that former Longhorn coach John Mackovic was fired after the 1997 season and remains one of the most unpopular Texas football coaches in history. Darnell’s tenure as Texas defensive coordinator included the Horns’ defense giving up over 30 points five times in 1994, as well as such embarrassments as the 55-27 pasting that Notre Dame laid on the Horns in 1995 and the lopsided 38-15 Longhorn defeat to Penn State in the Fiesta Bowl after the 1996 season. Just to put the icing on the cake, Darnell was also the college coach of currently underachieving Houston Texans linebacker Jason Babin, on whom the team wasted a first round draft choice.
Thus, with that backdrop, it was not particularly surprising that I received a phone call yesterday from a friend who is an ardent Longhorn fan. While chortling about Franchione’s hiring of Darnell, he passed along the following :
Q: “What does ‘Franchione’ mean in English?”
A: “Mackovic.”
I suspect the breakdown in talks with Gary Gibbs was less about money and more about Gibbs thinking his current position is a better springboard to a pro coordinator or college head coaching job, but Gibbs would have been a nice hire for Franchione. His defenses at Oklahoma were regularly some of the best in the nation, and in retrospect, he did a decent job as head coach of that program when it was flirting with the death penalty post-Switzer (it took Schnellenberger and Blake to drive that point home to some of us). That he’s now added coaching under Parcells and Zimmer to his resume is only a boost.
Darnell compares quite unfavorably.