Listen, I want White and all our coaches to succeed. I hope he makes a good hire. However, your post suggested that everybody he's hired has been
a great success. Not exactly true. Yes, if you're the AD at CFU and you hire Frost and he succeeds, you made a good hire and credit to you. But if Frost then goes on to a bigger job--at a school on par with Tennessee---and flops, well, then perhaps he wasn't that special after all and his real coaching level was a step below a P5 major. And this is a P5 major job--a notch above Central Florida and 3 notches above Buffalo.
As for Leipold, he deserves credit for making lowly Kansas more competitive, yes, but it still looks very much like the Big 12 job equivalent of Vanderbilt in the SEC: a dead end job. I suppose that is a tough decision for a coach at a mid-major who's not young anymore and gets an offer to be the head man at a bad major program--one that hasn't been good in decades. Do you take a job that is almost impossible to succeed in? Who's going to hire after you've tried your best at Kansas...or Vandy? Nobody good, unfortunately. In Leipold's case, he was in his 50s when he got the Kansas offer, and he may rightly have assumed that it could be the only major offer he'd ever get--and with it more money than he'd ever earned, for however long he sticks it out at Kansas. That said: With Texas and Oklahoma now out of the Big 12, maybe Kansas is ready to make a move!
I like Heupel, he seems a good coach, but, please, one good season does not make him "incredibly successful." A bit over the top there...Butch Jones had some good seasons--not as good as we did in 2023---but good, and we saw how that ended. Lots of coaches have one or two good seasons and get an extension and then fizzle. It's very common. See Jimbo Fisher. Winning over a long stretch of time equals "incredibly successful," not one year. The Heup has a long way to go.
White has made some good hires in his career, to be sure--and let's hope this is another.
