First and foremost, welcome Coach Caldwell. I hope you are the “sleeper hire” of the century.
Stepping back, however, the timing of this "high risk-high reward" hire is, from an outside perspective, hard to understand. Why roll the dice now?
Coach Caldwell would have been an option next season and would have gained a 2nd year of D1 coaching experience and given the UTAD another data point to assess. But why should White have waited?
Okay, this roster desperately needs 2 to 3 quality players from the transfer portal. Kellie has an excellent record in the portal and likely had some connections in play. We are also seeing two big de-commits and there is now a risk of current players transferring which would further heighten the roster problem. Unlike Brooks at KY, Caldwell is not going to bring elite players with her. In the transfer window, a rookie coach from Marshal is going to be at a disadvantage there.
Also, it would have seemed only fair to assess how Kellie’s high school recruiting class would fare under an improved NIL program (which several have reported is now in place). At the end of next year, Kellie might have taken this team to the S16 (or maybe better) and had a strong 2025 class in place and suddenly, she looks really good. If the team did not hit those marks, then White could have assessed where Coach Caldwell, among other options who might have come on the radar screen are at.
Last thing, one conjecture on this board is that White had to sack Kellie in order to get a better NIL package in place because the big donors did not have faith in her. That argument would be credible if the hire had, indeed, been a “name” coach. But, it is very hard to believe that the same donors who presumably were financially strangling the program because they did not trust Kellie would now start writing big checks for a newbie coach from a lower tier of mid major. I am going with EarlVol's statement that the NIL was in place with Kellie.
The logical inference is that White wanted “his coach” at the helm and Kellie not making the S16 provided the justification for making a change (which would also help the new coach to look better since she no longer had the same NIL disadvantage where Kellie might have started killing it in recruiting).
I am open to the idea that Caldwell is just an inherently better coach than Kellie Harper (I really know little about her).
So, time will tell if White's move was brilliance or arrogance.
I really am hoping for the former (and am quite glad a woman coach got the job, flame me I don’t care). But Coach Caldwell’s first big challenge will be rebuilding a roster in challenging circumstances.
