ToledoBlade- With Bowling Green fresh off a Mid-American Conference title powered by one of the country’s highest-flying offenses, then-AD Chris Kingston wanted to keep a good thing going. So he Googled which team had the best offense that year, noted it was Texas Tech, and essentially targeted the top Red Raiders assistant he could afford.
Conservatively speaking, it was the dumbest coaching search in college football history. Never mind that Jinks — then the 43-year-old running backs aide at Tech — was a career Texas high school coach with three years of college experience, none as a coordinator. Or that Texas Tech didn’t even run the same scheme as Bowling Green — no small thing if continuity was the main selling point. Or that Jinks had never so much as set foot in Ohio. Or that one BG insider told me Jinks had given so little thought to becoming a head coach that he did not have the standard, ready-to-go list of assistants he planned to hire. As the resident smartest man in the world, Kingston decided none of that mattered. He saw a sharp, well-respected assistant and charismatic recruiter, and, fit be damned, brought him to Ohio. ---------- The easy thing to do would be to echo the sentiments of the Toledo Blade in calling Bowling Green's search-engineered hire of then Texas Tech positional coach Mike Jinks to be far and away the most lazy and stupid we've ever come across at any level of sports. Retrospect helps, but you probably don't even need it to claim that it more than likely is, as things have gone even worse than predictably poorly since the Falcons followed up their 2015 MAC Championship by plummeting into the type of aimless rabbit hole that only the internet could provide. You can't pluck the most expendable and affordable employee from a Fortune 500 company and assume his/her inside information will eventually have you on the Forbes List, and it would be extremely generous to say that's what Bowling Green's recently departed AD did by clicking his way into an otherwise unknown candidate. Texas Tech wasn't even particularly good during another stat-happy season in which their passing game rested on the NFL-caliber arm of Patrick Mahomes, so - other than the type of blind faith that a hungry stoner puts into the first Google search result for nearby Chinese restaurants - it's really tough to find even the most remote of reason why someone would promote their running backs coach as a result of it. However, in fairness to both Bowling Green and Mike Jinks, I think it's worth noting that the short-lived marriage that was originally sparked online isn't as much of asinine outlier as it is the most egregious example of how a lot coaching trees come to sprout. Programs and organizations of much higher prestige have placed their fate in hands that are only proven in helping, as evidenced by the constant drip of Head Coaching failures leaking from the well-oiled machine that is the Bill Belichick regime. Granted, those failures had a hell of a lot more high-level success partially attributed to them than a short-time running backs coach for an air-raid offense, but the point is that misplaced praise is the number one killer of head coaching tenures for first timers. That's more than likely why most programs try to minimize the risk of promoting those of lesser responsibilities by engaging in a comprehensive interview process with a host of quality candidates whose resumes are rock-solid. But, I guess someone had to serve as the most comedic of cautionary tale in what can go wrong when you go the success-by-association route in hyperlinking your way into a head-scratching head coaching hire that was only thoroughly investigated in how many tabs it left open.
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