Guerrero Uses Hire Power to Take Risk

Mike Riley was the easy, safe, popular, perfectly fine and perhaps the right choice to lead UCLA football into the post-Bob Toledo era.

In hiring Karl Dorrell on Wednesday, however, Athletic Director Dan Guerrero made the bold choice.

This is what the really good administrators do -- identify the next young star before the public gets wind.

This is what Oklahoma’s Joe Castiglione did when he identified Bob Stoops, what California’s Steve Gladstone managed when he plucked Jeff Tedford off Oregon’s staff and what Arizona State’s Gene Smith accomplished when he went to Boise State and roped Dirk (Dirk who?) Koetter.

What we don’t know yet in Westwood is whether Guerrero is one of those really good administrators or whether Karl Dorrell is one of those next young stars.

Would you mind checking back in two or three years?

In the end, UCLA’s new beginning boiled down to a first-year AD hiring a first-time head coach and hoping his gut instincts are correct.

With this hire, too, Guerrero and Dorrell are attached at the hip -- two relative neophytes trying to make their names together.

Mike Riley, UCLA coach?

We could all have lived with that, even the part where Guerrero explained why he fired a coach with a winning record to hire one with a losing one.

Riley would have been well liked and accepted, and possibly thrived, yet Guerrero could also have been perceived as taking the easy way out.

Instead, he opted for the high-stakes game of risk-reward.

He should be commended short term for not settling for the easy answer and, while he was at it, increasing the appallingly low number of African American coaches in Division I-A from three to four.

“This is a courageous move, because Dorrell has no history,” former UCLA quarterback Tom Ramsey, a Dorrell backer from the start, said Wednesday night.

“Obviously it was not an easy decision. But I really believe it was well thought out, a very logical choice. When you look at the logic, it makes all the sense in the world. Karl has ties to Terry Donahue, and the history and tradition of UCLA, and he has ties to one of the best organizations, the Denver Broncos, and Mike Shanahan.

“The naysayers will say he doesn’t have head coaching experience. But how does one get head coaching experience? You’ve got to get in the field of fire. Well, he’s in now.”

Only time and two USC games will tell whether this hire was a good idea.

College football memory books are filled with athletic directors who rolled the dice on coaches and lost. We remember the smiling faces and handshakes at news conferences and talk of leading programs into new frontiers.

Only, it doesn’t always work out that way.

There was, for example, Oklahoma in the mid-1990s when it hired John Blake. You talk about hitting a dry well. Blake, like Dorrell, was a highly regarded NFL assistant with no head coaching experience, a man who was supposed to restore order at a once-proud program.

The thinking was it took a Sooner to know a Sooner, some of the same things people have been saying about Dorrell’s being a Bruin. Yet Blake, certainly a bold pick, was fired after going 12-22.

USC’s Paul Hackett mistake cost the Trojans three years of construction costs in the rebuilding of a program.

How about Stanford and Buddy Teevens?

Teevens arrived in Palo Alto a highly regarded one-time former assistant at Florida under Steve Spurrier. In one year, Teevens has turned the Cardinal program around -- the wrong way around.

Sometimes you think you have the right coach, then think you don’t, only to find out, hey, you do.

Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz was a fallback hire after the school stunningly failed to land Stoops, a former Hawkeye player and the presumed successor to Hayden Fry.

After negotiations with Stoops went three bales haywire, Iowa latched onto Ferentz and Iowans went “Huh?”

The first year, Ferentz put his foot in the bucket by going 1-10 and winless in the Big Ten. Three years later, Iowa is 11-1 and Orange Bowl bound.

How does an AD really know he’s going to get the right guy?

Unless he has an open checkbook and Jimmy Johnson’s home boat number, he doesn’t.

Instead, he does his homework, relies on a few trusted friends and prays for the best.

There are foolproof plans, of course, to get a wayward ship turned around.

To solve its recent coaching vacancy/crisis, Alabama simply courted one of the best coaches from one of the best leagues, threw more money at the guy than he has ever seen and, voila, Mike Price is pricing real estate in Tuscaloosa.

Guerrero, though, was working under a different mandate. It was his job to bring in the best man $700,000 (plus incentives!) could buy, knowing full well that next coach would be asked to defeat a USC coach in a higher tax bracket.

Some nerve, huh?

Actually, if you haven’t heard by now, this is the UCLA way, a balanced, fiscally minded approach to compensation. UCLA pursuing a coach is like a shopper screaming from a mall the day after Christmas -- Did you see what I got for $50?

Sometimes, in the case of Terry Donahue, you get a bargain that lasts 20 years.

Other times, Steve Lavin is on the clearance rack.

This time, well, we’ll just have to see where it goes.

After he fired Toledo, Guerrero barked out clear and stark commands.

“We want a national caliber program here,” he said. “We want to compete for the top 10 and be one of the top programs in the country every year.”

What he really meant was “we want a national caliber program and a coach who knows he could still be drawing up wide receiver plays in Denver had we not called.”

Karl Dorrell, one step forward or one step back?

“Genius move,” Ramsey said.

For now, we’ll stick with “bold.”