When Nick Saban, Alabama’s football coach, decided to replace his offensive coordinator, Lane Kiffin, in the run-up to last season’s national championship game, he had an experienced former head coach ready to step in.
Actually, he had several.
Not including Saban, there were five former top-tier head coaches on the Alabama staff when the postseason began, including three working as so-called analysts in what are (at least officially) noncoaching roles. Saban tapped one of them, the former Washington and Southern California coach Steve Sarkisian, to run the offense in the title game against Clemson. Though Alabama lost, it was not because of the offense, which scored 31 points and did not struggle in unfamiliar hands.
“This isn’t like I flew in on a plane and I just took over this week,” Sarkisian said at the time. “I’ve been here for four months. I’ve worked with Lane hand in hand.”
In fact, Sarkisian’s primary job was not to be Kiffin’s understudy, but to consult with Kiffin and other coaches in a range of areas. But his unusual trajectory was merely the starkest example of the advantage — and the luxury — of having noncoaching advisers in place, ready to step in at a moment’s notice.
These staff members do not count against N.C.A.A. bylaws restricting Football Bowl Subdivision teams to nine assistant coaches, a figure that will rise by one next year. And they must abide by rules barring them from activities only coaches may perform, including coaching athletes, actively coaching during games or practices, and recruiting off campus. But for the programs that can afford them, they provide an invaluable service.
“They’re involved in the organization,” Saban said in January. “That’s where they make their contribution, in the coaching meetings. They’re not really allowed to be involved with the team.”
While Alabama was a trailblazer in employing analysts to supplement the official staff, it is not alone. Texas has four quality-control coaches and a bevy of other noncoaching football staff members. Auburn’s roster of analysts includes the veteran offensive coordinator Al Borges. And after a fruitful N.F.L. career, the onetime wide receiver Brian Hartline recently returned to his alma mater as one of Ohio State’s quality-control coaches.
“They call it best practices,” said Tom Herman, the new coach at Texas. “You go to Alabama, you go to Ohio State, you go to Clemson, you say: ‘What do you got? What’re you doing?’ And one of the things that certainly jumped off the page was the amount of support staff those elite programs had both in recruiting and off-the-field analysts.
“If we say we want to compete on the field with those teams,” Herman added, “we have to do business the way business is done.”
But as that word “business” hints, the trend highlights how college football’s best programs, which are nearly synonymous with its richest ones, have entrenched advantages in a system ostensibly designed to maintain competitive equity. The N.C.A.A. has long billed caps on compensating players as important for ensuring parity, with the organization’s president, Mark Emmert, testifying three years ago in a pivotal class-action lawsuit that the amateur model was “essential” to competitive balance.
Critics characterize that supposed motivation as a fig leaf. They note the country’s richer teams have been able to realize higher returns, in the form of wins, on higher investments, in the form of perks like better coaches and better facilities, even amid what amounts to a hard salary cap for players.
“You have this economic system that is very competitive, where you’re not allowed to pay the producers,” said Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist at Smith College, referring to the players. “So the schools do everything they do to gain a competitive advantage given that they have this artificial restraint.”
“There are cracks in the system,” he added. “If a crack is hiring someone called an analyst instead of an assistant coach, that’s what you do.”
Shadowing coordinators so they can step in at a moment’s notice is actually not the primary job of these analysts. Rather, they serve as extra sets of expert eyeballs for coaching staffs seeking all available edges. Perhaps they have the time to break down an extra year of an opposing coach’s games; perhaps they can pay especially close attention to which second-string defensive back should replace an injured starter.
Their salaries, even at places like Alabama, are generally not commensurate with the six-figure (or more) paychecks that assistant coaches command, and they are not always experienced hands with head-coaching experience; frequently, they are younger, aspiring coaches looking for another way to break into the business.
At West Virginia, for instance, Coach Dana Holgorsen hired three analysts ahead of this season, tasking them with looking ahead an extra week on the schedule. So as the Mountaineers’ coaches focus and prepare for Saturday’s game, Holgorsen and his assistants also know they will be getting a jump-start on the following Saturday’s.
“I’m not smart enough to figure out two opponents at the same time, so I encourage our entire staff to focus on the game, win it, and then go on to the next game,” Holgorsen said. “Well, in the meantime, I’ve got three guys now that can move on to the game and get us ahead for the next week.”
Some coaches with the means to assemble a phalanx of experienced scouts have disdained that path. Coach Jim Harbaugh of Michigan has boasted of consolidating jobs. Oklahoma’s coach, Lincoln Riley, posited last month that “the more people you bring in, the bigger chance there is of having somebody that’s not all in, not as invested, and I think that can hurt a staff, hurt a team faster than anything.”
Still, if there were no advantages to the practice, there is a good chance it would have ceased altogether. Instead, it is spreading, and it is currently unregulated (two decades ago, a federal jury found that an N.C.A.A. cap on assistant coaches’ pay violated antitrust law).
“Teams like Texas that have all the money in the world can hire as many of those guys as they want,” Holgorsen said. “There’s no N.C.A.A. rule on this right now. I think there will be in the future.”
Perhaps. Todd Berry, the executive director of the American Football Coaches Association — and a nonvoting member of the Division I Football Oversight Committee — said his group had discussed some limits on analysts, saying, “We recognize there needs to be some autonomy for our universities to decide what’s best for them, but there needs to be some fairness — not necessarily equity.”
In other words: Alabama need not sweat losing its helping hands just yet.
This off-season it brought on Chris Weinke, the 2000 Heisman Trophy winner and most recently the Los Angeles Rams’ quarterbacks coach, as an analyst. And though Sarkisian departed for the N.F.L., one of his replacements, as co-offensive coordinator, is Mike Locksley — a former New Mexico head coach who spent last season as an Alabama analyst.
“His time as an analyst with us over the past season,” Saban said in announcing Locksley’s promotion, “should also ensure a smooth transition and a full understanding of how our organization operates.”
© 2017 The New York Times Company