Texas Tech is not Auburn. Tommy T will have a hard time succeeding there. With Mike Leach Tech was guaranteed 7-8 wins a year and a bowl game with the occasional 9-10 win season. With Tubberville they will be a perennial 7 win team.
If I were coaching at another school I would probably take Tubberville over McNeill. But with the current situation at Tech I don't see how you could not hire McNeill.
They should have hired Tubby with an absoulte LOCK on any personnel changes for the first year there.
Everyone who wants to stay can stay.
Good leaders do not come in and make this amount of changes, and in THOSE positions of importance. Change for the sake of changing is almost never a good idea. As a new leader, coming into a firestorm of a situation in Lubbock, Tubby could have bought himself a LOT of emotional real estate had he just sat back an dlet his asssitants do the job they had alwasy done.
Why: Because look at the Alamo Bowl's result. Instead of turtling up and crying over Leach's firing, they went out there and won a bowl game. Everyone went about his job, doing what was expected and leading them to victory. Those people wanted to prove to everyone that THEY could do THEIR jobs and that THEY were quite capable of continuing with their jobs when the new coach came in.
Enter the new head coach, who says out of one side of his mouth that he isn't upsetting the apple cart. "People gonna' like what I do..." And then shortly thereafter he goes and fires a whole slew of very noteworthy personnel on the team.
I just would have said "Look, I'm here to head this program. Every person who wants in, can be in. If you don't think you can stay here and continue on, then you can go. In fact, we NEED people to be man enough to admit they don't 'buy into this,' and to go ahead and leave on their own. Because what was built here in Lubbock was built by more than one man. This team has achieved bowl wins almost every year. This staff gutted out a tough week and won a bowl game."
I would have used this year to evaluate the staff. To really see what I had.
Instead, he just starts lopping off people's heads left and right.
That kinda' stuff doesn't fly in West Texas. He's not doing himself any favors if he thinks he can say one thing and do another in that area of Texas.
Now, could it be that there was already some residual problems with those whom he fired? Maybe they showed they were not very on-board with Tubby, and they were trying to just do their own thing and not really support him or let him near them? Maybe.
I think a lot of wind is going to be out of the sails of that pirate ship.
