Eric Bieniemy has been a hot topic lately as a favorite for the vacant head coaching job for the Colorado Buffaloes. Here’s why he should stay put.
Eric Bieniemy is a fantastic offensive coordinator. His expertise was born early in his career while he starred at running back for the Colorado Buffaloes in the late 1980s. Following his NFL career, Bieniemy went into coaching and had several brief stints with major college teams but most notably as a running backs coach and eventually offensive coordinator for his alma mater.
All these historic ties to the Colorado program have made Bieniemy target number one within the national sports media. After all, he’s clearly a talented offensive coordinator in a league where that skill set is highly valued. Yet, somehow he was passed over in head coaching searches by a number of NFL franchises two years in a row.
It would make sense for both Colorado, jilted by a coach seemingly dedicated to the program after only a year, and Bieniemy, overlooked and seemingly undervalued in a league where his gameplans have dominated, to look to each other to solve their problems. Without question, Bienemy would be a great fit for Colorado. He’s demonstrated both the intellectual acumen to develop and implement creative gameplans and the emotional acumen to lead a group of young players and veterans alike into battle.
Unfortunately, unless Bieniemy’s dream is to coach college football, taking the head coaching spot at Colorado would be a major step back in terms of his career. Right now, Bieniemy is at the pinnacle of jobs that are not actually head coaching roles. He is the offensive coordinator to one of the greatest coaches of all time, from whom he can consistently learn and refine his craft.
What’s more, Andy Reid is one of the most generous coaches in selling his coordinators to the national media as head coaching candidates. It’s hard to find a more trusted voice in the NFL, which has led to numerous coordinators finding themselves with NFL head coaching jobs with sometimes only a few years of experience.
Colorado, on the other hand, is nowhere near this level of prestige. No disrespect to the Buffaloes, but it has been a very long time since that team has been relevant in college football. In the last 20 seasons they have only broken 10 wins in a season twice and have a cumulative record of 102 wins and 147 losses. The last decade is even worse with 44 win and 80 losses.
You may think that a great coach like Bieniemy can come in and right the ship in short order, but the problem is that success in college football is so heavily contingent on talent. You can have great coaching, but if your talent is average it’s very difficult to win consistently. For context, in the last 10 recruiting classes the Buffalos have averaged the 55th ranked class in the country.
Bieniemy would undoubtedly improve that, but if you’re not consistently ranking in the top-25 it will be difficult to pull the program to relevancy again. What’s even more challenging is the fact that the recruiting cycle for next class is already significantly underway making what would be his first year that much more challenging.
It can usually take three to four seasons for a coach to turn a program around, which makes this opportunity looks less like a great one. It would be like a hot shot banker, tired of being a senior vice president at Goldman Sachs, leaving for a director’s role at a regional bank. Those two positions aren’t even in the same ballpark in terms of prestige, and neither are these two.
Bieniemy will be a head coach for an NFL team some day very soon. This head coaching cycle was tough, but there were also two former head coaches who had a lot of success that ended up getting jobs (Ron Rivera, Mike McCarthy). It’s rare there are candidates with that level of success in the search. He may have to wait another year or even two, but there’s no doubt he’s better off waiting in the wings of Andy Reid than in the middle of the Pac-12.