Despite poor process, Barry Odom can succeed at UNLV
Note: rankings for this series are set by TERSE, a D1 college football metric designed to imitate human rankings. These will shift as the offseason goes on, with more transfer data becoming available over time.
Let’s not make this more complicated than it needs to be: firing Marcus Arroyo was a bad decision.
The fact that good decisions often lead to failed hires has been a recurring point in this series, and the inverse is sometimes true as well. It would be premature to claim that Barry Odom, a reasonably accomplished coach who pieced together some solid seasons at Missouri, won’t pan out. But we can say that the process of firing Arroyo, whose Rebels battled through injury to tie for the second-best record in the last two decades, was a poor one. UNLV’s plan with the move, if they had one, was to swing for the fences and lock down a big name. Whether there was credibility to the rumors of Ed Orgeron and Chris Petersen being on the wish list, we don’t know, but names like those and Bronco Mendenhall, Gary Patterson, Deion Sanders, and Mike Stoops drifted around.
Odom is a fine coach—his own firing at Missouri was probably a case of shortsightedness, to some extent—but his hire hardly electrifies the program. That’s not a requirement in many cases, but here, it feels vital. Arroyo had buy-in from a team in a difficult position; why set yourself back a couple years in the rebuild process for the sake of a washed-up former SEC coach (who’s never led a team west of Oklahoma)? Perhaps more obviously, why do it right after upending rival Nevada for the first time since 2019?
Given the upgrades UNLV has made to their facilities recently, I’d suggest they made this move to parallel those at programs like USF and Texas State. But there was no reason Arroyo couldn’t be the coach to lead the Rebels into this new era of investment, and it isn’t surprising that the circumstances of the decision reinforce how tone-deaf it feels. UNLV justified it (in some cases, through media channels, as programs do) as a natural conclusion for a coach with a dreadful 7-23 record and a necessary move following a 1-6 finish to the season. This is reasoning that only makes sense from a distance; it doesn’t hold up when considering that the Rebels’ program was already terrible when Arroyo arrived and that his success in 2022 was heavily undercut by a spate of key injuries.
Relitigating the firing won’t change what happened, but it does raise some questions about what the future looks like under Odom. UNLV has all the pieces in place to win now, which doesn’t just undercut the confusing decision to move on from Arroyo—it also puts immediate pressure to succeed on a coach taking over a program which is 66-170 in the last two decades. This is a problem that can compound itself if HC hires aren’t made carefully, because if Odom can’t capitalize and is fired quickly, the already-unattractive UNLV job would become even harder to sell candidates on. We’ve seen this happen with positions like Miami and Florida State, but those programs have enough money that they can afford to overpay coaches who would otherwise be uninterested, if worst comes to worst. The Rebels’ financial situation, while better than it’s been in the past, doesn’t afford such luxuries. Stability is vital right now, and the athletic department hasn’t approached football with that fact in mind.
Again, though, it’s no use dwelling on the past. Odom isn’t the candidate UNLV wanted, but he does offer a sense of balance, in a way. Missouri moved on from him because his 25-25 record wasn’t ambitious enough for their liking, but the Rebels could use a few average seasons to establish themselves as more than a perennial cellar dweller. The process of Odom’s hiring was flawed, but the answer is not necessarily to move on posthaste if things don’t work out. Now more than ever, UNLV needs time to find itself as a program and focus on long-term goals.
So, while expectations should be reasonably high for a solidly-built team with excellent recruits coming into their own, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that 2023 represents opportunity for the Rebels. If they win right away, they’ve got a great foundation to build from, but another losing season shouldn’t be held against their first-year coach. As with Arroyo, UNLV can do great things under Odom’s watch, but they have to learn to step back and give this nascent program time to grow.
The Last Five Years
The prospect of a successful UNLV football team is very reasonable—the Mountain West currently has a relative power vacuum with no consistent top-25 team—but it’s always been heavily theoretical. The Rebels have just ten winning seasons since joining Division I in 1978, and they haven’t reached .500 in back-to-back years since the mid-1980s. Arroyo’s recruiting success and a talented core brought him closer to success in three years than Tony Sanchez managed in five, but time ran out before he could overcome miserable luck with one-score losses and those injuries in 2022.
2022 and 2023
Losing Doug Brumfield to a concussion against San José State is probably what hurt the Rebels’ bowl chances the most last season. Through five games, he was 105-for-149, averaging 8.2 yards per attempt with eight touchdowns and one interception while leading UNLV to a 4-1 start. He threw just 105 passes in the final seven games, and even when he returned from injury, he looked a shadow of his early-season self (6.4 Y/A, 2 TD, 3 INT). It’s easy to imagine what could’ve been, but the good news is that Brumfield and some other key pieces are back.
The Rebels do have to replace lead rusher Aidan Robbins (1009 yards) and draft hopeful linebacker Austin Ajiake (132 tackles, 11 TFL, 2 interceptions). On the upside, Brumfield’s most successful—or at least most available—target from last season, Ricky White (619 yards on 51 catches) is back, leading a receiving corps with solid depth. The offensive line is experienced enough to take a big step forward, and Brennon Scott, who was injured throughout 2022, is expected to anchor the front seven if he can build on a four-sack redshirt freshman season. New defensive coordinator Mike Scherer is one to keep an eye on—he coached linebackers at Arkansas across the last two seasons, producing possibly the nation’s best LB tandem in Drew Sanders and Bumper Pool.
The Next Five Years
The disconnect between process and results in college football is a blessing and a curse. Obviously, for fans it’s mostly a positive—this sport would be incredibly boring if every good hire worked and every bad hire didn’t. But as an AD, it’s easy to forget that the frustration of a good process failing comes hand in hand with the opportunity of a bad process succeeding.
I’ve obviously been critical of UNLV’s firing and hiring decisions in this article, but what I think doesn’t really matter that much, even if I’m right. Not just in that the Rebels could stumble into success under Odom (although that could certainly happen), but also in that I may just be overstating how bad this coaching search was. I think even UNLV would agree that it could have gone better, in full honesty, but it could obviously have gone worse. Getting a former SEC coach, even one who was fired and isn’t a clear cultural fit, is a considerable accomplishment for a program with the Rebels’ historical level of success.
But enough about the past. This is a preview series for a reason—because, as helpful as considering previous successes and failures can be, it can also be misleading, and telling the difference is difficult even for the best coaches and reporters in the field. (Sportswriters have been trying to figure out whether one-score games indicate luck or skill for decades, and we’re still not quite sure which is more accurate!) Facing the unknown of the future gives us more room to admit we don’t always know what we’re talking about, and to consider how our expectations could be challenged by a coaching move like this one turning out well. Firing Arroyo may have been a bad decision, but was hiring Odom? That’s something we’ll only know with time.