I indulged in a long planned vacation with wife and kid in New York. I skipped one full day blogging despite being on vacation. I checked back in today and it sounds like the lobby of Bailey Building & Loan.
To answer some questions that have been posed in the comments section:
1. NCAA transfer rules aren't waived because a coach is fired. A player would still have to sit out a year unless he could get a waiver. As I wrote previously, many players are taking a wait-and-see attitude because they'd like to see who the new coach is. It doesn't make much practical sense for most players to transfer.
2. The list of people who know who the next football coach will be is short and, as of right this very second, doesn't include me. I've been around long enough to also know some folks, for their own benefit, will attempt to mislead me or lie to me. I will report what I know, what I'm told and, in this forum, sometimes analyze the information I get. I'm not going to say, "I think (some name here) will be the next FIU coach" until I have a more solid idea of that.
Sometimes, I'm told things way off the record -- as in, "please don't print or blog this, even using me as an unnamed source" -- and all I can tell you is what those tidbits might mean.
3. FIU would like to know Cristobal's next stop before talking money with the next coach, but it's not a red light. That's especially the case if FIU lands someone who doesn't need a ton of money in the early years of the deal (i.e. Houston Nutt, Butch Davis).
And FIU will find the money, if need be.
4. I made a public records request for athletic director Pete Garcia's evaluations back in July. This is what I received:Download PeteGarcia1 Download PeteGarcia2.
Obviously, those aren't yearly evaluations. I requested them again. The request was forwarded to Liz Marston, FIU's Associate General Counsel, who e-mailed that those were the only performance evaluations that could be found. I chuckled and knew I'd revisit this when the football season ended.
Last week, I re-requested those evaluations from Marston, pointing out that Garcia said he was evaluated each year as the coaches were. I also requested any official commendations, suspensions and censures in his file, as well as Mario Cristobal's performance evaluations, commendations, suspensions and censures.
Marston e-mailed back that they were in the process of gathering the documents and would respond in a reasonable time. I noted to her that Friday was five months from the original request, so "reasonable time" was in the past. I found it ridiculous, but interesting, that I was being told that something as basic as performance evaluations for an employee making over $350,000 a year in base salary didn't exist.
Why did I ask? Because I like to read.
