Evaluating Rick George's head coaching hires as Colorado athletic director
As he addressed the dismissal of the most important, highest-profile coaching hire of his tenure as Colorado’s athletic director, Rick George was surprisingly candid.
“There's no excuses and I own my part in where we are today,” George said Sunday at a press conference, hours after he fired Karl Dorrell as the Buffs’ football coach.
Candid as those words were, they weren’t exactly revelatory. Given Dorrell’s lackluster performance in 23 games as Colorado’s coach, George had failed in perhaps the most critical aspect of his job, a fact lost on few Buffs fans.
Compared to coaches, the measurements for judging a college athletic director are slightly murkier. Fundraising is paramount, especially in a day and age of skyrocketing revenues and expenses. Maintaining positive relationships with coaches, alums and donors is crucial, as well. Where an athletic director has the biggest, most visible impact, though, is with the coaches they hire and how those leaders of the school’s various programs fare.
Which brings us back to George. Whichever person becomes Colorado’s next head football coach will be George’s third head-coaching hire for that program, a rare feat for an administrator whose previous two hires weren’t undeniable successes. While the football program is a reflection of George’s choices, the university’s other major revenue sport isn’t, at least not nearly to the same extent, as Tad Boyle’s hiring predated George’s arrival in Boulder.
While George’s coaching hires in other sports shed only so much insight on what direction he will ultimately go in this search, they are instructive in helping paint a picture of George’s effectiveness in what is likely the most important facet of his job.
With that in mind, let’s take a look back at George’s head-coaching hires in his time at Colorado and how those turned out. The hires are listed in chronological order.
Jesse Mahoney, volleyball
Previous role: Denver head coach (88-41 record)
Hired in 2015, Mahoney led the Buffs to a 92-83 mark in his first six years atop the program. His win-loss percentage is an improvement over his predecessor, Liz Kritza, who went 90-125 in seven years at the school. However, she led Colorado to the NCAA Tournament in 2013 and 2014, and her 2015 team went 19-13 before she was fired after the end of the season.
Mahoney’s squads have performed well, reaching the NCAA Tournament in 2017 and 2018, though they were bounced in the first round both times. They spent a total of eight weeks ranked in the top 25 between those two seasons, including a final ranking of No. 19 in 2017. The Buffs faltered in the two seasons that followed, going a combined 21-29, before bouncing back last year with a 15-14 record. About halfway through the regular season this year, they’re 11-3, including a 3-1 mark in Pac-12 play.
Colorado has a proud volleyball history, with 15 NCAA Tournament appearances in 16 seasons from 1991-2006, but the Pac-12 remains a challenging league with several top programs nationally. Overall, though, Mahoney has done fairly well.
JR Payne, women’s basketball
Previous role: Santa Clara head coach (34-27 record)
Since Ceal Barry’s retirement in 2005, the Buffs have often been unsuccessful in trying to recreate the legendary coach’s accomplishments. After Barry led Colorado to 12 NCAA Tournaments in a 17-season stretch from 1988-2004, including three Elite Eights, the Buffs have returned to the Big Dance just twice over the past 18 years.
The good news? One of those two berths came last season, providing at least some encouragement for the program and Payne’s ability to lead it to a more prosperous future. Hired in 2016, Payne’s teams have gone 94-84 and each of her past three squads have finished with a winning record. The highlight of that recent run came last year, when Colorado went 22-9 – its most wins in a season in nearly a decade – finished fifth in the Pac-12 and earned a No. 7 seed in the NCAA Tournament, where it fell to Creighton in the first round.
After taking over a program that went 22-40 in its final two seasons under Linda Lappe, Payne has done well and appears to have the program on an upward trajectory, with five of the top seven scorers from last season’s team back for the 2022-23 campaign. For now, consider this one a success.
Danielle Steinberg, women’s tennis
Previous role: Kansas State head coach (47-57 record)
After succeeding longtime coach Nicole Kenneally in 2018, Steinberg remained in her post for just three seasons, resigning in 2021 due to what the university described as “family reasons.” Under her watch, Colorado went 27-32, including a 6-16 mark against Pac-12 competition. It did represent a bit of an improvement, as the Buffs went 3-27 against conference opponents in Kenneally’s final three seasons.
Mel Tucker, football
Previous role: Georgia defensive coordinator
Tucker was a bit of an unconventional hire for the Buffs – having never coached farther west than Baton Rouge, La. – but his resume was nonetheless impressive, with experience as an NFL defensive coordinator and a top assistant at elite college programs like Georgia and Alabama. It was enough to sell George, who was impressed by Tucker’s reputation as an elite recruiter in the cutthroat SEC.
He went 5-7 in his first season in Boulder and led the Buffs to one more Pac-12 win than they earned the previous year. Perhaps more notable, he had ramped up the program’s recruiting efforts, piecing together Colorado’s highest class ranking in the Pac-12 (No. 7) since it had joined the league. As former Buffs standout linebacker Alfred Williams told The Athletic earlier this year, “He had the alumni base jacked up, man.” That hope proved to be short-lived. After striking out on several of its top choices to replace the abruptly retired Mark Dantonio, Michigan State lured Tucker back east by more than doubling the $2.7 million he made with the Buffs.
That sequence of events can make it difficult to evaluate George’s effectiveness as a decision-maker. The instability created by losing a coach after just one season is catastrophic for many programs, a pain made that much worse by the fact that Tucker departed for a program that, while good, isn’t among the sport’s elite. Still, George lost out on Tucker because of an astronomical salary offer that Colorado would never be able to realistically match and based on Tucker’s early results, he appeared destined for success in Boulder.
Karl Dorrell, football
Previous role: Miami Dolphins wide receivers coach
This hire’s a little easier to analyze. Dorrell was a surprise choice for the job, to say the least. He hadn’t coached at the college level since a hapless one-year stint as Vanderbilt’s offensive coordinator in 2014, when the Commodores had the ninth-worst scoring offense in the sport. His last go-around as a college head coach wasn’t particularly decorated, as he went 35-27 at UCLA, with one 10-2 season sandwiched between seasons in which the Bruins won either six or seven games.
After Tucker’s shocking departure, George was seeking a stabilizing presence, which he believed Dorrell would be, even citing how Dorrell’s family had kept a home in the Boulder area for years. By now, we know how things turned out. In two-and-a-half seasons, Dorrell’s Buffs teams went just 8-15, with the situation surrounding the program deteriorating year after year. Following an eye-opening 4-2 record in the pandemic-altered 2020 season, Colorado went 4-8 in Dorrell’s second year and had lost the first five games of his third season by an average of 29.8 points.
It was an underwhelming hire that came with predictably underwhelming results, the kind of move that has cost administrators in similar positions their jobs in the past.
Andy LeRoy, skiing
Previous role: Denver head coach
When tasked with replacing legendary head coach Richard Rokos, who had overseen the program for 31 seasons, George turned to LeRoy, a Colorado graduate who led Denver to six NCAA Championships in his tenure from 2007-21. In his first season, the Buffs finished fourth at the NCAA Championships, where they didn’t have a men’s skier finish higher than 17th in the 20K freestyle and had just one female skier finish in the top 15 of the 15K freestyle (Hanna Abrahamsson, at No. 7).
Anthony Pham, women’s tennis
Previous role: Colorado associate head coach
Following Steinberg’s resignation, George turned to her top assistant coach, elevating Pham to head coach in July 2021. It was a historical hire, as Pham is the first Vietnamese-American head coach in Colorado history and is believed to be the first such coach in any sport at any school in any of the Power Five conferences. In Pham’s first season, the Buffs finished 8-14, down slightly from their 9-12 mark the previous year.
Prior to Colorado, Pham was the associate head coach at Wisconsin, where he recruited two five-star players for the Badgers’ 2021 recruiting class. He was the head coach at Niagara, where he headed the men’s and women’s programs from 2010-14.