Derek Dooley to Serve as Athletic Director and HFC at La. Tech

Other than Chris Ault at Nevada I don't think there are any other coaches also running an athletic department. Interesting move.

Dooley's only 39.

http://latechsports.cstv.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/030608aaa.html

 

La Tech will still suck at most men's sports.

 

No way does this last more than two or three years. Dooley will either move on to a better coaching job or Tech will find a real A.D. I've known some coaches who tried to do both, and it wore ... them ... out.

 

I can't see how it would do anything else. Football is so time extensive to coach, adding on AD duties is just insane. Either one job or the other suffers, or you wind up in the hospital for "exhaustion" in 18 months.

 

Even if it lasted more than two or three years, it will likely age him fast.

He'd probably be 45 looking like 70 by the time his stint doing both is over.

 

Like father, like son, I guess. Hope the gym at La. Tech can hold on for another 60 years or so.

 

I wish.

 

The only way it works is:

a) you are such a spectacularly successful football coach that nobody can possibly bitch about the AD job diverting your attentions from those duties; and

b) you hire an absolute f'ing stud of an Assistant AD to handle all the nuts-and-bolts grunt work, allow you to confine your AD duties to smiling at press conferences and schmoozing the trustees and the top alumni, and also is 100% loyal to you and will not begin maneuvering to stab you in the back.

Otherwise, one or both halves of the job will blow up on you within a year or two.

 

Reading between the lines in the release it looks like he got the job because he's a good fundraiser. I'm guessing he'll go with option "b" you mentioned.

 

I think Alvarez did both at Wisconsin. Wasn't Paterno PSU's AD for awhile?

I thought La. Tech was one of the schools that had separate ADs for men's and women's sports. I think Tennessee does that.

 

Alvarez did it very briefly at the end of his coaching tenure at Wisky. The current AD at Iowa State was the guy who handled the day-to-day administrative stuff under Alvarez.

John Robinson held both roles briefly at UNLV but other than the guy at Nevada there haven't been many coach/ADs in Division I since the early 90s.

 

The more I think about it, the more positive I am that Paterno did it or is still doing it...