The Top 10 Candidates For The Kansas Football Job

Despite some mild improvement to the Kansas football team this year, David Beaty was fired as head coach on Sunday, putting and end to one of the worst coaching tenures in the history of the sport.

Now comes the time to find a man willing to take on a project of this magnitude and return Kansas to the glory days, which were only 10 years ago but somehow feel like 50.

These are the top candidates to replace Beaty at Kansas.

Willie Fritz

Tulane’s head coach is an ideal candidate in certain ways. Fritz played at Pittsburg State in Kansas, then coached in Kansas at the high school and junior college level. He’s a two-time juco national champion, an MIAA national champion, and a champion of both the Sun Belt and Southland conferences.

None of those are on the level of the Big 12, but we’re talking about a guy who has won, and won big, almost everywhere he’s been for the last 23 years.

It is a concern that, so far, Tulane has been an exception to that. This is Fritz’s third year there, and he’s 13-20.

Les Miles

Would Les Miles actually listen to an offer for this job? Who knows. But he’s still only 64, he’s by far the most accomplished coach that might be remotely available to Kansas. Plus, as the Lawrence Journal-World’s Tom Keegan reported, Miles has known both Kansas athletics director Jeff Long, and the man Long hired to oversee the football program, Mike Vollmer, since the 90s.

Miles coached in the Big 12 at Oklahoma State from 2001-04, for whatever that’s worth, and engineered a turnaround of that program.

My issue with Miles as a candidate is that you never want to be in a position where your football coach feels like he’s doing you a favor just by showing up. I’m not saying Miles would have that attitude, but it seemed like Charlie Weis did.

Dave Doeren

Doeren is a native Kansan and coached at KU under Mark Mangino from 2002-05. Now the head coach at N.C. State, Doeren is 63-36 as a head coach, including a 40-32 mark with the Wolfpack.

He won two MAC championships at Northern Illinois, and beat Charlie Weis’ Kansas team in 2012.

According to the Kansas City Star, Doeren “badly wanted” the KU job in 2011, when it hired Weis to replace Turner Gill. But Doeren was still an assistant at Wisconsin at that point. Now that he’s won 15 of his last 21 games at N.C. State, he may not want the KU job so badly.

Bret Bielema

Kansas AD Jeff Long hired Bielema at Arkansas in 2012, and it wouldn’t be crazy for him to do it again at Kansas in 2018. Bielema is a consultant for the New England Patriots who is “not going to Kansas” per CBS’ Dennis Dodd.

This would be a great get for KU, it’s just difficult for me to imagine Bielema wanting that job.

Jeff Monken

Monken is the head coach at Army, where he runs a triple option. Kansas should be doing that, or something like it, rather than trying to be better than Texas and Oklahoma at their own game.

Let’s not forget this is the offense that made Nebraska — which is in a very similar state to Kansas — a national power. And let us not forget that Nebraska has not been a national power since it stopped running the triple option.

Army is on its third winning season in a row and Monken, 51, is 69-44 as a head coach.

Clint Bowen

Every time the Kansas job comes open, Clint Bowen becomes the interim coach, and there’s some talk about hiring him on a full-time basis before somebody else gets the job.

Bowen, 46, has spent almost all his life in Lawrence, Kan. He was born there, played high school football there, played college football there and has been a member of the coaching staff at KU for all but three of the last 22 years, coaching mainly defense.

After Charlie Weis got fired, Bowen coached Kansas the last eight games of the 2014 season, winning one. Otherwise there isn’t much to go on. Bowen was on Mark Mangino’ staff during the glory years, but he’s also been around for most of the horrors that came next.

He’s worth considering on the grounds that Kansas football has some unique challenges that have to be well understood in order to overcome them. Weis thought he could X and O his way out of that hole. He was very wrong.

Is a new athletic director likely to use his first big hire to promote Clint Bowen to head coach? Eh, probably not.

Lane Kiffin

The Kansas City Star mentioned Kiffin, and while that seems a little far-fetched, he’s only making $1 million per year at Florida Atlantic. Kansas could double that and then some while providing the 43-year-old Kiffin with another chance to prove himself at the Power 5 level.

Craig Bohl

Bohl, 60, grew up in Nebraska and played and coached for the Cornhuskers in the 70s and 80s. If you’ve heard of him, though, it’s probably from the three consecutive FCS national titles he won at North Dakota State at the beginning of this decade.

He’s at Wyoming now, and doing well. He won the Mountain West in 2016 and finished second last year. All put together he’s 130-67 in 16 years as a head coach.

He also has experience winning in Kansas. His North Dakota State team beat Kansas 6-3 in 2010, then beat Kansas State 24-21 in 2013.

Jason Candle

Known for his recruiting ability, Candle is 26-11 at Toledo, where he took over for the last game of the 2015 season. The Rockets were 11-3 last year, including a 7-1 conference record.

Candle has no connection to Kansas as far as I can tell — he’s spent his whole life in Ohio and Pennsylvania — but at just 38 years old, with the record he has, that’s probably not going to last too much longer.

How does that recruiting ability translate from the football-rich Ohio and Pennsylvania area to the talent desert that is Kansas? That’s a question that would be tough to answer without seeing him give it a shot.

Recruiting at Kansas isn’t just a matter of putting together a good pitch and developing a relationship with the player. Doing it successfully also requires seeing something in players that everybody else is missing.

That all said, this would be worth a shot.

Brent Venables

I’m on the record in this space saying Kansas should go to the Bill Snyder coaching tree and just start making offers until one of them says yes.

Under that premise, Venables would be the first one you call.

He’s Clemson’s defensive coordinator now, but he was born in Salina, Kan., played at Kansas State, coached under Snyder from 1993-98, then at Oklahoma from 1999-2011 before going to Clemson.

Venables is an odd case, though. He’s been one of the most highly regarded assistant coaches in the country for 20 years, and his name has been popping up on lists like this just almost as long. It may be he simply isn’t interested in being a head coach, or maybe there’s something with him that keeps getting in the way.

Whatever the case, I wouldn’t bet on this happening, but on paper he’s the ideal candidate.