Playing with Fires will take a look at firing decisions made in the world of football. 

Ron Turner

The first coaching casualty of the 2016 season was FIU’s Ron Turner. Turner always seemed like a bizarre fit at FIU. He spent 8 years as Illinois’ head coach around the turn of the century, putting together a 35-57 record. He was the Big Ten Coach of the Year in 2001 when the Illini went 10-2, but in retrospect, all that 10-2 season does is emphasize just how bad the rest of his tenure was, going 25-55 in the other 7 seasons. He bookended his years in Champaign with 9 cumulative years as the OC for the Chicago Bears. In his original run with the Bears, he turned around a pretty bad offense that ranked 26th in the league in DVOA his first year, but improved to 12th in 1994 and 3rd in 1995¹ before regressing a bit in 1996, his final year before coaching Illinois. When he returned to the Bears in 2005, he took over an offense that finished dead last in DVOA the year before. In his 5 years in Chicago, they finished 28th, 20th, 30th, 22nd, and 28th. If you remember that Bears team that reached the Super Bowl in spite of its offense, Ron Turner was in charge of that Rex Grossman-led atrocity. Needless to say, his Bears offenses of the aughts were unable to replicate the turnaround his Bears offenses of the 90’s generated. He did some positional coaching with the Colts and Buccaneers, and then was oddly hired by FIU in 2013 to replace Mario Cristobal.

Mario Cristobal became FIU’s 2nd head coach in 2007, and when he took over the program, they were a doormat of what is now the FBS. First playing football in 2002 under coach Don Strock, the longtime Dolphin backup QB to Bob Griese and Dan Marino, and former coach of a professional team actually called the Miami Hooters, FIU joined the top division in 2004 and proceeded to go 8-25 over its first 3 years, bottoming out with an 0-12 2006 season, Strock’s last. That kind of a debut is not uncommon for start-up programs. A veteran (like Schnellenberger or Curry) will help get the program on its feet and then turn things over to a younger coach. Cristobal was that younger coach, and he seemed made for FIU. Cristobal was a Cuban-American born and raised in Miami. He went to Miami and was a two-time national champion and first team All-Big East offensive tackle. After cutting his teeth at Rutgers, he was a positional coach for the Hurricanes in the aughts. Aside from the normal red flag of not having any coordinator experience, Cristobal was a pretty ideal candidate for FIU.

In his first year, the team was as bad as Strock’s teams, going 1-11. But in year 2, the Panthers went a considerably better 5-7. 2009 saw some win regression to 3-9, but FIU more or less maintained the quality of play it had established the year before. In 2010, the team took a major step forward, going 7-6, earning a share of the Sun Belt Conference championship and winning the Little Caesars Bowl. By advanced metrics, they were nearly an average FBS team (-5.4% F/+). It was a long way from the 0-12 (-42.8% F/+) team he inherited. In 2011, the team was again solid for its level, winning 8 games. I haven’t mentioned, but probably should, that during the first 5 years of Cristobal’s tenure, FIU couldn’t even award the maximum number of scholarships due to sanctions incurred during the Strock era. All in all, the building of FIU was pretty amazing. In 2012, FIU had a down year, going just 3-9. F/+ saw a decline as well, but not as drastic, as FIU fell to only -18.0%, still better than anything they’d done prior to 2010. The team was rattled with injuries at key positions, including QB, where a freshman was forced into the starting lineup against multiple bowl-bound opponents, and still, numerous losses were by single digits. Shockingly, FIU fired Cristobal after the season, despite Cristobal having turned down jobs at Rutgers and Pitt to stay in his hometown. Perhaps, with FIU on the cusp of a move to Conference USA, the administration believed a higher-profile conference demanded a higher-profile coach. More realistically, AD Pete Garcia, notorious for not getting along with people, wanted to get rid of a coach he wasn’t buddies with (Garcia is buddies with Butch Davis, and reports circulated that Davis had gotten the job, but it never came together). Sometimes, that’s how it works, and that’s how you wind up with Ron Turner. The Cristobal firing remains one of the boldest in recent college football history.

2013, Turner’s first at the helm, was a disaster. FIU went 1-11 (-42.5% F/+), restoring the program to the depths of the Strock years. They weren’t under sanctions and scholarship limits this time – Turner’s squad only played that way. The last two seasons weren’t quite the dumpster fire his debut was, but they were pretty bad (combined 9-15 with F/+ scores of -24.8% and -39.2%). After an 0-4 start to 2016, Turner was relieved of his duties (FIU is 3-0 since). His tenure effectively undid all the progress the Cristobal years had made. Now FIU and Pete Garcia again look for a HC. Given Garcia’s history, we can’t assume the choice will be a particularly bright one.

 

¹ – Turner’s ’95 Bears offense was particularly impressive given what he had to work with. He coaxed a career year out of Erik Kramer, who managed 3838 yards, a 29:10 ratio, and the league’s best sack rate. In no other season did Kramer resemble a competent starter, but in 1995 he was Pro Bowl caliber. Kramer had two 1000 yard receivers, one of which was the memorable Curtis Conway (1114 yards, 12 TD) and the less memorable but equally valuable Jeff Graham (1301 yards, 4 TD). At RB was rookie and former Heisman winner Rashaan Salaam, who wasn’t very efficient (9 fumbles, 3.6 yards per attempt) but did carry the ball enough to reach the 1000 yard mark and score 10 TDs. Somehow, with a top 3 offense, the Bears only went 9-7 and missed the playoffs. But they did have 1986 Super Bowl MVP Richard Dent on the roster to regale teammates with tales of what it would have been like.