This is the time of year in Nashville when the faithful often herald the arrival of a messiah who will finally lead his people out of the wilderness and toward salvation. For Vanderbilt fans, of course, this is not the sort of annual celebration that it is for their Christian brethren, but it happens regularly enough to qualify as a Vandy ritual.
Last Friday, amid much anticipation, Vanderbilt observed the festival once again with the defrocking of another false football prophet, Rod Dowhower, who was already settling in for a long winter’s nap when the news was proclaimed. Even before that, the gold-blazered rabble along West End Avenue had begun clamoring for a new messiah, defensive coordinator Woody Widenhofer. For better or worse, their wish may be granted.
This most recent palace coup was surrounded by a weird aura; yet it seemed inevitable. On the one hand, Dowhower had completed only two years of his five-year contract (which was still better than the percentage of passes his teams completed). At most collegiate football outposts, unless their players are discovered importing heroin or selling off the campus Tri-Delts as love-slaves, even the most ineffectual coaches manage to linger around at least three years—and usually longer.
Watson Brown, the last Vandy coach to be sacked before Dowhower, took four seasons to win as many games as Rod claimed in two. Yet Brown’s amply deserved dismissal provoked great wailing and angst. When the Turk came for Dowhower, his removal was unmourned and even celebrated.
On the other hand, Brown’s teams were at least exciting: They might have surrendered 35 points per game, but they were capable of scoring almost that many too. Dowhower never even passed Go.
Given his coaching knowledge, you’d have thought Dowhower’s Commodores might have developed a short-passing attack to compensate for their lack of talent or experience, or at least that their offensive execution might have been crisper. Instead, on their better days Vandy’s offense was merely boring. The rest of the time, they were absolutely painful for even neutral observers to watch. The ’Dores brought the myth of Sisyphus to life: Every time they managed with great grunts and heaves to move the boulder five yards forward, it would come tumbling 10 back.
But the fatally flawed offense ultimately wasn’t Dowhower’s fatal offense. The larger failing—and an instructive one now for Vandy’s new athletic director, Todd Turner—is that Dowhower simply wasn’t adequate for the job.
Off the field, Dowhower is a pleasant, generally soft-spoken man. On the field, he’s a skillful deviser of game plans. Those two talents will carry you only so far as a head coach, a position that demands the skills of an impresario, a master politician, a tireless promoter, and an indefatigable hustler.
Dowhower wore the top coach’s headset, but he could never escape an assistant’s mindset; he held onto the position, offensive coordinator, for which he ultimately was best suited. By the halfway point of this season, there didn’t seem to be much fire in his belly. It had been replaced with indigestion.
According to families of prospective recruits, Dowhower sounded like someone trying to sell young men on the virtues of mortician school. In what must have been the final straw for Turner, the coach apparently began telling his assistants that he’d understand if they jumped to other jobs.
Finally, like some condemned prisoner who begs the warden not to delay his appointment with Ol’ Sparky, Dowhower greeted his doom with fatalistic relief. He seemed ready to retire to some quiet, grassy pasture—which is about where he ended up in his new assignment as a special assistant for facilities planning.
There is every reason to believe that Widenhofer, who in the eyes of the fans and media had already surpassed Dowhower as Vanderbilt’s coaching star, will be the new anointed one. That decision, which might be announced by the time you read this, carries with it both a certain logic and some potential risks.
For Turner, handing the keys to Woody would be the least brain-taxing of his options. In one swoop, he could mollify Vanderbilt fans, and he could avoid the effort of a search process.
Besides, Turner genuinely might need look no further than down the hall at McGugin. Plenty of other programs, including Pittsburgh and Michigan, have come courting Widenhofer. As coaching properties go, he’s in high demand right now, and if Vanderbilt doesn’t offer him the big job, someone else will scarf him up faster than you could say, “Lost opportunity.”
Then there’s the advantage of continuity. By promoting Widenhofer and retaining most of the rest of the coaching staff, Vandy could minimize the impact of having three different head coaches in four seasons. The players—who already love Woody in the same way that Confederate soldiers loved Robert E. Lee—wouldn’t have to acclimate themselves to a new coach’s style and system.
At the same time, for all of the Commodore Club crowd, who view Widenhofer as a magic cure-all, history provides little comfort. They’ve been down this cul-de-sac before.
When the George MacIntyre regime ended with a whimper, Watson Brown was heralded as the true messiah. Another coach and much ugly football later, Dowhower was hailed as the man who would fill the air with footballs and make the weekly wakes at Dudley Field at least a little more exciting.
The Dowhower debacle also suggests that, to be successful, a college coach should have recent experience with the college game—something Widenhofer lacks. Before arriving in the shark-infested SEC, Dowhower had been swimming for 15 seasons around the NFL, where he didn’t have to fret over recruiting, relating to teenagers, or negotiating the admissions gauntlet, which is particularly torturous at Vanderbilt. In hindsight, for whatever it’s worth, Mike Riley, the imaginative offensive coordinator for Southern Cal and a rival candidate to Dowhower in 1995, would have been a more logical choice.
As Gerry DiNardo proved (especially at LSU), assistants sometimes make good head coaches. Frequently, as Dowhower demonstrated, they make lousy ones.
So if there’s any certainty about Widenhofer’s chances of success, it’s that there are no certainties. Regardless of his, or any new coach’s talents, a Woody administration would enjoy only middling prospects without more support from the Joe Billy Wyatt administration.
Little birds flittering around Kirkland Hall say that, in spite of strong recommendations from the Vanderbilt Board of Trust’s Committee on Athletics, the school continues to turn up its nose at athletes who represent “special cases” but who could most likely handle Vandy’s rigorous academic demands if given the opportunity. DiNardo, who won admission for more recruits with marginal test scores than any other Vanderbilt football coach, was relentless in working through the Kirkland minefield. That quality will be absolutely essential for Widenhofer.
In the new coach’s favor, the pressure to win at Vanderbilt, compared to other SEC schools, is way down the barometer. Vandy alums just want a coach who won’t make their own collective backside look bad.
Still, last week’s events may eventually be seen as a turning point for the school’s tumbledown football house. As a newcomer, Todd Turner could have simply waited one more year to make the inevitable coaching change. Instead, he sent a signal that, under him, Vanderbilt won’t be content to play out a losing hand. The people who have walked in darkness may, after all, see a great light.
