BOWLING GREEN — Knock me over with a peregrine feather, credit Bowling Green for the bold audible Sunday.
Rather than carrying on a charade to its inevitable end, the university made the difficult but right decision to fire Falcons football coach Mike Jinks.
The midseason move was distinctly out of character for an athletic department known to scour the sofa cushions for loose change.
Not long ago, if you had told me Bowling Green would dismiss its highest-paid coach halfway through the third season of a five-year, $2.1 million deal, I would have said someone on the Ay Ziggy Zoomba message board must have won the Powerball.
Except these were not ordinary circumstances.
We don’t know what sealed the abrupt announcement, other than another defeat — a 42-35 loss Saturday to Western Michigan at half-empty Doyt Perry Stadium — in a tenure filled with them. Athletic director Bob Moosbrugger was not immediately available for comment. We’ll hear from him Monday, including the details of a booster-funded buyout.
But we do know this: With apathy at an all-time high and the program at an all-time low — with boosters bailing on Jinks and the Falcons bailing water amid the worst three-year stretch in school history — Bowling Green could not let a badly misguided hire continue to set it back.
To allow what one top booster called a “total train wreck” continue off the rails would have done no one any good. Not a program that can now turn its attention the next six weeks to identifying and vetting a pool of candidates. Not Jinks, a good man we wish the best.
In the end, Jinks was a bad fit in over his head.
Not a bad coach. Just a bad coach for Bowling Green.
Think back to Jinks’ bizarre appointment in December, 2015.
With Bowling Green fresh off a Mid-American Conference title powered by one of the country’s highest-flying offenses, then-AD Chris Kingston wanted to keep a good thing going. So he Googled which team had the best offense that year, noted it was Texas Tech, and essentially targeted the top Red Raiders assistant he could afford.
Conservatively speaking, it was the dumbest coaching search in college football history.
Never mind that Jinks — then the 43-year-old running backs aide at Tech — was a career Texas high school coach with three years of college experience, none as a coordinator. Or that Texas Tech didn’t even run the same scheme as Bowling Green — no small thing if continuity was the main selling point. Or that Jinks had never so much as set foot in Ohio. Or that one BG insider told me Jinks had given so little thought to becoming a head coach that he did not have the standard, ready-to-go list of assistants he planned to hire.
As the resident smartest man in the world, Kingston decided none of that mattered. He saw a sharp, well-respected assistant and charismatic recruiter, and, fit be damned, brought him to Ohio.
Unfortunately, foresight proved 20-20.
Jinks threw together a wet-behind-the-headset staff that counted seven first-time Division I coaches, none with Ohio ties, and a program that won two of the last three conference titles set off on a one-way trip to the bottom.
This was a make-or-get fired season, Jinks given one more chance to win with a recalibrated staff and three classes of his own recruits. You know the rest. Still the same issues bedeviled, writ large as ever. Little discipline (BG ranks 100th in penalty yards), less defense (124th), no reasons for supporters to believe. Bowling Green (7-24 the last three seasons) had become the Rutgers (7-24) of the MAC.
This was a necessary step on the road back.
Unlike Rutgers, which intends to fall further behind with third-year coach Chris Ash despite the same air of inevitability, credit Bowling Green for the aggressive audible.
The most needed call of the season yet.
Contact David Briggs at: dbriggs@theblade.com, 419-724-6084, or on Twitter @DBriggsBlade.
First Published October 14, 2018, 11:37 p.m.
