•••
When University of Oregon Head Football Coach Mike Bellotti decided to transition to his new position of Athletic Director on March 13, the Ducks didn’t have to look far to find his replacement. Offensive coordinator Chip Kelly had been named Oregon’s coach in waiting just more than three months prior. Kelly had been a prospect for other open head coaching positions, including one at Syracuse University, but in the end, the guarantee of one day taking over the Ducks’ successful program was too much to pass up.

Kelly’s hire marked the second football coach in waiting to move up to the head ranks this offseason, as Purdue University’s Danny Hope replaced former Head Coach Joe Tiller in December. A number of other schools, including Florida State University, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Texas, have similar succession plans in place.

Not everyone, though, is happy with this type of transition. While the NFL requires teams to interview minority applicants for open coaching positions, the idea of naming a successor without conducting a wide-ranging search irks some advocates for affirmative action.

“It's just not an open search,” Floyd Keith, president of Black Coaches and Administrators, told Inside Higher Ed. “It happens behind the door, and no one knows what actually goes on. For better or worse, that's not good for inclusion and diversity. It doesn't lend itself to what we're trying to accomplish.”

One expert, Richard E. Lapchick, Director of The Institute for Diversity & Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, has even called for an NCAA rule that requires colleges to interview minority candidates, just like in the NFL. According to Inside Higher Ed, however, Gary R. Roberts, Dean and Professor of Law and the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis, says coach in waiting scenarios are unlikely to raise any legal issues, provided colleges follow internal procedures.

“The idea of not doing a search is not foreign on college campuses, whether it’s in athletics or anything else,” Roberts told Inside Higher Ed.

However, naming a coach in waiting can have its advantages for an athletic program and for a team.

“The biggest advantage of being the coach-in-waiting is you get to do an inventory of the program from an in-house perspective,” Hope told ESPN.com. “You can see where every phase of the program is at. You can take a look at the players you already have and see if there's changes you can make to improve.”

For Texas Men’s Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds, one advantage of naming Will Muschamp as Mack Brown’s successor is avoiding the headaches that go along with the search process.

“It seemed to us that it was such a problem to go through all that [trouble] when the program's in good shape, and that you can train somebody from the inside and have a seamless kind of transition when the time came,” Dodds told the Washington Post. “So if the right person was in the ranks, it seemed to us that it was best to keep them there and grow them and put them in the position when the time came.”

For a school like Florida State, which is led by 79-year-old Bobby Bowden, naming a coach in waiting can help diffuse attempts by coaches at other schools to sway recruits by claiming Bowden won’t be around by the time they graduate.

“We put the university in the position to say, 'Hey, you're going to get to play under one of the winningest coaches in the history of college football and on top of that, you're going to get one of the fine, outstanding young coaches when he retires,’” former Interim Athletic Director Bill Proctor told the Washington Post.

In a twist on the trend, the University of Maryland showed its commitment to Offensive Coordinator James Franklin by promising to pay him $1 million if he is not eventually named the successor to current Head Coach Ralph Friedgen. Franklin, who has received at least one NFL assistant coaching offer, was named Maryland’s coach in waiting in February.

The trend is also present in collegiate basketball, as Pat Knight succeeded his father, Bob Knight, at Texas Tech University, and current assistant Mike Hopkins has been tapped as Jim Boeheim’s eventual replacement at Syracuse.

Mike Phelps is an Assistant Editor at Athletic Management.