Why Brent Pry Failed

One fact about being a head coach is that you will most likely fail.

Sports is a very unique area of life in that it is a completely zero-sum endeavor. In the corporate world, two businessmen could go home happy after a deal even if one is marginally wealthier than the other. This does not happen in sports, where every game must have a winner and a loser.

And since most fanbases demand consistent excellence, most coaches will be deemed losers. As a fan, you expect your team to win many games. But so do fans of every other team. Thus, something must give. It is a tough profession, sure. But without failure — lots of it, in fact — there would be no barometer to judge success.

Brent Pry is no longer the head football coach at Virginia Tech. He joins a long list of coaches who could not hack a profession in which nearly two-thirds of employees will someday be fired. Where exactly did things go wrong for Pry?

Today, the autopsy of yet another failed head coach.

Breaking Convention

We must concede that coaching hires are generally a crapshoot. But some hires are better than others, and it is my contention that Pry's hire should have raised some massive red flags, even if Hokie fans didn't see it at the time.

There's nothing wrong with hiring a first-time head coach (many are successful!). There is also nothing wrong with hiring a first-time coordinator — though admittedly, hiring two highly inexperienced coordinators while you are also learning on the job is a bit risky.

But as I wrote last year, Pry's hire was unconventional in two ways.

1) Age. At 52 years old, Pry was the oldest first-time head coach hired at the P4 level since at least 2012. The average head coach is hired at age 47; for first-timers specifically, it's 42.