If Stoops fired Shannon Dawson....

Chris Vannini--Rocky Long is never afraid to speak his mind, and as the coaching carousel gets underway, he had some pretty straightforward comments about coaching changes elsewhere.

How do you rebuild a program? As schools are less and less patient, simply making a change for the sake of change isn’t the answer.

“If you don’t win or don’t win quickly, people don’t buy tickets and you’re not on TV. The quickest way to change people buying tickets or change an attitude or get TV to put your games on is to get a brand-new shiny coach that is going to fix everything,” Long said with sarcasm this week.

“That's why old guys like me love being in coaching, because we did not come from that era.”

You have to have a coach with a plan, but you have to give him enough time to fully implement that plan.

“People are so impatient now,” he said. “There’s a lot guys out there that can turn program around, but they’re not given the opportunity to. The coach at Wyoming (Craig Bohl) who is struggling is one of the best coaches that has ever coached college football. If they don’t give him five years or six years to do it, he won’t get it done either. He won three straight national championships and lost two games in (three) years or something (at North Dakota State). Now he can’t coach? I’m sure people up there are upset and their record’s bad.

“Now, the (schools) hire new coaches, they expect you to fix it in a day. You don’t fix programs in a day. It takes you six, seven years to fix a program. That’s my belief. … You have to recruit players that fit your personality and schemes, and guess what? They’re not any good as freshmen. They’re not. It’s unfair to them. You have to wait until they’re third- and fourth-year guys before you can see if they can play or not. … It takes us three years to have a good player out there.”

As schools weigh the decision of making a change, it’s something to keep in mind. And for the ones that hire a new coach, will they give it a long-term approach?