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Karl Dorrell needs geek assistance, stat!

By DC Trojan

I was glancing at ESPN.com and noticed an article by Ivan Maisel about Karl Dorrell and his rotating cast of assistant coaches. Maisel was pretty fair-minded in pointing out that it's not unreasonable for a new-ish head coach to hire and eventually fire a few duds, and lose the good ones to the NFL or other college jobs. (Mind you, where was that good job merry-go-round for DeWayne Walker? I know that the Bruins got spanked by Florida State but come on people! He's a coach for the future, especially in a conference or league other than the PAC-10!)

I was struck that Dorrell's salary is low by college standards; it's certainly more than I am likely to make per annum, but then I don't have to take the abuse that Dorrell does. Actually, maybe he isn't getting paid enough after all:

UCLA scares off plenty of candidates because of the high cost of living in the Los Angeles area coupled with the state-run university's tradition of lagging behind the national market in coaching salaries. Take Dorrell. He is guaranteed $850,000 with incentives for another $505,000. Why, USC coach Pete Carroll has to work darn near till the end of May to make that kind of money.

And I bet Dorrell doesn't get a golden unicycle to get around campus. Hopefully they're telling him it's because of the hills.

However, this quote from Dorrell did give me pause for thought:

There are plenty of permutations of the West Coast offense, he said. The framework of the offense doesn't change.

"It's like Windows," Dorrell said. "It's an operating system, but you tailor it to what you think is important."

Oh Karl. Karl Karl Karl. That's a terrible metaphor. Windows is a pile of poo, needlessly complex because of the need to incorporate old versions underneath new versions, hopelessly erratic, and new editions are never as good as they would have you believe.

Well, maybe that is a better comparison than I thought. But still, Coach, reach higher. You could have picked Apple's Mac OS X Leopard, for instance. Superficially more sophisticated but running on fairly simple, robust code, with excellent marketing that suggests an overinflated sense of it's own worth, which in turn puts a lot of people off. Sort of like our football program, or your undergraduates.

Hell, even Ubuntu Linux would have been a better choice - not fancy, but stable, and the work of many people toiling in obscurity to come up with a darn good, stable system.

So. I thought that I would go and look up UCLA's computer science department to see if there was anyone who could perhaps help Coach Dorrell out. I think I may have found out why Coach isn't getting great advice - after the jump...


(Apologies for the slightly odd formatting, going from the laptop widescreen to a 4:3 format is what did it...)

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