The famous theologian C.S. Lewis once said, “Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”
Kliff Kingsbury will be the first person to acknowledge that the 2014 Texas Tech football season was an abject failure. He is angry and embarrassed about being the head coach of the team that won the fewest games of any Red Raider team in a quarter of a century.
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However, as C.S. Lewis points out, failures can be redeemed if they are used as an opportunity to learn and improve. And that is exactly what it appears that Kingsbury has been doing since the end of the 2014 season.
If he learned nothing else from last season’s 4-8 debacle, it appears that the 36-year-old coach learned that no amount of charisma, style, attractiveness or “swag” can mask a losing season. That’s why the only head coach in a “power 5” conference under the age of 40 has purposefully flown under the radar in 2015.
To be fair, Kingsbury did not plan to promote himself as a GQ Ryan Gosling clone, nor did he expect the media to fawn over him at all. At the age of 34, during his first season as a head coach at any level of football, Kingsbury simply acted like himself naïvely thinking that he would be judged as a football coach not as a pop culture figure.
But despite a successful first season, that included a Holiday Bowl victory, Kingsbury could not shake the “coach cool” label. Then, when last season imploded, everyone from the media to colleagues to even Tech fans started to use Kingsbury’s persona against him.
In September of last year, Barry Tramel of The Oklahoman newspaper penned an article calling the Tech head coach the “Anna Kournikova of college football,” because just like the Russian tennis player who was beautiful enough to attract world-wide media adoration despite never winning a professional tournament; Kingsbury was being over hyped by the media for his good looks despite his lack of a successful track record.
"Country singer Jake Owen, while on ESPN’s “College Gameday Live” program said of Kingsbury, “I have a hard time pulling for a team where I feel like the coach spends more time looking in the mirror than pulling for his guys.”"
Just as an aside, if you do not know who Jake Owen is, do an online image search for him and ask yourself how much time you think he spends in front of a mirror.
I experienced the same backlash against Kingsbury in person. Sitting next to a group of crotchety old men during a Tech home loss last year, I heard them yelling at Kingsbury to spend less time on his hair and more time watching game film.
Apparently, this image has come to bother Kingsbury. Actually it always has.
Just months after being hired by Tech, the new head coach asked for any memorabilia featuring his likeness or referring to his appearance (“Our coach is hotter than your coach” was a popular t-shirt among female Tech fans) be taken off the shelves so that the focus could be on the university.
However, Kingsbury also knew that the best way to draw attention to his program, the most geographically isolated in major college football, was to get on TV and social media as often as he could. Thus he played along with the media’s obsession with his style and good looks.
But, 2015 has been different. Humbled by a 4-8 season and more wise to the challenges of being a head coach, Kingsbury has stayed off of television and out of the limelight.
Kingsbury’s only public appearance this offseason has been his mandatory appearance at Big 12 media days. However, he skipped the opportunity to spend a day at the ESPN studios to appear on various radio and TV shows because he wanted to be on campus to meet with recruits.
There have been no shirtless photos of him at the pool, no dance competitions after practice and no over-the-top antics such as the ice bucket challenge he orchestrated during which he called out Beyonce.
Now, Kingsbury seems to have reinvented himself in an attempt to resurrect the Texas Tech football program.
Kingsbury told the Dallas Morning News. “We’re just grinding. None of us were happy with the way things worked out. It’s kind of a decision with the way things went last year. We want a workmanlike attitude.”
But will this new version of Kingsbury translate to success on the field? In 2014, Tech finished 119th in turnover margin (-1.08 per game) and 124th of 125 teams with 9.33 penalties per game.
Experts attribute these woeful stats to a lack of maturity in the team and most take the leap that the “players coach” relaxed attitude of Kingsbury and his young coaching staff were responsible for the team’s self-inflicted mistakes. Thus, Kingsbury has been more workmen like this offseason and he has conscientiously added experience to his coaching staff in the form of 47-year-old defensive coordinator David Gibbs, who has coached in the NFL and has the reputation of coaching defenses that create numerous turnovers.
It is safe to say that Kingsbury’s honeymoon with the Tech fans and the national media is over. He must find a balance between staying true to himself, but being purposeful with his image and what he lets the public see.
"Matt Hinton of ESPN.com’s Grantland sums up the new version of Kliff Kingsbury best, “…until the record improves and the Red Raiders regain some measure of relevance in the Big 12, if blue-collar rhetoric is what the skeptics need to hear to be assured their head man is maturing into the kind of sober, straitlaced chief who fits the standard head-coaching mold, then that’s what they’re going to get.”"