Hey Buffaloes: meet big data.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS biz

WANT TO MAKE A FEW MILLION BUCKS? Get hired as the University of Colorado's head football coach. Then get fired.

That's the path that has enriched the last three coaches who guided the Buffaloes' football program. Gary Barnett walked away with $3 million when he was fired in 2005. Dan Hawkins collected $2 million when he was shown the door in 2010. In November, CI: paid former coach on Embree $1.5 million when it terminated his three-year contract a year early.

That's $6.5 million paid out to three individuals in exchange for NOT coaching the CU football team. Colorado is always looking for growth industries LO bring good jobs to our state. By gum, I think we've found one.

It wouldn't be so farcical except for two facts. First, colleges fire football coaches with regularity, not just at CU but across the college gridiron kingdom. From 1997 through 2010, 117 Football Bowl Subdivision universities we used to call them Division I-A teams--gave the axe to coaches on 150 different occasions for performance reasons. That's according to a provocative study published in October in the academic journal Social Science Quarterly.

Second, as the same study indicates--and this is where that $6.5 million starts to sting--replacing coaches doesn't make college football teams any better than teams that stick with their existing coach.

You read that right. As tempting as it is go invest: great hope in the next new coach, an exhaustive analysis of data tracking 1,643 cases over a 14-Year period shows that coaching replacements had little impact for poor-perlbrming teams compared to other struggling teams that didn't replace their coach. For average teams, the study found replacing a head coach actually resulted in worse performance compared to teams that kept their coach.

Ouch.

It so happens that the study's lead author is employed by CU. E. Scott Adler, an associate professor of political science at CU's Boulder campus, is a University of Michigan graduate and a Wolverines football fan who specializes in the study of organizational leadership succession. His new book. "Congress and the Politics of Problem-Solving," examines how the electoral replacement of lawmakers does (or doesn't.) impact policy change.

Adler notes there are often extenuating...