CCU coach decision troubling

The hiring of a 62-year-old Wall Street CEO as head football coach at Coastal Carolina raises a series of questions that run much deeper than the future of a single athletic program at a local college.

We are expected to believe that replacing a head coach who started the program and won four conference titles in nine years with a man who left coaching 27 seasons ago is a smart move.

And what of that particular man? A cursory look at Joe Moglia’s history reveals that in that college coaching career that ended 27 years ago, Moglia never coached at a school that even gives out athletic scholarships. His resume states that his only college experience at even a coordinators level was at Dartmouth College from 1981 to 1983. Those Dartmouth teams finished 6-4, 5-5 and 4-5-1. His one year of head coaching experience with a semi-pro football team in Omaha last year yielded a 1-4 record. But he’s the man to improve on David Bennett’s 7-4 2011season?

So how is the Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Moglia going to come across on the recruiting trail with South Carolina high school football coaches? He said at his press conference that he plans to use his own money if necessary to pay top assistant coaches. This on the very day that The Sun News reports that the University of Georgia has been punished by the NCAA for violating rules when head football coach Mark Richt supplemented his assistants’ salaries with his own personal funds. And we are to believe Moglia will convince a higher quality of high school athlete to come accept a Coastal Carolina scholarship than David Bennett?

This whole thing reminds me of another local sports farce. Remember the great publicity last year over the news that the multi-millionaire, out-of-town owner of the Myrtle Beach Pelicans, Chuck Greenberg, had just bought the Texas Rangers and was going to “upgrade” the Pelicans by kicking out the Atlanta Braves as the only major league affiliate our Pelicans had ever known and replacing them with his new team, the Rangers. It was going to be nirvana, we were told, having the Rangers and Pelicans owned by the same man. It would bring us so many benefits that the Braves couldn’t. And then before the Pelicans first season with Texas even began, Greenberg was unceremoniously fired as Rangers CEO. So much for all that hype. You think if we beg the Braves they’ll come back?

My prediction is that, like Greenberg in Texas, Moglia never makes it to his first game as the Chanticleer’s head football coach. Another look at his history reveals that prior to his one five-game season with the Omaha semi-pro team, he accepted the head-coaching job with a semi-pro team in Virginia Beach, and then quit six weeks later before ever coaching a single game. When he leaves, you think if we beg David Bennett he’ll come back?

But the biggest issues this brings up are far more important than just a game like football. If the people who are running Coastal Carolina University managed to pull something like this in full view of the public and media, what of the many decisions made every day at this taxpayer-subsidized public university that we never hear about? It certainly stretches the imagination to believe that a braintrust that pulls something like this is routinely showing sound judgment when no one is looking, with a budget of over $100 million a year and the lives of more than 8,000 students.

The writer lives in Surfside Beach.