The athletic director at a major university in the Sunflower State fires his football coach with three games remaining in the season.
Did this week’s action by Kansas State athletic director Bob Krause sound familiar?
Seven years ago, Kansas athletic director Al Bohl did the same thing.
On Wednesday, Krause fired Ron Prince following a 52-21 loss to archrival Kansas. Bohl had decided to fire Terry Allen after a 40-6 loss to Kansas State in 2001.
Prince was canned with three games remaining in the season. So was Allen.
Although Allen wasn’t officially pink-slipped until after the Jayhawks’ 51-7 loss to Nebraska, word had leaked out before the NU game that Bohl had made up his mind in the wake of Allen’s fifth straight loss to Kansas State.
Allen never defeated K-State in five tries. In fact, he never came close, losing by scores of 48-16, 54-6, 50-9, 52-13 and finally 40-6.
Prince, meanwhile, never won against Kansas, losing 39-20 two years ago, 30-24 last season and 52-21 on Saturday.
While Prince apparently will coach the Wildcats in their last three games, Allen was not given the same opportunity by Bohl. Allen was replaced by assistant head coach and defensive coordinator Tom Hayes.
No one connected with KU athletics ever said for the record why Allen wasn’t allowed to continue to coach the Jayhawks down the stretch, but it was speculated Bohl and his advisers convinced Allen it would save him a lot of call-in, Internet and media grief if he stepped down.
With Hayes in charge during that November interim, the Jayhawks were clobbered by Texas, 59-0, and thumped by Iowa State, 49-7, before pinning Wyoming, 27-14, in front of fewer than 10,000 fans in Memorial Stadium.
The Wyoming game had been postponed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.
Today Allen is head coach at Missouri State, an NCAA Bowl Subdivision school. The Bears have a 3-5 record at this stage of the season. One of the defeats, incidentally, was a season-opening 35-27 loss to Washburn.
Allen’s legacy is that he was the only KU football coach to post five consecutive losing seasons, and the only KU football coach in modern times who was fired during a season and replaced by an interim.
Hayes remained in Lawrence for a few years after Mark Mangino was hired in December of 2001 and managed a watering hole on the city’s west side. In 2005, Hayes left to join the Stanford University staff. A year later, he became secondary coach of the New Orleans Saints, but the Saints fired him in January.
Bohl, who was removed by KU chancellor Robert Hemenway in the spring of 2003, lives in St. Augustine, Fla. He and his son Brett operate The Bohl Group Inc., a consulting firm with a focus on fundraising, motivational speaking and direct sales.
