I don't think Pinkel was afraid of change.

Posted on: August 25, 2016 at 16:20:26 CT

Here's what Pinkel required of his staff:

- do your evaluation and decide who are you best players at each your position. Explain and defend your decision.
- coach them up.
- if a player isn't living up to the expectation then there are two possibilities: 1. your evaluation was wrong then. Explain why your evaluation is right now? 2. you're not coaching them up.

That put a ton of responsibility on the individual coaches -- but Pinkel also gave them the freedom to make the evaluations and make those decisions. But he then held them accountable.

I think too often it would be easy for a position coach to say "the kid just can't do the job" -- well, then why did you think he could do the job earlier? If you thought the kid could do the job, have you then done everything you can for that kid to be successful?

That is a kind of loyalty that players do value - and it gives coaches a level of responsibility and freedom they say they want.