The football coaching carousel began its annual spin this week with the firings of Kansas’ Turner Gill, Illinois’ Ron Zook, and UCLA’s Rick Neuheisel, among others. U.N.I. coach Mark Farley, who is in his 11th year of leading the Panthers, says that coaching can be a rough business.
“Honestly you feel sick for those guys, even if you don’t know them personally,” Farley says. He says everyone wants to win right now and have the high of winning, but he says it is not easy to do.
Farley says that he’s thankful to have had the chance to be in a situation where success has been the standard, and to not have to try to turn around a losing program. “What we need to appreciate here and what I sense here is how lucky you are, we have a tradition of winning, we win and we expect to win,” Farley says, “where some people are trying to build something and it takes time to build something.”
Farley says that high expectations come with the territory when so much attention is paid to football programs across the country.
By Jesse Gavin, KCNZ, Cedar Falls