If this were baseball, Temple University athletic director Arthur Johnson would have a pretty good batting average in major head coaching hires.

Home run with the women’s basketball hire, and two strikeouts (so far) with the other two people.

That’s a .333 average.

Baseball, a great average. Athletic directing, no so much.

Still, there are lessons in those three hires.

The two strikeouts came here as never leading a program as a head coach.

The home run, Diane Richardson, was an already established successful head coach in the same Mid-Atlantic region.

Richardson led her basketball women to an AAC championship in a couple of short years. Drayton has had two years of failure (3-9) and there are major questions about Adam Fisher and the men’s basketball program after it gave a clinic in matador defense on Thursday night in a 100-72 loss to visiting UAB. The lack of effort on defense was so appalling major questions were raised nationally.

The lesson is simply this.

If Drayton is not able to pull rabbit out of his hat in the form of a winning season, Johnson will have to look for the male version of Richardson: A successful coach with a history of knowing how to be a winning CEO elsewhere BEFORE coming to Temple. Also in that resume is an ability to successfully recruit the footprint–a 250-mile radius around Temple.

That’s one big part of the job.

The other big part is not having to learn on it.

When you have to learn to be a head coach while on the job, the guinea pig is Temple. That means the players and the fans.

Temple is paying for the on-the-job training and, if you are successful here, the likely beneficiary is another school who gets to hire the guy away from Temple. If you fail, Temple pays the price and no one benefits.

What the Richardson hiring proved, Towson paid for the on-the-job training and Temple was the beneficiary. That has always been my preference for the football program. Other schools, preferably nearby, should have paid for the training for a ready-made football head coach so no learning on the job was required.

That’s Athletic Directing 101 but since Johnson is also learning on the job, we can only pray the lessons are being absorbed and applied to future hires.

Monday: Speaking of Praying