After a few minutes to get the wheels spinning, a bit of conjecture:
- Someone has been hired, and for whatever reason the university and the coach aren't keen on letting us know about it. Either he's headed to a bowl and doesn't want/need the distraction for his team, or the deal has been done since earlier in the season (after the State loss?) and the university doesn't want the bad PR of replacing a coach on the sly in the middle of a season, especially if he manages a miracle win.
Update [2006-11-27 17:38:37 by Todd]:
More conjecture: It's unlikely that the university would wait until after the bowl season to announce a head coach, so could they be waiting a week until after the ACC Championship game to announce Jim Grobe? - Is Kines the interim head coach because he'll be retained by the new regime? It stands to reason that Rader wouldn't be since he's part of the offense that got us in this mess to begin with, but he's been a head coach while Kines has only been an interim HC at Arkansas and would be a more likely candidate to lead the team to a bowl. But if Rader is getting canned with the rest of the offensive staff by a new coach and Kines is being retained, then giving Kines the reigns makes more sense.
- If there isn't a new coach waiting in the wings, could Mal Moore have continued to handle this any more poorly? First, why isn't there? Letting Shula twist in the wind was bad enough, but taking that much time to decide to fire him without making sure there were a few fairly conrete hires out there is just foolishly irresponsible. Second, that was one of the worst press conferences I've ever seen. If there really were no contacts made yet, why would he say "we'll begin the process in the next day or so" like there's no rush, and why would he say "we'll make a list of who we want and in what order" and let potential hires know "hey, you weren't our first, or possibly second, third, fourth, etc choice"? Coaches are so ego driven I'd imagine we'd get turned down even if they did want to come here, just because they weren't the first choice.