So University of Minnesota president Eric Kaler has appointed another search committee to find a permanent athletic director, and if that committee is as successful as previous ones to hire football coaches and especially athletic directors, it will be a total failure.

At least the athletic directors they've hired without search committees, guys like Rick Bay, Mark Dienhart and Paul Giel, did a pretty good job.

But the hiring of football coaches has been a complete flop when the university uses a search committee, except for Murray Warmath, Glen Mason and Lou Holtz.

The best example of a search committee failure was the hiring of Tim Brewster, when the Gophers had a two-person committee of Joel Maturi and Kathy Brown, which I believe Brown dominated. Brewster was hired even though coaches like Gary Patterson of TCU, who turned the job down once and then wanted to accept the position, wasn't hired; and Charlie Strong, who at the time was a defensive coordinator for Lou Holtz at Notre Dame, wasn't even considered.

Why would any successful athletic director, who has a good job that pays well, consider the Minnesota job that will take the biggest rebuilding job of most any athletic department in the country?

Memo to Kaler: Your present interim athletic director Beth Goetz, is probably as good as anybody you could hire. However if you wanted to do a real successful, hire a local businessman like Pete Najarian, Bob Stein, Dave Mona, Jim Carter or a similar person who knows the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies in this town and could do a better job than anybody you hire from the outside. Anyone hired from a college or university on the outside would only take the job because they are a failure at their current position.