Harbaugh was considered "too costly" by Gretchen Bataille, our President at the time. He basically used us for interview experience and got the Stanford job. RV basically realized that to keep his job, as always, he just had to stay in budget, so he hired Todd Dodge from Southlake Carroll, who brought over his coordinators from the high school to be our coordinators. The good news was that Dodge didn't cost us too much, so we fired him after he was deemed affordable to let go, as it only cost us $325k to fire him, after his spectacular 6-37 record. And thank goodness we didn't fire him after his third season, or else that $325k we saved by letting him coach again for a 4th season got us one extra win for Coach Dodge and it allowed us to have our best season since 2006, at 3-9.
RV got to keep his job as AD for another 9 years after hiring Dodge in 2007. Even though he hired the worst football coach in our history (Dodge), the worst women's basketball coach in our history (Shanice Stephens), and a men's basketball coach that absolutely destroyed a program that had been in the NCAA Tournament and had a great 5* recruit herein exactly one season (yet still got 5 years to coach). He was only let go after the 17 boosters he had fleeced for years to pay for access to our program decided that paying off the contract of Dan McCarney for over $2 million immediately following the worst loss in modern college football history on Homecoming against an FCS program in Portland State 66-7 was too much to swallow and eventually saw him leave in the spring of 2016.
No matter how frustrated anyone is with our athletic department right now, its light years better than it was back then.
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