I don’t know what to think about anything regarding the coaching search at the moment. I know even less about the whole deal with Dana Holgorsen, WVU, Oliver Luck and Bill Stewart.

Was Pitt looking at and trying to get Dana Holgorsen? Yeah. I do think that. At the very least, there was strong interest in him and Pitt had discussed things with him. That’s about as far as I’m willing to go with it. I don’t think contract was even close to being worked out, and I’m not even sure the job was actually offered to him. But I’m reasonably sure they talked.

On the West Virginia side of things, there was plenty of dissatisfaction with Bill Stewart that rivaled the Pitt fans dissatisfaction with Wannstedt. Remember that before the Backyard Brawl, there was less than a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the losing coach could find himself out of a job. Heck, even after winning, a “rumor” suddenly was circulating that Stewart would retire after this season.

In fact, it was just as obvious to their new AD Oliver Luck, that there was a growing issue with a reported 10,000 plus no-show for the season finale against Rutgers. A very unnerving sight.

It has been very obvious that Luck was not enamored with Stewart. It now appears that Dana Holgorsen has been in Luck’s mind for some time. The two go back to Luck’s time in Houston. He had gotten to know Holgorsen when Holgorsen was the OC at Texas Tech and Houston.  And as details are now emerging, clearly he had been getting ready to get Holgorsen sooner.

Holgorsen, 39, and WVU Athletic Director Oliver Luck worked out the arrangement last week after an initial meeting between the two was canceled earlier this month. The two sides are said to be working toward a formal contract.

So if there had been talk with Holgorsen and Pitt, it could have been as much Holgorsen trying to force WVU’s hand and up the money.

And that appears to have worked..

Holgorsen reportedly has agreed to a six-year deal with WVU, the final five of those seasons as head coach.

According to the website OStateIllustrated.com, Holgorsen has agreed to a $750,000 deal at WVU for 2011, and then around $2 million annually once he becomes head coach in 2012.

If those numbers are accurate, that is a lot to pay for an assistant to become the HC. Of course part of it is to deal with being put in what is clearly an awkward situation — one that seems more likely to create some hard feelings.

Still that money jumps out. Oliver Luck is taking a big risk that this works. Spencer Hall at EDSBS wrote a great piece on Florida’s choice of hiring Will Muschamp. His thoughts on how the Florida AD was looking to find the equivalent of 1999 Florida DC Bob Stoops in 2010. But still it is a gamble.

The truth is that there are no guarantees, but the next truth is that Muschamp is even less of a guarantee than any of these because he has never been a head coach at any level before, and that thought alone should make Florida fans shit anvils this morning. Ours was magnificent: a weighty rhino’s head of finely hewn iron, it’s in the backyard lurking like the head of a great black Bullet Bill caught in mid-air. You’ll feel clean as well-maintained natural gas pipeline once you pass it.

The same was true of [NAME REDACTED,] and of Charlie Weis at Notre Dame. It was also true of Stoops when he took over at Oklahoma. To say you have any idea how this will turn out is insane, and enough wagering’s been done here. Let’s just leave it at what is known: he’s potentially brilliant, young enough to happily give the pound of flesh the job takes out of you, and is not demonstrably dumb like some people you’ve hired in the past. What is also known: this hire, unlike Foley’s last, is a massive roll of the dice on an unknown quantity, a naked skydive into a raging forest fire armed with a car-sized fire extinguisher compared to the easy nod to Urban Meyer in 2005. This simulation features live fire, bears, and the worst beast of all, real live existential dread of the unknown. That won’t pass for quite some time, we’re afraid.

Bruce Feldman at ESPN.com also has a piece on the hit and miss of coordinators and even elevating mid-major head coaches (Insider subs).

When athletic directors and college administrators interview coaching prospects they try and determine whether they have the right guy and a good fit by seeing if the candidate has a vision and a plan, but while much of that stuff sounds great in theory until they’re actually doing the job — making the decisions, dealing with the headaches — you don’t truly know what you have.

In the past decade or so, it’s such a mixed bag of high-profile former coordinators who have thrived or flopped as head coaches, you can’t say with much clarity who will succeed and who won’t.

Among the ones who hit: Mark Dantonio, Kyle Whittingham, Chip Kelly, Dan Mullen, Bret Bielema, Skip Holtz, Bo Pelini, Bobby Petrino and Gene Chizik.

Among the ones who missed: Greg Robinson, Chuck Long, Mike Sanford, Mark Snyder, JD Brookhart, Ted Roof, Nick Holt and Randy Shannon.

The jury is still out: Mike Stoops, Jimbo Fisher, Charlie Strong, Mike Locksley, Lane Kiffin, Sonny Dykes, DeWayne Walker, Steve Sarkisian and a few others.

Part of the reason is the change in the way you have to do things. But also it concerns how you decide on the staff.

From my observations, the most critical part of taking over as a first-time head coach is your staff and who you surround yourself with. I’ve seen firsthand what can happen when staff chemistry goes awry. You get the job and the guys you plan on hiring, whose names you jotted down on the notebook paper before you interviewed with the college brass that was thinking of hiring you, well, those coaches aren’t actually coming to work for you. A few might. A few get cold feet. Their families don’t want to move. Others who are also on the staff you’re coming from see the opportunity they may have with you leaving. Or the coaches who you worked with 15 years ago, when you were both grad assistants, recall what you were like back then and decide you might not be such a good boss.

Instead, you get the guys who you can get. Maybe you bring some grad assistants with you and promote them up for their first time as full-time assistants coaching a position, running their own positional meetings and being out on the road recruiting on their own.

You’re learning on the job. Your assistants are learning on the job. Mistakes happen. You feel like you can’t trust some of the guys you have on staff, so you bring in other guys later on who you know, older guys who need a break. You know them. You feel like you can trust them. Problem is, they don’t run the stuff scheme-wise that you want to run, so you have them clinic with other staffs or a consultant for a two-day cram session. Now, you’ve got a 25-year assistant whose whole world has been built around running The Power and he’s trying to grasp zone blocking or to figure out the nuances of a 3-3 stack defense. More mistakes happen. Big mistakes.

You’re frazzled. You don’t react to players the way you did as an assistant.

Meanwhile, the administration is getting jittery. They’re meddling. Promises aren’t kept. It starts getting real tense. Coaches’ families see it. The players see it. Soon, it’s toxic.

Welcome to the worst case scenario.