Kellenberger: JSU's firing of Jackson was inevitable
Harold Jackson is out as Jackson State's football coach, which just seems like the most obvious, inevitable thing ever, does it not?
This is not a slight to Jackson, who is by all accounts a very nice guy. He was offered a job in 2014 and took it. People get offered jobs they're not qualified for all the time. That's not their fault, even if in Jackson's case what followed was a 6-11 total record (and 1-4 this season). What else was going to happen when you hire a career assistant that had not coached in college since 2006 and who had spent two years in between then and Jackson State coaching minor league football?
Jackson was 68 and a first-time head coach that most recently had been living in Los Angeles. You pick that guy to replace Rick Comegy, who had taken JSU to two-straight SWAC championship games, and you get what you get.
The timing surprises me, because we are after all only five weeks into the season. But that the team is struggling? No, that does not. It was clear throughout the offseason Jackson was in over his head, and did not have a clear and viable path to fixing what went wrong during a 5-7 season in 2014 (including a loss to Comegy's Mississippi Valley State). It's one thing to give up 70 points in a pay-for-play game against Middle Tennessee State, but the Tigers also let Southern score 50 and Grambling 59. The latter, in a 32-point loss Saturday, turned out to be Jackson's last as head coach.
Jackson State fires Harold Jackson
This goes higher than Jackson, the same way it did when Comegy was let go. The problems at Jackson State are institutional. This is the same school that had an athletics director, Vivian Fuller, who had racked up at least six lawsuits against her and still got a 40 percent raise. Jackson State finally fired her earlier this year, except they did not so much fire her as they moved her to the student affairs department. So she's still around.
Robert Walker was the interim athletic director until last week, when he resigned citing a desire to spend more time with his family. So now it's Wheeler Brown, who was associate athletic director for compliance, running the department, again in an interim capacity.
So when will they hire an actual director? Word is that may not be until 2016. Who will make the hire to replace Jackson? The same people who hired him, I would guess. The same people who have run Jackson State, a program that has all kinds of advantages (population base, media attention, financial resources) over its SWAC competitors, down to this point. That's a shame. Jackson State's fans, and its football program, deserves better than this.