Mason would like to get back on sideline

With the coaching carousel about to heat up, Glen Mason would like to hop on and get a job.

"But I am kind of a realist," he said. "When I got let go after 2006, people told me I did a great job at Minnesota and would get another chance to coach. You think someone would offer up a chance to coach, and more often than not it doesn't happen.

"I wasn't overly optimistic after 2006. And now I am more of a realist and I don't think it's going to happen."

Glen Mason was fired despite a 64-57 record and seven bowl bids at Minnesota.

Minnesota's decision to fire Mason after the Gophers blew a 38-7 lead in the 2006 Insight Bowl and lost 44-41 in overtime to Texas Tech led to the hiring of Tim Brewster. Brewster was fired in October after going 15-30 overall and 6-21 in the Big Ten.

"I think I was a 'surprise fire,' " Mason said. "We won our last three Big Ten games to get bowl-eligible [that year] and then lose to a good Texas Tech team. Then, they hire Tim Brewster. And three and a half years later, he's out. You can't keep making those type of decisions and accomplish what you want to accomplish."

Mason, 60, a former Ohio State player and assistant, was one of the most successful coaches in Minnesota history. From 1997-2006, he forged a 64-57 record and went to seven bowls. He led the Golden Gophers to 10 wins in 2003, notched victories at Penn State, Ohio State and Michigan and beat Arkansas, Oregon and Alabama in bowls. But school officials thought the program had gone stale and needed a new vision as it made a push toward the opening of an on-campus stadium.

Before taking the Minnesota job, Mason had success at Kent State and Kansas.

"A coaches' won-loss record can be misleading because it's harder to win at some places than others," said Mason, who is 123-121-1 in 21 seasons as a coach. "I won at three places that were perennial losers. When I left, they were consistent winners. And I did it the right way. I didn't break any rules and I had the respect of my colleagues."

Since leaving, Mason has worked for a financial company in the Twin Cities and as an analyst for the Big Ten Network. But he'd like to get back on the sideline.

"I have had a couple of inquires," Mason said. "But I have a pretty good thing going now. All of my kids live in Minnesota, so I wasn't just willing to go anywhere. After 21 years as a head coach, I'm not willing to go just any place to be a head coach."

Who does Mason think Minnesota should hire?

"There are a couple ways to look at it," he said. "I used to tell our coaches that there are two different kind of coaches: fundamentalists and schemers. I said we are going to be fundamentalists. We are going to coach football and take the best players we can get and improve them. It didn't matter how well we recruited at Minnesota, we weren't going to out-recruit Ohio State, Michigan or Penn State. They have a lot of built-in advantages. But we could recruit ... good, hard-nosed, hard-working kids who may have been a step slow or an inch short ... and we were going to develop them. That's what we did.

"That's what I believe Minnesota needs. You need someone who can go out and sell the school and get the best talent you can. But then you better have a guy who can really develop them."

Minnesota often is viewed as a difficult job. Indeed, the school has the longest Rose Bowl drought of any Big Ten school, last playing in Pasadena after the 1961 season. Getting to the Rose Bowl will be more difficult starting in 2011 with Nebraska joining the Big Ten.

"It's a lot better now because they have a stadium, which I never had," Mason said. "I always thought the biggest drawback we had was we played in the [Metro]dome. It wasn't on campus, it wasn't a collegiate atmosphere, we didn't control it. We had to compete for time with the Twins and Vikings.

"When we brought kids in for recruiting, it seldom was set up as a football field. It was set up for tractor pulls, snowmobile contests, they had a mum festival every year. We had to take prospects in there in that atmosphere. It was horrible. ... As far as I am concerned, it's a lot better situation now than when I was there."
Can Minnesota ever win the Big Ten title?

"Sure," Mason said. "I came close. We were positioned a couple times and we only have ourselves to blame. You just had to hang in there and believe. They need to make a thoughtful and educated decision on what needs to take place. Find that individual, and have everyone hang in there and go for it."

NC Sports clients: Four of top 10 Big Ten coaches of the decade

Big Ten coaches of the decade

________________________________________
By Adam Rittenberg

January 22, 2010

It's time to look back at the best Big Ten coaches of the decade. The top choice was a no brainer. After that, it gets interesting.

Here's a looksie:

1. Jim Tressel, Ohio State: Other than USC's Pete Carroll, no coach dominated a major conference this decade like Tressel dominated the Big Ten. Since 2001, Tressel has won a national title, six Big Ten titles (outright or shared), five bowls and four BCS bowls. He owns a 94-21 record at Ohio State, and, perhaps more impressive, a 59-13 mark in Big Ten play. This was unquestionably the decade of The Vest.

2. Kirk Ferentz, Iowa: Ferentz revived a struggling Iowa program this decade and restored the Hawkeyes among the Big Ten's elite. Since 2002, he has guided Iowa to two Big Ten championships, four seasons of 10 or more victories and eight bowl games, winning five of them. Iowa owns four top-10 finishes this decade under Ferentz, who gets a slight edge over Lloyd Carr.

3. Lloyd Carr, Michigan: It seems like a while since Michigan last won a Big Ten title, but Carr's teams claimed three of them (two shared, one outright) in the first half of the decade. Michigan finished first or second in the league in seven of the eight years Carr coached this decade. He struggled against Tressel and in the Rose Bowl, but Carr's accomplishments shouldn't be overlooked.

4. Joe Paterno, Penn State: Paterno is right up there with Tressel in the second half of the decade, winning two Big Ten championships and averaging 10.2 wins per season between 2005-09. Four losing seasons in the first half of the decade sting a bit, but JoePa is getting better with age!

5. Joe Tiller, Purdue: Tiller won his only Big Ten title in 2000, and Purdue reached bowl games in the first seven years of the decade. Purdue's all-time coaching victories leader made the Boilers into a consistent upper-half Big Ten team in the aughts.

6. Bret Bielema, Wisconsin: Bielema probably hates being listed ahead of his boss and predecessor, but his record in the past four years speaks for itself. He owns a 38-14 record at Wisconsin (20-12 Big Ten) and has taken the Badgers to bowl games each year. Bielema coached Wisconsin's best team of the decade in 2006, a squad that went 12-1 and finished seventh in the final AP Poll.

7. Barry Alvarez, Wisconsin: Alvarez was arguably the Big Ten's Coach of the 1990s, and he kept the program among the league's elite until he stepped down following the 2005 season. He had three seasons of eight or more victories and won three bowls during the decade. Alvarez's best season this decade came in his last, as Wisconsin went 10-3 and beat Auburn in the Capital One Bowl.

8. Glen Mason, Minnesota: Mason coached Minnesota to six bowls in seven years until his dismissal after the 2006 Insight Bowl. He oversaw one of the nation's top rushing attacks this decade as backs Laurence Maroney and Marion Barber III piled up yardage. Mason had a 10-win season in 2003, but his inability to get Minnesota to the next level led to his firing. He went just 24-32 in Big Ten play this decade.

9. Mark Dantonio, Michigan State: Dantonio has stabilized a Michigan State program that really underachieved for most of the decade. The Spartans have reached bowls in each of Dantonio's three seasons as head coach. Dantonio owns a 13-11 mark in Big Ten play, which is much better than his predecessors.

10. Pat Fitzgerald and Randy Walker, Northwestern: The two Wildcats coaches share this spot after bringing consistency to a program that reached historic lows before 1995. Walker won a Big Ten championship in 2000 and took NU to three bowls in six years this decade. Fitzgerald, who took over after Walker's sudden death in 2006, owns 17-9 record (10-6 Big Ten) in the last two seasons. Expect him to be much higher on this list in the next decade recap.

Mason leads KU to ranking

By Tully Corcoran

September 17, 2009

17 YEARS AG0 | Sept. 19, 1992

LAWRENCE -- A 49-7 win at Oregon State didn't do it, and neither did a 62-10 home win over Ball State.

But on Sept. 19, 1992, Kansas coach Glen Mason led the Jayhawks to a 40-7 win against Tulsa, which propelled KU into the Associated Press Top 25 for the first time since 1976, breaking a 16-year drought that remains the longest in school history.

And, wouldn't you know it, No. 24 KU lost to Cal the next week and fell right back out.

The Jayhawks finished the season at No. 22. It was a year that included an Aloha Bowl win, which was KU's first bowl berth since 1981, and a win against Kansas State, which would be KU's last until 2004.

Glen Mason, Tom Moe, Mark Dienhart paved way for Gophers' new on-campus football stadium

Moe, Dienhart, Mason, saw need for campus facility

By Marcus R. Fuller

September 8, 2009

University of Minnesota men's athletic director Tom Moe answers questions from the media during a press conference Friday at the Gibson-Nagurski Football Complex. (Staff)

Tom Moe had been the Gophers' interim athletics director less than a week when he made his dream about bringing football back to campus public in 1999.

"It caught the president's (Mark Yudof) attention, because it really came like a shot out of the blue," said Moe, who eventually took over a year later and served until 2002. "He called me and said, 'As I understand it, you're interested in seeing a football stadium built on our campus.' I said, 'Absolutely.' He said, 'If you're going to talk about it, then you have to make sure that it's your idea and not mine.' He didn't want to be associated with any kind of stadium discussion, at least at that point."

The discussion didn't end there.

Moe, a Gophers football most valuable player in 1959 and a member of the national championship baseball team in 1960, is proud the Gophers finally will have a place to call home on campus when they open TCF Bank Stadium on Saturday against Air Force.

Moe, 71, doesn't take credit for being the person who got it all started. But he certainly feels surreal about it actually coming to fruition.

"I was very passionate about the importance of a stadium, and I couldn't be more excited about it all coming together," he said. "Now, we're ready to play our first game there."

Moe could have been turned off by Yudof's initial lack of interest in a new stadium. Instead, he became even more outspoken.

"In the following months that I was there, and I was there almost three years, I don't know how many groups I spoke to throughout the state of Minnesota," Moe said. "It must have been 75 different groups during that three-year period, at least. Each time at some point during the talk, I would focus on the importance to the university of having a stadium on our campus. I stressed the financial advantages of doing so and also, more importantly, the atmosphere and collegiate feel that would be created by an on-campus stadium that we could possibly replicate."

Mark Dienhart, whom Moe replaced as athletics director in 1999, said he was in favor of the Gophers playing on campus, but he didn't think fans cared as much about it with the program struggling to win.

Dienhart said former Gophers coach Glen Mason was the catalyst of the stadium talk.

"I would be overstating my involvement to say that me talking about it had any real impact," said Dienhart, who was AD from 1995-99. "Then Mason all of a sudden beat Penn State when it was ranked No. 2. After a couple more years, he beat Michigan and Ohio State. That had people thinking the program wasn't preordained to be a bottom feeder."

Mason said he first unintentionally pushed for a new stadium at a Rotary Club event in 1998.

"Someone asked me about the Dome, and in a moment of weakness I told them exactly what I thought, that it wasn't the best situation and we needed our own place on campus," he said. "I was the first one speaking about it, the only one speaking at the time. In my mind, it was a no-brainer. I didn't want the guy following me to say we never addressed the issues of this program. Then, when Tom Moe became AD, he shared the same views I did. In fact, he was the one that was outspoken."

One of the first orders of business for Moe as interim AD was to extend Mason's contract. He had earned Big Ten coach of the year honors in 1999 after leading Minnesota to eight wins and its best season in 32 years.

Moe said Mason thought the Metrodome really hurt his recruiting.

"He said we had numerous letters and explanations from players we were trying to recruit in those years who would decide to go somewhere else," Moe said. "They said one of the major reasons was the fact that we didn't have our own stadium on campus. They would compare the excitement that you would experience at Iowa City and Madison on game day to downtown Minneapolis."

Mason bringing the Gophers to a competitive level helped attract fans who weren't that involved before, but Moe said many long-time supporters always wanted to move back.

"They were looking for a glimmer of hope," Moe said, "to be able to come back, be involved and show their support for the university. I can't tell you the positive reception I was seeing over and over from groups throughout the state, whenever I talked about the need for the stadium. I don't ever remember receiving a negative response."

Moe never planned on getting involved with Gophers athletics after his playing days, let alone becoming such an instrumental force in bringing attention to on-campus football.

After spending 40 years at the Dorsey & Whitney law firm in Minneapolis, he had retired and expected to move to Palm Desert, Calif., with his wife when Yudof called about the AD job.

Moe didn't accept the job to push for a new stadium, but that became his goal.

He recalled being a young lawyer in 1980 when the Gophers were talking about leaving Memorial Stadium, where he played from 1957-59, to a stadium in downtown Minneapolis.

"I felt so strongly about it at that time that I wrote a lengthy letter to the board of regents outlining why I thought it would be a huge mistake," Moe said. "I retained that view the entire time we were at the Metrodome. While I hadn't planned on being an AD, when the job came to me, I figured it was a great opportunity to use that position to express that view to the community and to the administration."

It fell on deaf ears at first, but eventually the higher-ups listened.

Current university President Bob Bruininks, who was hired in 2002 and fully supported current AD Joel Maturi's stadium efforts, said he was inspired by Moe's words.

"I think it's important to emphasize that the former ADs like (Mark) Dienhart and Moe were very passionate in advocating for the stadium very early in the process," Bruininks said. "When I was trying to formulate the strategy here, I received a very thoughtful letter and a copy of a speech that Tom Moe had given."