What's next for Yale?

When Jack Siedlecki "retired" in 2008, Yale still had time to go through the process, hire a coach and bring in a pretty solid recruiting class. Of course the process of finding Siedlecki's replacement began in late November. However, with the news that Tom Williams resigned on Wednesday puts the Yale program in a tough spot. This time it is late December and if the Yale administration doesn't act fast it could have some negative ramifications towards recruiting.

"We would like obviously to try and do this early, that is our top priority," Yale director of athletics Tom Beckett said. "We want to get as much feedback as we possibly can from all of our stakeholders in all of this I don't have a time line that I would want to identify at this point."

I asked Beckett if they are looking for somebody with previous head coaching experience as well as somebody with ties with the Ivy League and he said that is still to be determined.


"We are going to meeting with the committee, interested parties affiliated with Yale football in particular our student-athletes, members of the faculty, leaders of the institution, our alums," Beckett said. "We are going to be doing a very thorough analysis of that very question and at this point, I know we are looking at a tough timeline here with the recruiting issues staring at us in the face but we want to be thorough, we want to do our best to identify all of the priorities associated with the leadership of Yale football. There is a great pride and tradition associated with Yale football and we are confident that our search will help us to identify some outstanding candidates."

Beckett said that Williams' entire staff is remaining in place - for the time being. Beckett said he would be meeting with the staff today. When this happened in 2008, the assistant coaches took on additional responsibilities without a head coach in place with Tony Reno taking the lead in recruiting. Beckett said those decisions have yet to be made. In my opinion since he already has the title of recruiting coordinator, I would expect to see Kyle Metzler fill the same role that Reno did back in 2008.


"The members of the staff are working to help us in all aspects of the program, in particular the focus right now is communicating with the students and also their focus is on helping to recruit this class and they are continuing with those efforts," Beckett said.

"We are going to be talking to the staff later here and as we go through that process, we will be making those kinds of decisions and talking to everybody about what their roles will be."

I asked Beckett if the university will be changing the way they conduct background checks on applicants since Williams claims of being a Rhodes Scholarship candidate as well as a member of the San Francisco 49ers practice squad resulted in an internal investigation and ultimately the end of his tenure with the Bulldogs. However, Beckett said he could not comment on that.

One thing that surprised me is that the Yale players were apparently informed of Williams' decision after I was. One player said he found out about Williams by reading this blog and received a generic e-mail later in the morning. I also spoke to a player being recruited by Yale and he said the only coach he heard from in the last couple of days about the situation at Yale came from a member of the Brown staff. That's a pretty poor job, if you ask me.

Also, Yale's investigation into Williams' background is now considered closed.