The Billion-Dollar Coach

Another article on my Alma Mater’s new football coach.

Former Fortune 500 CEO Joe Moglia has never led a major football program — so why is Coastal Carolina finally giving him a chance?

Out beyond the water parks and seafood buffets of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, off a four-lane highway studded with gentlemen's clubs and discount fireworks outlets and beauty school billboards, a multimillionaire sat in a Hampton Inn and waited for his pizza to arrive. The multimillionaire did not want to go to bed without eating something, but the pizza did not show, and the multimillionaire grew agitated and rang the front desk and ordered the clerk to turn away the delivery man if and when he arrived. Then he purchased two bags of potato chips from a hallway vending machine, ate his dinner, and fell asleep.

Last fall, on a college campus in Conway, South Carolina, a university president made the decision to fire the only football coach his school had ever known. Until 1993, the school had been an offshoot of the University of South Carolina, but now it had its own identity and its own team colors and its own nearly decade-old Football Championship Subdivision program, not to mention a rapidly expanding campus of more than 9,000 students. The university president, having generated his own ideas about what makes a successful coach, and having read media reports about a retired chief executive officer turned United Football League coach named Joe Moglia, and having heard that Moglia recently moved into his community — a prosperous subdivision of Pawleys Island known as Prince George — sent Moglia an e-mail.

"Hello from a Neighbor in Prince George," the university president wrote in the subject line.

Two weeks later, the university president and the multimillionaire met for breakfast at a restaurant called the Eggs Up Grill. Afterward, the university president seemed convinced he had found his man. Three weeks later, the school held a press conference at which it announced the firing of David Bennett, who had gone 63-39 in nine seasons at Coastal Carolina University.1 Eleven days after that, Joe Moglia, ex-CEO of TD Ameritrade, who has a career college and pro record of one win and four losses, was introduced as the second football coach in school history.

Stripped of context, Moglia's hiring seems unorthodox at best, and an outrageous display of cronyism at worst. In this moment, in the midst of a national argument about the role of money in society and the fitness of a CEO to translate his skills into other fields — not to mention the cloud of ethical lapses in both industries Moglia is associated with — here is a story that sweeps everything into a single narrative. It is only natural to raise questions about how this happened, which is why I showed up on campus in early August, and which is why there are people with ties to Coastal Carolina University (and those with ties to David Bennett especially) who have translated Coastal Carolina president David DeCenzo's unorthodox change of direction into something dark and suspicious. These people have made the presumption that Moglia was hired in order to pay for a new baseball field or a new Astroturf practice field on campus, that he was hired because he is rich and not because of the way he got rich.

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Related book: 4th and Goal: One Man's Quest to Recapture His Dream