Can you link it or us?

Sure link is below, but it's behind a paywall, so you'd need a subscription to read it. I highly recommend a subscription though; great group of writers. https://theathletic.com/2576778/2021/05/11/chris-petersen-reflects-on-the-busyness-the-imbalance-and-the-out-of-control-recruiting-grind-of-college-football/?article_source=search&search_query=petersen

A good quote from the article...

"My first thing after I get some clarity is, why didn’t somebody tell me this? That’s how I see my role moving forward. Maybe I can just share some of that and help people. But here’s the crazy thing. When I decided, ‘OK, I’m gonna coach and I’m not going to be a psychologist. I’m going to go coach at UC Davis.’ I finished my Master’s and I’m coaching there along the way. Then, I’m thinking that this is more me than the other thing. I think OK, if I’m going to coach, I need to leave UC Davis and my coaches there, and I call them game-changing coaches. They were so far ahead of their time 30 years ago — Jim Sochor, Bob Foster and Bob Biggs and all those guys that stayed there forever — how they treated us, using the platform of football. I got it being around those guys. But, here was my mindset: If I’m gonna do this — coach football—I need to leave Davis. I don’t want to stay at Davis my whole career for these guys. Paul Hackett was the gold standard at Davis. My coaches were like, ‘Paul Hackett, Paul Hackett, Paul Hackett,’ and I’m thinking, ‘I want to be Paul Hackett.’

They make the connection and I go talk to Paul Hackett at Pittsburgh. Here’s the irony. Paul Hackett is a Davis guy that played for these coaches, probably 20 years before I did. He had ’em on the younger end, I have these coaches when they’re on the older end. I do the interview with him, and we’re talking and he goes, ‘So tell me, why do you want to leave Davis?’ I said, ‘Well, Coach, I decided that I want to get into coaching. I want to be the best of the best. Iron sharpens iron, and I want to get in the fast lane, and I want to try to compete for national championships.’ Something along those lines. He looks at me, and Paul Hackett had been around, he’d been in the NFL and with Bill Walsh. He goes, ‘You’re going to be leaving the best place that you’re going to ever coach in your career in terms of the balance and quality of life that you can have, and how you can win there, the kids you can recruit there and living in Davis, California.’ He goes, ‘I’ve been around, and it’ll never be better.’ I looked at him because I didn’t even really know what he was talking about, and I said, ‘Yeah, I don’t care about that.’ He just laughed and shook his head. ‘You’re just like the rest of us. ‘"

Ha, so while the balance and quality of people are there for somebody in Davis, when you're shooting for the top of the top, it really is a sacrifice on your time and your life balance to get there and get a shot at it.

I took from this that a college football coach can't have it all, unless he were coaching at UCD in the 1970s-2000s. Really a good read if you can get the full article.

Great quote! It all started with Jim Sochor; he was a smallish guy from a nowhere school. No head coaching experience that I know of. Who was the genius who hired him in the first place? That person deserves a lot of credit for this whole “Davis thing” and I have never heard the persons name. Does anyone know? Another thing I might add, is that Jim Sochor was an inspiration for many other Davis coaches besides football, including Bob Williams and Jennifer Gross. Fairly recently Jen Gross commented that very early in her career at Davis she was in a game at the Pav and her team was not doing well and she became very visibly upset with her team. Jim watched it all from his usual spot in end zone bleachers. Apparently after the game he approached Jen and commented about the scene of her being so upset with her team. We will never know what he said, but we can guess it was something along the line of: “that was not very cool, coach better”, etc. apparently she really got it; and look at her now! One of the best in the business and Jim played a part in that story as well..

I don’t know who hired him but it wasn’t much of a reach to hire Sochor, who won three league titles in the Aggies league while playing for SFState, and then spent most of a decade as an assistant at SF State and then UCD. SF State was the more successful of the programs in the 50s and 60s. So SF State was not a nowhere school from UCDs perspective; they were looking up at them.

Herb Schnamberger hired him as an assistant (baseball assistant also). Not sure the AD who made them him the varsity coach.

River, you are very right. My son went to SF State recently. It is not a nowhere school at all as a university it is probably the best in the CSU system. I meant it in the sense of a major football program. Like on a CV. My son is doing very well with a SFS degree and that is all that counts for me.

While I did some graduate study at SF State,, I’m not talking about their academics. They had a good football program before the 1968 student strike. They were the class of the league prior to that and had two quarterbacks go on to football head coaching careers in Sochor and Bob Toledo.

Young and highly competitive. Big time football has to be an immense time suck during football season, recruiting, and then alumni relations. Like legal trial work or startup high tech.