Northern Colorado officials are scheduled to meet today to decide who they want to be their new head football coach.
Ken McConnellogue, the vice president for university advancement who is supervising the search, declined to identify any of the four finalists. But among those known to have been brought in for recent interviews are Bob Stitt, head coach at Colorado Mines; Tony Alford, the assistant head coach/running backs at Iowa State; and Earnest Collins, cornerbacks coach at Kansas.
“We’re close,” McConnellogue said Monday. “We should have something real soon. What I hope happens is that we come to a decision (today) and we start negotiating a contract. Ideally, we’d like to have a new coach by the end of the week. But we’re not going to be hasty about it. If it’s two or three days after Christmas, that’s OK, too.”
The final decision will be made by a three-member committee that includes McConnellogue, UNC president Kay Norton and Jay Hinrichs, the school’s new athletic director.
Stitt and Collins have UNC ties, while Alford was a former running back at Colorado State.
Stitt, who led the Orediggers to the Division II playoffs in 2004, was a graduate assistant at UNC under the highly successful Joe Glenn, now the head coach at Wyoming. Collins, a former Bears defensive back, was a student assistant under Glenn. He also served as the secondary and special-teams coach at UNC under Kay Dalton for three seasons (2000-02).
Collins and Alford are helping get their teams ready for bowl games. Kansas plays Houston in the Fort Worth Bowl on Friday. Iowa State plays TCU on Dec. 31 in the Houston Bowl.
Dalton, the Bears’ head coach the past six years, was fired Dec. 2 after two losing seasons.
All of the UNC assistants under Dalton have been invited to reapply for their jobs once the new head coach is hired. Keith Grable, UNC’s recruiting coordinator and running backs coach, was retained to oversee recruiting while the program was without a head coach.
Neither longtime Colorado assistant Brian Cabral nor Wyoming linebackers coach Marty English, a former Bears defensive coordinator under Dalton, were brought in for interviews.
Joseph Sanchez can be reached at 303-820-5458 or jsanchez@denverpost.com.
