The recent hiring of Timmy Chang as the next University of Hawaii football coach, along with all its twists, turns and drama, has dominated local news — so much so that another rather significant story seems to have not gained as much attention. This is the donation by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of $50 million to UH to help study the impact of climate change on the ocean.
How do these go together? With all respect to Chang, UH missed the mark. No, we’re not talking about June Jones. Clearly, the obvious best choice for the new coach would have been none other than Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg, despite some initial controversy around his Kauai landholdings, appears to be embracing the Aloha State in full. In addition to the recent donation, he and his wife have reportedly donated generous amounts of time and money to worthy causes on the Garden Isle.
WHOA, WHOA, whoa, you say, Zuckerberg has never indicated any interest, much less expertise in football, or any sports, really. But is that really important? Do you think Zuckerberg knows the fine details of building a resilient website for billions of people around the globe that runs 24/7 and rarely goes down? No. He’s not in there coding the operating system on the routers or maintaining the failover groups for the databases; he delegates those duties and focuses on the big picture.
Many a successful coach at high-level college programs has been branded a “CEO” coach. Recent championship coaches such as Kirby Smart, Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney have all been labeled as such. The term goes back to Mack Brown and even further to Bobby Bowden and Bear Bryant.
The fact of the matter is that a Division I football coach requires many other skills today that Zuckerberg can bring to bear. In this day of name image likeness, who else could further improve a player’s online image than the founder of the most dominant force in social media today? Let’s be honest, recruits would love to play for a coach who can guarantee them a significant monetary return without playing a single down.
What else? How about analytics. Facebook’s use of analytics, even to its detractors, is wildly impressive. Rest assured that everything you’ve ever done online and pretty much everything you’re going to do online in the future, Facebook knows about. Now take that technology and apply it to the opposing teams and imagine how decided an advantage that would be.
On top of all of that, Zuckerberg’s official salary at Facebook is $1. Of course, he rakes in the dough through other means, but clearly he doesn’t need more money. Surely, UH could have afforded that dollar.
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John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. He can be reached at jagsalud@live.com.
