It's time to pause for a lesson, one that I've learned from watching scores of coaching searches. No. 1: Search firms are useless. They are a waste of money. And they often have agendas. No. 2: A search committee should be comprised of one person making the decision. Typically, that's a strong athletic director. Collaboration is overrated. A one-person search committee arrives at a coaching search already with a good idea of what it is looking for. It talks to other smart people -- in some cases lots of them -- but only in order to get information that informs its conception of what it wants in a coach. Let me give you two examples, apologies if Sun Devils fans who won't like hearing this: Arizona's Greg Byrne and Washington State's Bill Moos.