Conor Casey Rapids #9 Is Back!

By now I'm sure you've all heard the news.  Anthony Hudson was dismissed as Colorado Rapids Head Coach today and Conor Casey has been given the interim title.  A much needed change for a club that's been at a historic awful start.  Hudson finishes with a league 0.77 pts/game average, worse in club history (not counting Wegerle's single game as player/manager at the end of the '96 season that he lost) and with only 8 wins in 46 competitive matches in charge of the club.  It was also the second shortest tenure for a non-interim coach, only Houghton's 31 games in 1996 was shorter.

So very much out with the bad and, hopefully, in with the good.  For now club legend Conor Casey has the reins and he was the logical choice.  Of all the assistants only two of them, Casey and GK coach Chris Sharpe, were not brought in by Hudson from his prior jobs and Sharpe splits time between the first team and working with the Academy keepers.  Combined with his top 3 all-time player standing (Pablo and Balboa being the other two) and for an interim role he's an easy choice.

Note, I said interim.  Let's talk about the full time role.  Padraig Smith has the biggest decision of his career ahead of him.  He has to get the right coach this time or this club is in deep trouble for a long, long time.  Smith has two options.  With many of the top leagues ending their seasons in the next couple of weeks Smith could already have targets lined up and be planning to hire somebody in the next few weeks.  The other option is to let Casey handle the rest of the 2019 season and hire the coach in the offseason.  Honestly I think this could go either way an neither option would shock me.  The only thing that would be surprising is hiring somebody before the end of the season but after, say, July 4th.  If I had to put my money on something I'd go with a quick hire.

So who should fill that role?  Not Conor Casey.  Well, with one exception.  If Casey has the club for the rest of the season and somehow makes a miracle run into the playoffs he can have the job.  Short of that however we should be looking for somebody for more experience.  After Hudson, Pablo, Pareja, and Smith, all having essentially no club head coaching experience we need to hire somebody who's run a club before, preferably successfully.  Despite what some people like to claim there's actually a number of selling points for the Rapids job.  One, there's nowhere to go but up.  Two, there is a lot of dead weight rolling of the roster at the end of the season allowing a chance to build the team the new coach wants.  Three, two big DP spots will be open going into 2020.  That's a great chance to shape the future of a club.  But it also shows the biggest risk to the club at this point.  A bad coaching hire and/or bad DP signings could block this club from moving forward for a long time.

A couple of names are already floating around out there.  The two most notable ones are Josh Wolff and Eric Wynalda.  I don't particularly like either pick.  Wolff might be a good coach but never having been a head coach before we don't really know.  Wynalda's actual results don't match his hype.  He's never spent more than one season with his team and his "big" successes were building a team specifically to make USOC runs, not play full league seasons.

I'm sure we'll hear more names as time goes on and we'll be talking about the most likely of them here.  For now though its a new start to 2019 for the Rapids, lets see if we can put a run together with this bounce.