**New** (Larry) Resounding message
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- The West Zone
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Resounding message
Traditionally, most Clemson fans have at best tolerated the ACC. But we believe times are changing.
**New** (Paul) Tuesday Insider Notes
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TigerIllustrated - Tuesday Insider Notes
The ripple effect on Clemson's QB pursuits following Dylan Raiola-to-UGA, Clemson coaching stops and ...
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How the Deep State Took Down Nixon
- By TigerGrowls
- House Of Politics & Off-Topics
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The deep state has been in control for a long time. It took the America First Movement led by Trump to force them to show themselves and what they can do.
April 6, 2023
PHOTO: AP
In conventional histories, Richard Nixon’s impeachment is remembered as a triumph of good government. Nixon is viewed as a corrupt politician whose unconstitutional schemes threatened the republic, while his opponents are seen as defenders of the Constitution. This narrative, written by journalists, has persisted for nearly five decades—despite the slow accumulation of evidence that tells a very different tale.
In the early 1980s, Harper’s editor Jim Hougan obtained 30,000 documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. The result was Secret Agenda, one of the most important yet curiously neglected books of the late 20th century. While some of its conclusions are incorrect—Hougan didn’t believe that FBI Associate Director Mark Felt was Deep Throat—his factual claims have been vindicated as more and more Watergate-related documents have been released.
“Nixon had to go.”
Since the publication of Secret Agenda, books such as Len Colodny’s and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup (1991), James Rosen’s The Strong Man (2008), and Geoff Shepard’s The Real Watergate Scandal (2015) and The Nixon Conspiracy (2021) have drawn on declassified documents and unsealed judicial and congressional hearings to help us better understand what really happened. Although these authors disagree about many details, they agree that Nixon was removed from office not because he endangered the constitutional order, but because his bureaucratic and political enemies plotted successfully against him. And while scholars shy away from endorsing some of the more dramatic claims that have been made over the years, the best of them understand Watergate not in terms of the conventional narrative, but as an institutional “conflict” in which Nixon was the most important casualty. Nixon had to go—not because of a bungled break-in, but because he challenged the national-security state.
Thanks to the revelations concerning Felt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s role in Nixon’s downfall is better understood. The Central Intelligence Agency’s role, however, remains mysterious. It was only one of several US intelligence agencies spying on Nixon and his officials, but Langley’s role in Watergate set it apart. As Hougan shows, it infiltrated and sabotaged “The Plumbers,” the covert unit responsible for the Watergate burglaries, run by several figures in Nixon’s re-election campaign committee with connections to the White House. It was the CIA that set in motion the events that forced Nixon from the presidency.
The CIA, the military, and other agencies spied on the White House because Nixon the president acted differently than Nixon the politician. As congressman, senator, and vice president, Nixon was a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior. While this position earned him the ire of media and academic elites, especially when he exposed the treason of their darling Alger Hiss, anti-Communism was at the time a fairly conventional position within military and intelligence circles. In backing Nixon in 1968, his supporters in the military and intelligence communities thought they were getting a hawk who would stop trying to micromanage the Vietnam War and national security from the White House.
Nixon had other ideas. Sometime in the mid-to-late-’60s, he had become a heretical anti-Communist. While Nixon wanted the United States to remain vigilant against the spread of Communism, in a series of 1967 articles, he recognized the limits of American power and wanted to avoid conflicts that weren’t in the national interest. Rejecting Manichean assumptions in foreign policy as a recipe for escalation and war, Nixon called for stronger economic and political ties with the Soviet Union and China and a legitimate acknowledgement of their interests as the preconditions for hard-nosed but effective diplomacy. Moreover, he opposed granting the intelligence and military bureaucracies more autonomy. Nixon had grown skeptical of their conformism, their inefficiencies and errors, and the way they shielded themselves from accountability and control by the executive branch. To that end, he planned a grand course-correction to the way the US government operated.
To assert presidential control over the federal bureaucracy and enact his contrarian foreign policy, Nixon first turned his attention to the National Security Council. Like his ex-boss Dwight Eisenhower, he believed that this relatively new addition to the American regime provided the best immediately available institution for the president to direct policy. Under Eisenhower, however, Nixon had witnessed how the Dulles brothers (one as secretary of state, the other as CIA director) played an oversized role in the NSC, at the expense of the president’s own power. The issue, Nixon believed, went deeper than the force of the Dulles’ personalities. A shrewd observer of the nature of bureaucracies, Nixon believed that department heads—even the political appointees meant to serve the president—tended to get captured by their agencies, becoming advocates for their interests, rather than advocates for the policies set by the president.
The solution, Nixon thought, was to marginalize the influence of the most dangerous agencies. He reorganized the NSC around his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, personally accountable to the president. As Kissinger later observed, Nixon refused to have the NSC operate in the usual manner, as an organization that provided the president with a menu of predetermined options concocted in the intelligence bureaucracy. Instead, he turned the NSC against the bureaucracy, using it “for the intelligence it supplied him about the views of a bureaucracy he distrusted and for the opportunity to camouflage his own aims.” He thus sought to preempt a repeat of Eisenhower’s presidency.
He offered State to an old friend, William Rogers, unlikely to defy him. Nixon then isolated Rogers and ordered the State Department to cease coordinating interdepartmental policy at the NSC (Kissinger took over that task). This neutered the State Department’s influence on policy. And while many were surprised to see that Nixon left Richard Helms, an LBJ appointee, in charge of the CIA, Nixon strove to limit the agency’s influence. At first he considered removing Helms’s seat at the NSC, but then settled on restricted attendance. The director would provide intelligence briefings, but then leave. For the director, it was an awkward arrangement, yet the point was to make it clear that the CIA’s role was restricted to providing information. It didn’t shape policy.
Nixon set up clandestine backchannels that bypassed the usual interdepartmental processes, allowing him to open negotiations with the upper echelons of the Soviet and Chinese governments in almost complete secrecy. Even the military was kept out of the loop. One month after taking office, Nixon was encouraging the military to believe that he favored escalation in Vietnam by arranging a secret backchannel with them, in order to authorize strategic bombing raids in Cambodia. But on another backchannel, he was letting the Kremlin know that in his negotiations, he would countenance complete US withdrawal from Vietnam.
Nixon’s secretive strategy paid off and led to his landslide re-election in 1972. A decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he negotiated a nuclear-arms treaty with the Kremlin, so that the superpower rivals could practice diplomacy without the pressure created by runaway arms spending and massive nuclear arsenals. And while he pursued détente with the Soviets, he also sought to weaken their influence. He peeled off Soviet allies in the Middle East, bringing them closer to the American camp. He restored relations with Western Europe, at a nadir during the Vietnam era. NATO was revitalized, but not unconditionally—Nixon told the Europeans that they needed to pay more for their own defense. And most spectacularly of all for the conventional anti-Communist, he ended the Vietnam War while normalizing US relations with mainland China.
As one astute writer and critic of Nixon has put it, Nixon’s strategy was a massive gamble. It relied on deceit and outright defiance of Washington’s permanent bureaucracies. It “put Nixon in a race against powerful institutions that often bowed to no one, not even a president.”
There were early signs Nixon couldn’t keep up. By 1970, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had grown squeamish about authorizing the same kind of surveillance operations he had approved under previous presidents and wouldn’t authorize them for Nixon. Hoover, however, continued to spy on the administration—one of Attorney General and Nixon adviser John Mitchell’s bodyguards was an FBI informer. And he created the impression that he knew more than he did. He told Nixon that the FBI had bugged his ’68 campaign plane, when it had probably just collected his telephone records.
Nixon also came to regret keeping Helms. He tried to press Helms on key policy mysteries of the 1960s: the role Kennedy played in the assassination of South Vietnam’s devoutly Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem; the origins and resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Johnson’s October 1968 bombing halt; and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Helms demurred, indicating that what the CIA did for other presidents wasn’t up for reexamination by the present one. When Helms finally presented Nixon with a dossier on the Bay of Pigs, Nixon believed it was heavily redacted. Helms guarded the CIA’s secrets, leaving Nixon helpless. This and the CIA’s repeated errors confirmed Nixon’s skepticism of the agency. When the agency failed to predict the 1970 coup in Cambodia, he asked, “What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley?”
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff were spying on the president.”
The most disturbing dynamic emerged with the military. Memoranda that discussed de-escalation or troop withdrawals from Vietnam—opposed by the Joint Chiefs—had a way of appearing in The New York Times. In December 1971, the White House discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were spying on the president. The full details of what was later called the Moorer-Radford Affair only emerged in October 2000, when the relevant tapes were declassified.
An aide-de-camp at the NSC, Yeoman Jack Radford, copied or took about 5,000 classified communiqués and memos from the president and his advisers and passed them on to his superiors: first Adm. Rembrandt Robinson, then Adm. Welander. Both Robinson and Welander passed them on to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Thomas Moorer. Alexander Haig, who later became Nixon’s chief of staff, might have been involved. This had been going since at least November 1970, though a different version had begun under Johnson. Wartime espionage on the commander-in-chief was, as a furious Nixon put it, “a federal offense of the highest order.” Nixon wanted to prosecute Moorer. But Mitchell convinced him that a public humiliation of the military would harm his foreign policy and allow too many state secrets into the light. Nixon never confronted the Joint Chiefs directly and kept Moorer in place. While the solution spared the military a humiliation during a delicate time, it also allowed men who Nixon distrusted and who distrusted him to remain in powerful positions. Leaks continued.
It was this atmosphere that led officials in the White House to set up their own unit, The Plumbers, to plug leaks and investigate their sources. G. Gordon Liddy became the unit’s operational chief. Yet from at least the morning of Jan. 27, 1972, when Liddy presented “Gemstone”—the codename for elaborate surveillance and dirty-tricks operations—to his superiors, The Plumbers were dependent on the CIA for material support.
For assistance, Liddy had turned to E. Howard Hunt, a career CIA officer only recently retired. With the help of his friend Bernard Barker, Hunt assembled a team of Cubans. All four Cubans had connections to the CIA and to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Most of the espionage equipment and technical support the burglars needed, down to their fake IDs, were supplied by the CIA. And the Gemstone charts Liddy used for his first presentation were prepared by the CIA.
The CIA’s involvement extended beyond material assistance to outright infiltration.
As Hougan first reported, Hunt’s retirement was a ruse. He was still working for the CIA and reporting to the agency. In its own investigation of the Watergate break-in, the FBI concluded that Hunt was reporting to the CIA while working at the White House. A CIA employee statement of Jan. 17, 1974, raised concerns that Hunt was making secret reports to the agency and passing along items of interest directly to Helms. Another member of The Plumbers, James McCord, also had worked extensively for the CIA during the Bay of Pigs. As unsealed testimony from the Senate Watergate Committee from June 1973 corroborates, he had brought some of his old colleagues into his unit. McCord also had a dubious CIA retirement story. A noted surveillance expert, he had been described by Allen Dulles as “the best man we have.” McCord had become chief of security for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, but he said to FBI colleagues that he wanted to move beyond this rather boring position. An FBI internal memorandum said that he wanted to angle himself into a position of “intelligence”, that he ultimately wanted to “become more and more involved” in political activities. CIA documents released in 2017—part of the JFK Files—confirm that while Hunt and McCord pretended not to know each other, they had, in fact, worked together before. At the CIA, McCord had supervised two investigations of Hunt for security breaches. And one member of the break-in team, Eugenio Rolando Martinez, was actively on the CIA payroll and reporting not to Hunt and McCord, but directly to Langley.
Finally, there is good evidence to indicate that The Plumbers’ operations were sabotaged. The first two break-ins that they performed were at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the RAND Corporation and Pentagon analyst who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. The camera’s film could only be developed by the CIA; it was sent away with an uncertain fate. Then, over Memorial Day weekend, May 26-28, The Plumbers attempted three break-ins at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building, succeeding on the night of May 27-28. On the successful break-in, dozens of photos were taken and given to McCord to develop. After a delay, McCord handed them off to Hunt. But as the later FBI investigation ascertained, McCord had switched them: The developed photos couldn’t have been taken at the DNC.
The most important witness to a secret agenda is Alfred C. Baldwin III, whom McCord hired to oversee the listening devices. Baldwin later revealed that on the morning of May 25, McCord told him that “bugs had been installed on two phones” at the DNC, and his job was to monitor them. That date is significant because it predates the successful entry of the Watergate. If what Baldwin says is true, McCord had already planted the bugs and deceived his other colleagues about it.
In any case, McCord—despite his experience—oversaw a supremely sloppy surveillance operation. Only one person, Baldwin, was assigned to listen, meaning that if he ever stepped out of the room, took weekend breaks, or performed other tasks for McCord (which he did), no one would record the calls. Baldwin ostensibly scribbled notes as he listened; he and McCord claimed no tape recorders were used (though two were present in the room). When Liddy questioned McCord about this, McCord said those tape recorders were incompatible. What seems likely is that this setup was a ruse, enabling McCord to pass on doctored intelligence to Liddy while keeping the genuine product for Langley. Magruder claimed the information Liddy gave to him was worthless, which was part of his reason—but only part—for ordering the final, June 17, break-in, at which The Plumbers were caught.
Over the years, we have learned that the genuine product probably pertains not to political intelligence, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein claimed, but to a prostitution ring arranging liaisons over a phone line at the DNC, with an address book naming clients and friends, likely kept in the desk of DNC secretary Ida “Maxie” Wells. When he was arrested, Martinez was carrying a key that opened this desk, which he tried but failed to dispose of. The definitive proof would have to come from unsealing further documents, and Baldwin telling what he heard. A court-enforced gag order from January 1973 prevented him from speaking about it, but in a 1995 interview, he said he monitored “a lot of conversations of a sexual nature.”
We have to acknowledge where the facts end, and interpretation of facts begins. The Moorer-Radford Affair is well-documented. From it, we can conclude that the military, spying on the president, was trying to undermine his foreign policy. The curiosities of the Fielding and Watergate break-ins are well-documented. But from this alone, we can’t make assumptions about how malign the CIA’s motivations for getting involved were.
Yet a modest and reasonable conclusion is that the CIA’s infiltration of The Plumbers is best understood as the agency’s counterpart to the military’s espionage on Nixon’s covert diplomacy. As James Rosen puts it in The Strong Man:
The report was “brilliant,” Nixon stated in a December 1972 memo. Schlesinger’s objective would be to oversee the reorganization of the intelligence agencies, at long last. “I have been bugging him [Kissinger] and Haig for over three years to get intelligence reorganized, with no success whatever,” Nixon exclaimed. However, while the president wanted a leaner, crisper intelligence budget, he believed that the personnel needed a drastic overhaul:
Yet no further reforms would take place under Nixon’s watch. McCord was cracking under pressure. “He was dismayed,” writes Rosen, that the Cubans were considering the “CIA defense” strategy, where they would plead not guilty on the grounds that they believed they were carrying out a CIA mission. “So fierce was his determination to protect Langley” that he quarreled with his defense team, objecting to their plan to subpoena Helms. Finally, McCord wrote a letter to the trial judge, John Sirica, contending that the proceedings were damaged by political pressure and perjury. When the judge read it publicly, this set off the scramble for plea bargains and revised testimony from compromised mid-level officials, which created new investigations that a priori focused on the White House and on Nixon himself.
During these investigations, occasional hints emerged implicating the CIA in the break-ins. In summer 1973, Helms revealed before Congress that Martinez was on the CIA payroll. The Watergate Special Prosecution Force, or WSPF, looked further. But when on Oct. 12, 1973, the WSPF asked for two reports that discussed Martinez, the agency refused outright. Meanwhile, the president’s own men didn’t grasp what had happened during the break-in, allowing their opponents to run rings around them. Already in late 1973, one writer concluded in Harper’s that “they underestimated both the bitterness and the subtlety of the CIA hierarchs, and it is conceivable that the CIA arranged for a trap at the Watergate.”
Congress didn’t show much interest in learning more. Speaking before a secret meeting of the Senate Armed Forces Committee in November 1973, the Harper’s writer was asked to reveal how he got this information. While he could corroborate his claims about Martinez, he had also said something for which he couldn’t provide evidence: that Helms was told of the burglary on 7 a.m. the next day. The committee excoriated him for making this uncorroborated claim. Nevertheless, the affair raised the question of how much Helms knew and when he knew it. Thanks to recently published documents, we now know that Helms was well informed and tried to hide it at first. On June 19, 1972, Helms was briefed on the “biographic details” for each of the men arrested on June 17. However, three days later, Helms told the acting director of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray III, that “none [of the arrested men] had worked for the [CIA] in the past two years.”
Even after Helms had resigned, he remained involved. He was startled to learn of a conversation between Kissinger and Haig, where Haig suggested that the CIA knew beforehand about the burglary. On Dec. 3, 1973, he sent a classified cable to Langley to warn the agency, asking whether Haig was “basing his allegation on information from Martinez or just what.”
“It was unclear whether false information affected their policy-making.”
In the media environment of the 1970s, it wasn’t possible to generate sufficient public interest in the CIA’s role in Watergate. Small details, like Martinez’s first case officer failing to appear before Congress, went unnoticed. The White House was the juicier target. As Geoff Shepard has meticulously documented through his own FOIA requests, the WSPF was staffed with Kennedy loyalists looking to take down Nixon. Through several secret ex parte meetings with Judge Sirica and violations of grand-jury rules, the WSPF passed material on to select members of the House Judiciary Committee, with the goal of removing Nixon from office and preparing the way for later criminal trials. This coordinated effort between officials in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches to take out the head of the executive branch was, to put it mildly, an act of constitutional vandalism. By adopting these means, the architects of Watergate set the precedent for future attempts to topple presidents.
Thanks to Shepard’s research, the abuses of the WSPF, the House Judiciary Committee, and Judge Sirica are clear. The CIA’s abuses are much harder to pin down. Yet the CIA didn’t emerge from the period untouched. As one critic of Nixon acknowledges, after the first phase of the Nixon reform, the agency was now “vulnerable to future investigations.” This would set the stage for the partially successful Church Committee, although the result was (nominally) more legislative oversight, not more executive oversight. The issues raised by the absence of the latter were exposed in the 1990s, when it was revealed that the CIA had provided Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton with tainted intelligence reports, prepared with information from known Soviet agents. Mid-level CIA management reserved unto itself the prerogative to sort out which information the Soviet agents provided was true or false. The presidents weren’t notified, so it was unclear whether false information affected their policymaking. One might say that Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was channeling Nixon’s more radical side when he proposed bills to abolish the CIA during these years.
The legend of Watergate that ignores CIA involvement is a feel-good ideological story, in which noble liberal constitutionalists bring down a conservative, authoritarian president. That’s what the public still thinks. Yet both Nixon and his institutional opponents in the intelligence community were conservatives and dedicated anti-Communists. Even Mark Felt fell into this camp—he was a Hoover loyalist. The real disagreement was a regime-level dispute about the arrangement of the administrative state.
“Nixon was trying to reassert voter control over the agencies.”
Nixon’s actions against the CIA in 1972 weren’t petty revenge against an uncooperative director and agency. The 1971 report and his memo demonstrate a more substantive project. Nixon saw that the technological advances of the 1960s had allowed the intelligence community to entrench and institutionalize itself to its own benefit, with no gain for the nation. The people were losing control of their own government. As Nixon put it in his diary just after his re-election: “It is the only way, and probably the last time, that we can get government under control before it gets so big that is submerges the individual completely and destroys the dynamism which makes the American system what it is.”
Determined not to give the establishment the benefit of a “timid opposition party,” Nixon was trying to reassert voter control over the agencies through the most important office the voters elected: the presidency. He sought to align the unelected bureaucracies with the chief elected official, making it easier for the president to direct the CIA and easier for the CIA to be held accountable.
Hoover, the Joint Chiefs, Helms, and Felt weren’t defending the Constitution or fighting to limit “the imperial presidency.” They were guarding their institutional autonomy, the idea of an apolitical bureaucracy serving the public good. Like the agents passing on compromised reports to the White House, they believed their judgements didn’t need to be assessed by political partisans. In the tumultuous years of the Nixon era, career intelligence men like Hoover, Helms, and Felt were defending the interests of their own institutions against a White House that didn’t want to conform to what later officials have called the “interagency consensus.”
Nixon was audacious enough to challenge and defeat that consensus, winning stunning victories. The price he paid, however, was his own downfall. Mindful of Nixon’s fate, most presidents—but not all—prefer to avoid defying that consensus.
Nathan Pinkoski, a senior fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation, is a contributing editor of Compact.
Nathan Pinkoski
April 6, 2023
PHOTO: AP
In conventional histories, Richard Nixon’s impeachment is remembered as a triumph of good government. Nixon is viewed as a corrupt politician whose unconstitutional schemes threatened the republic, while his opponents are seen as defenders of the Constitution. This narrative, written by journalists, has persisted for nearly five decades—despite the slow accumulation of evidence that tells a very different tale.
In the early 1980s, Harper’s editor Jim Hougan obtained 30,000 documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. The result was Secret Agenda, one of the most important yet curiously neglected books of the late 20th century. While some of its conclusions are incorrect—Hougan didn’t believe that FBI Associate Director Mark Felt was Deep Throat—his factual claims have been vindicated as more and more Watergate-related documents have been released.
“Nixon had to go.”
Since the publication of Secret Agenda, books such as Len Colodny’s and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup (1991), James Rosen’s The Strong Man (2008), and Geoff Shepard’s The Real Watergate Scandal (2015) and The Nixon Conspiracy (2021) have drawn on declassified documents and unsealed judicial and congressional hearings to help us better understand what really happened. Although these authors disagree about many details, they agree that Nixon was removed from office not because he endangered the constitutional order, but because his bureaucratic and political enemies plotted successfully against him. And while scholars shy away from endorsing some of the more dramatic claims that have been made over the years, the best of them understand Watergate not in terms of the conventional narrative, but as an institutional “conflict” in which Nixon was the most important casualty. Nixon had to go—not because of a bungled break-in, but because he challenged the national-security state.
Thanks to the revelations concerning Felt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s role in Nixon’s downfall is better understood. The Central Intelligence Agency’s role, however, remains mysterious. It was only one of several US intelligence agencies spying on Nixon and his officials, but Langley’s role in Watergate set it apart. As Hougan shows, it infiltrated and sabotaged “The Plumbers,” the covert unit responsible for the Watergate burglaries, run by several figures in Nixon’s re-election campaign committee with connections to the White House. It was the CIA that set in motion the events that forced Nixon from the presidency.
The CIA, the military, and other agencies spied on the White House because Nixon the president acted differently than Nixon the politician. As congressman, senator, and vice president, Nixon was a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior. While this position earned him the ire of media and academic elites, especially when he exposed the treason of their darling Alger Hiss, anti-Communism was at the time a fairly conventional position within military and intelligence circles. In backing Nixon in 1968, his supporters in the military and intelligence communities thought they were getting a hawk who would stop trying to micromanage the Vietnam War and national security from the White House.
Nixon had other ideas. Sometime in the mid-to-late-’60s, he had become a heretical anti-Communist. While Nixon wanted the United States to remain vigilant against the spread of Communism, in a series of 1967 articles, he recognized the limits of American power and wanted to avoid conflicts that weren’t in the national interest. Rejecting Manichean assumptions in foreign policy as a recipe for escalation and war, Nixon called for stronger economic and political ties with the Soviet Union and China and a legitimate acknowledgement of their interests as the preconditions for hard-nosed but effective diplomacy. Moreover, he opposed granting the intelligence and military bureaucracies more autonomy. Nixon had grown skeptical of their conformism, their inefficiencies and errors, and the way they shielded themselves from accountability and control by the executive branch. To that end, he planned a grand course-correction to the way the US government operated.
To assert presidential control over the federal bureaucracy and enact his contrarian foreign policy, Nixon first turned his attention to the National Security Council. Like his ex-boss Dwight Eisenhower, he believed that this relatively new addition to the American regime provided the best immediately available institution for the president to direct policy. Under Eisenhower, however, Nixon had witnessed how the Dulles brothers (one as secretary of state, the other as CIA director) played an oversized role in the NSC, at the expense of the president’s own power. The issue, Nixon believed, went deeper than the force of the Dulles’ personalities. A shrewd observer of the nature of bureaucracies, Nixon believed that department heads—even the political appointees meant to serve the president—tended to get captured by their agencies, becoming advocates for their interests, rather than advocates for the policies set by the president.
The solution, Nixon thought, was to marginalize the influence of the most dangerous agencies. He reorganized the NSC around his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, personally accountable to the president. As Kissinger later observed, Nixon refused to have the NSC operate in the usual manner, as an organization that provided the president with a menu of predetermined options concocted in the intelligence bureaucracy. Instead, he turned the NSC against the bureaucracy, using it “for the intelligence it supplied him about the views of a bureaucracy he distrusted and for the opportunity to camouflage his own aims.” He thus sought to preempt a repeat of Eisenhower’s presidency.
He offered State to an old friend, William Rogers, unlikely to defy him. Nixon then isolated Rogers and ordered the State Department to cease coordinating interdepartmental policy at the NSC (Kissinger took over that task). This neutered the State Department’s influence on policy. And while many were surprised to see that Nixon left Richard Helms, an LBJ appointee, in charge of the CIA, Nixon strove to limit the agency’s influence. At first he considered removing Helms’s seat at the NSC, but then settled on restricted attendance. The director would provide intelligence briefings, but then leave. For the director, it was an awkward arrangement, yet the point was to make it clear that the CIA’s role was restricted to providing information. It didn’t shape policy.
Nixon set up clandestine backchannels that bypassed the usual interdepartmental processes, allowing him to open negotiations with the upper echelons of the Soviet and Chinese governments in almost complete secrecy. Even the military was kept out of the loop. One month after taking office, Nixon was encouraging the military to believe that he favored escalation in Vietnam by arranging a secret backchannel with them, in order to authorize strategic bombing raids in Cambodia. But on another backchannel, he was letting the Kremlin know that in his negotiations, he would countenance complete US withdrawal from Vietnam.
Nixon’s secretive strategy paid off and led to his landslide re-election in 1972. A decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he negotiated a nuclear-arms treaty with the Kremlin, so that the superpower rivals could practice diplomacy without the pressure created by runaway arms spending and massive nuclear arsenals. And while he pursued détente with the Soviets, he also sought to weaken their influence. He peeled off Soviet allies in the Middle East, bringing them closer to the American camp. He restored relations with Western Europe, at a nadir during the Vietnam era. NATO was revitalized, but not unconditionally—Nixon told the Europeans that they needed to pay more for their own defense. And most spectacularly of all for the conventional anti-Communist, he ended the Vietnam War while normalizing US relations with mainland China.
As one astute writer and critic of Nixon has put it, Nixon’s strategy was a massive gamble. It relied on deceit and outright defiance of Washington’s permanent bureaucracies. It “put Nixon in a race against powerful institutions that often bowed to no one, not even a president.”
There were early signs Nixon couldn’t keep up. By 1970, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had grown squeamish about authorizing the same kind of surveillance operations he had approved under previous presidents and wouldn’t authorize them for Nixon. Hoover, however, continued to spy on the administration—one of Attorney General and Nixon adviser John Mitchell’s bodyguards was an FBI informer. And he created the impression that he knew more than he did. He told Nixon that the FBI had bugged his ’68 campaign plane, when it had probably just collected his telephone records.
Nixon also came to regret keeping Helms. He tried to press Helms on key policy mysteries of the 1960s: the role Kennedy played in the assassination of South Vietnam’s devoutly Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem; the origins and resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Johnson’s October 1968 bombing halt; and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Helms demurred, indicating that what the CIA did for other presidents wasn’t up for reexamination by the present one. When Helms finally presented Nixon with a dossier on the Bay of Pigs, Nixon believed it was heavily redacted. Helms guarded the CIA’s secrets, leaving Nixon helpless. This and the CIA’s repeated errors confirmed Nixon’s skepticism of the agency. When the agency failed to predict the 1970 coup in Cambodia, he asked, “What the hell do those clowns do out there in Langley?”
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff were spying on the president.”
The most disturbing dynamic emerged with the military. Memoranda that discussed de-escalation or troop withdrawals from Vietnam—opposed by the Joint Chiefs—had a way of appearing in The New York Times. In December 1971, the White House discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were spying on the president. The full details of what was later called the Moorer-Radford Affair only emerged in October 2000, when the relevant tapes were declassified.
An aide-de-camp at the NSC, Yeoman Jack Radford, copied or took about 5,000 classified communiqués and memos from the president and his advisers and passed them on to his superiors: first Adm. Rembrandt Robinson, then Adm. Welander. Both Robinson and Welander passed them on to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Thomas Moorer. Alexander Haig, who later became Nixon’s chief of staff, might have been involved. This had been going since at least November 1970, though a different version had begun under Johnson. Wartime espionage on the commander-in-chief was, as a furious Nixon put it, “a federal offense of the highest order.” Nixon wanted to prosecute Moorer. But Mitchell convinced him that a public humiliation of the military would harm his foreign policy and allow too many state secrets into the light. Nixon never confronted the Joint Chiefs directly and kept Moorer in place. While the solution spared the military a humiliation during a delicate time, it also allowed men who Nixon distrusted and who distrusted him to remain in powerful positions. Leaks continued.
It was this atmosphere that led officials in the White House to set up their own unit, The Plumbers, to plug leaks and investigate their sources. G. Gordon Liddy became the unit’s operational chief. Yet from at least the morning of Jan. 27, 1972, when Liddy presented “Gemstone”—the codename for elaborate surveillance and dirty-tricks operations—to his superiors, The Plumbers were dependent on the CIA for material support.
For assistance, Liddy had turned to E. Howard Hunt, a career CIA officer only recently retired. With the help of his friend Bernard Barker, Hunt assembled a team of Cubans. All four Cubans had connections to the CIA and to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Most of the espionage equipment and technical support the burglars needed, down to their fake IDs, were supplied by the CIA. And the Gemstone charts Liddy used for his first presentation were prepared by the CIA.
The CIA’s involvement extended beyond material assistance to outright infiltration.
As Hougan first reported, Hunt’s retirement was a ruse. He was still working for the CIA and reporting to the agency. In its own investigation of the Watergate break-in, the FBI concluded that Hunt was reporting to the CIA while working at the White House. A CIA employee statement of Jan. 17, 1974, raised concerns that Hunt was making secret reports to the agency and passing along items of interest directly to Helms. Another member of The Plumbers, James McCord, also had worked extensively for the CIA during the Bay of Pigs. As unsealed testimony from the Senate Watergate Committee from June 1973 corroborates, he had brought some of his old colleagues into his unit. McCord also had a dubious CIA retirement story. A noted surveillance expert, he had been described by Allen Dulles as “the best man we have.” McCord had become chief of security for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, but he said to FBI colleagues that he wanted to move beyond this rather boring position. An FBI internal memorandum said that he wanted to angle himself into a position of “intelligence”, that he ultimately wanted to “become more and more involved” in political activities. CIA documents released in 2017—part of the JFK Files—confirm that while Hunt and McCord pretended not to know each other, they had, in fact, worked together before. At the CIA, McCord had supervised two investigations of Hunt for security breaches. And one member of the break-in team, Eugenio Rolando Martinez, was actively on the CIA payroll and reporting not to Hunt and McCord, but directly to Langley.
Finally, there is good evidence to indicate that The Plumbers’ operations were sabotaged. The first two break-ins that they performed were at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the RAND Corporation and Pentagon analyst who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. The camera’s film could only be developed by the CIA; it was sent away with an uncertain fate. Then, over Memorial Day weekend, May 26-28, The Plumbers attempted three break-ins at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building, succeeding on the night of May 27-28. On the successful break-in, dozens of photos were taken and given to McCord to develop. After a delay, McCord handed them off to Hunt. But as the later FBI investigation ascertained, McCord had switched them: The developed photos couldn’t have been taken at the DNC.
The most important witness to a secret agenda is Alfred C. Baldwin III, whom McCord hired to oversee the listening devices. Baldwin later revealed that on the morning of May 25, McCord told him that “bugs had been installed on two phones” at the DNC, and his job was to monitor them. That date is significant because it predates the successful entry of the Watergate. If what Baldwin says is true, McCord had already planted the bugs and deceived his other colleagues about it.
In any case, McCord—despite his experience—oversaw a supremely sloppy surveillance operation. Only one person, Baldwin, was assigned to listen, meaning that if he ever stepped out of the room, took weekend breaks, or performed other tasks for McCord (which he did), no one would record the calls. Baldwin ostensibly scribbled notes as he listened; he and McCord claimed no tape recorders were used (though two were present in the room). When Liddy questioned McCord about this, McCord said those tape recorders were incompatible. What seems likely is that this setup was a ruse, enabling McCord to pass on doctored intelligence to Liddy while keeping the genuine product for Langley. Magruder claimed the information Liddy gave to him was worthless, which was part of his reason—but only part—for ordering the final, June 17, break-in, at which The Plumbers were caught.
Over the years, we have learned that the genuine product probably pertains not to political intelligence, as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein claimed, but to a prostitution ring arranging liaisons over a phone line at the DNC, with an address book naming clients and friends, likely kept in the desk of DNC secretary Ida “Maxie” Wells. When he was arrested, Martinez was carrying a key that opened this desk, which he tried but failed to dispose of. The definitive proof would have to come from unsealing further documents, and Baldwin telling what he heard. A court-enforced gag order from January 1973 prevented him from speaking about it, but in a 1995 interview, he said he monitored “a lot of conversations of a sexual nature.”
We have to acknowledge where the facts end, and interpretation of facts begins. The Moorer-Radford Affair is well-documented. From it, we can conclude that the military, spying on the president, was trying to undermine his foreign policy. The curiosities of the Fielding and Watergate break-ins are well-documented. But from this alone, we can’t make assumptions about how malign the CIA’s motivations for getting involved were.
Yet a modest and reasonable conclusion is that the CIA’s infiltration of The Plumbers is best understood as the agency’s counterpart to the military’s espionage on Nixon’s covert diplomacy. As James Rosen puts it in The Strong Man:
Oblivious to all of this, Nixon turned his attention after his re-election to the comprehensive reorganization of government that he had planned. As he himself put it, his goal was to “break the Eastern stranglehold on the executive branch and the federal government.” It was, as he admitted in his diary, “going to be quite a shock to the establishment.” In an action that caused considerable turmoil and resentment throughout the federal government, Nixon asked all political appointees to send in letters of resignation; he indicated many would be accepted. One of the key institutions he had in his sights was the CIA. While Nixon at times toyed with the idea of abolishing the agency entirely, he settled on a plan to reform it. Helms was sent off to be ambassador to Iran and replaced with James Schlesinger. Schlesinger interested Nixon because he had written a 1971 study on how to reorganize the intelligence agencies. Costs had exploded, the study observed, along with “spectacular increases in collection activities,” as technological advances turned the agencies from an invisible police force into an empire. But there had been a failure to see “a commensurate improvement in the scope and overall quantity of intelligence products.” Because of the intelligence community’s failures, “a fundamental reform of [its] decision-making bodies and procedures” was required.
The report was “brilliant,” Nixon stated in a December 1972 memo. Schlesinger’s objective would be to oversee the reorganization of the intelligence agencies, at long last. “I have been bugging him [Kissinger] and Haig for over three years to get intelligence reorganized, with no success whatever,” Nixon exclaimed. However, while the president wanted a leaner, crisper intelligence budget, he believed that the personnel needed a drastic overhaul:
In early 1973, Schlesinger initiated the first phase of Nixon’s plan. Beyond introducing more upper-level control over the CIA budget, he would fire more than 1,000 agents and incite senior leadership, the guardians of the status quo, to head toward the exit.
Yet no further reforms would take place under Nixon’s watch. McCord was cracking under pressure. “He was dismayed,” writes Rosen, that the Cubans were considering the “CIA defense” strategy, where they would plead not guilty on the grounds that they believed they were carrying out a CIA mission. “So fierce was his determination to protect Langley” that he quarreled with his defense team, objecting to their plan to subpoena Helms. Finally, McCord wrote a letter to the trial judge, John Sirica, contending that the proceedings were damaged by political pressure and perjury. When the judge read it publicly, this set off the scramble for plea bargains and revised testimony from compromised mid-level officials, which created new investigations that a priori focused on the White House and on Nixon himself.
During these investigations, occasional hints emerged implicating the CIA in the break-ins. In summer 1973, Helms revealed before Congress that Martinez was on the CIA payroll. The Watergate Special Prosecution Force, or WSPF, looked further. But when on Oct. 12, 1973, the WSPF asked for two reports that discussed Martinez, the agency refused outright. Meanwhile, the president’s own men didn’t grasp what had happened during the break-in, allowing their opponents to run rings around them. Already in late 1973, one writer concluded in Harper’s that “they underestimated both the bitterness and the subtlety of the CIA hierarchs, and it is conceivable that the CIA arranged for a trap at the Watergate.”
Congress didn’t show much interest in learning more. Speaking before a secret meeting of the Senate Armed Forces Committee in November 1973, the Harper’s writer was asked to reveal how he got this information. While he could corroborate his claims about Martinez, he had also said something for which he couldn’t provide evidence: that Helms was told of the burglary on 7 a.m. the next day. The committee excoriated him for making this uncorroborated claim. Nevertheless, the affair raised the question of how much Helms knew and when he knew it. Thanks to recently published documents, we now know that Helms was well informed and tried to hide it at first. On June 19, 1972, Helms was briefed on the “biographic details” for each of the men arrested on June 17. However, three days later, Helms told the acting director of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray III, that “none [of the arrested men] had worked for the [CIA] in the past two years.”
Even after Helms had resigned, he remained involved. He was startled to learn of a conversation between Kissinger and Haig, where Haig suggested that the CIA knew beforehand about the burglary. On Dec. 3, 1973, he sent a classified cable to Langley to warn the agency, asking whether Haig was “basing his allegation on information from Martinez or just what.”
“It was unclear whether false information affected their policy-making.”
In the media environment of the 1970s, it wasn’t possible to generate sufficient public interest in the CIA’s role in Watergate. Small details, like Martinez’s first case officer failing to appear before Congress, went unnoticed. The White House was the juicier target. As Geoff Shepard has meticulously documented through his own FOIA requests, the WSPF was staffed with Kennedy loyalists looking to take down Nixon. Through several secret ex parte meetings with Judge Sirica and violations of grand-jury rules, the WSPF passed material on to select members of the House Judiciary Committee, with the goal of removing Nixon from office and preparing the way for later criminal trials. This coordinated effort between officials in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches to take out the head of the executive branch was, to put it mildly, an act of constitutional vandalism. By adopting these means, the architects of Watergate set the precedent for future attempts to topple presidents.
Thanks to Shepard’s research, the abuses of the WSPF, the House Judiciary Committee, and Judge Sirica are clear. The CIA’s abuses are much harder to pin down. Yet the CIA didn’t emerge from the period untouched. As one critic of Nixon acknowledges, after the first phase of the Nixon reform, the agency was now “vulnerable to future investigations.” This would set the stage for the partially successful Church Committee, although the result was (nominally) more legislative oversight, not more executive oversight. The issues raised by the absence of the latter were exposed in the 1990s, when it was revealed that the CIA had provided Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton with tainted intelligence reports, prepared with information from known Soviet agents. Mid-level CIA management reserved unto itself the prerogative to sort out which information the Soviet agents provided was true or false. The presidents weren’t notified, so it was unclear whether false information affected their policymaking. One might say that Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was channeling Nixon’s more radical side when he proposed bills to abolish the CIA during these years.
The legend of Watergate that ignores CIA involvement is a feel-good ideological story, in which noble liberal constitutionalists bring down a conservative, authoritarian president. That’s what the public still thinks. Yet both Nixon and his institutional opponents in the intelligence community were conservatives and dedicated anti-Communists. Even Mark Felt fell into this camp—he was a Hoover loyalist. The real disagreement was a regime-level dispute about the arrangement of the administrative state.
“Nixon was trying to reassert voter control over the agencies.”
Nixon’s actions against the CIA in 1972 weren’t petty revenge against an uncooperative director and agency. The 1971 report and his memo demonstrate a more substantive project. Nixon saw that the technological advances of the 1960s had allowed the intelligence community to entrench and institutionalize itself to its own benefit, with no gain for the nation. The people were losing control of their own government. As Nixon put it in his diary just after his re-election: “It is the only way, and probably the last time, that we can get government under control before it gets so big that is submerges the individual completely and destroys the dynamism which makes the American system what it is.”
Determined not to give the establishment the benefit of a “timid opposition party,” Nixon was trying to reassert voter control over the agencies through the most important office the voters elected: the presidency. He sought to align the unelected bureaucracies with the chief elected official, making it easier for the president to direct the CIA and easier for the CIA to be held accountable.
Hoover, the Joint Chiefs, Helms, and Felt weren’t defending the Constitution or fighting to limit “the imperial presidency.” They were guarding their institutional autonomy, the idea of an apolitical bureaucracy serving the public good. Like the agents passing on compromised reports to the White House, they believed their judgements didn’t need to be assessed by political partisans. In the tumultuous years of the Nixon era, career intelligence men like Hoover, Helms, and Felt were defending the interests of their own institutions against a White House that didn’t want to conform to what later officials have called the “interagency consensus.”
Nixon was audacious enough to challenge and defeat that consensus, winning stunning victories. The price he paid, however, was his own downfall. Mindful of Nixon’s fate, most presidents—but not all—prefer to avoid defying that consensus.
Nathan Pinkoski, a senior fellow at the Edmund Burke Foundation, is a contributing editor of Compact.
CBS Top College Football Coaches 69 thru 26
- By scartiger
- The West Zone
- 2 Replies
69
Stanford
Troy Taylor: I can't speak for every voter, but I know I have a simple method for the bottom of my ballot. You're going at the bottom if it's your season as a head coach. It works because it makes sense and keeps me from having to actually rank somebody as the worst coach. Taylor has head coaching experience, so he wasn't 69th on my ballot, but I guess my colleagues aren't as impressed by three straight conference titles at Sacramento State. 2022 rank: n/a68
68
Miss. State
Zach Arnett: Arnett steps into an awful situation. It'd be one thing to replace a coaching legend if that coach had retired, but to try to fill Mike Leach's shoes after his unexpected death is an enormous task. He did get a win in Mississippi State's bowl game, though. 2022 rank: n/a67
67
Virginia Tech
Brent Pry: It's never a great sign when you have a year under your belt, and you're ranked behind other newcomers. Pry drops a couple of spots in our rankings after a 3-8 debut at Virginia Tech. 2022 rank: 65 (-2)66
66
Virginia
Tony Elliott: Another first-year coach in Virginia falling, but Elliott's Cavaliers team ended its year with heartbreak. Three members of Virginia's team (D'Sean Perry, Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr.) were shot and killed in a mass shooting on campus in November. It led to the cancellation of Virginia's final two games after a 3-7 start. 2022 rank: 60 (-6)65
65
Arizona St.
Kenny Dillingham: Capping a successful career as an offensive coordinator, Dillingham helped Bo Nix take a significant step forward with the Oregon Ducks last season. Now, he gets to lead his alma mater as the 33-year-old replaces Herm Edwards at Arizona State. 2022 rank: n/a64
64
Purdue
Ryan Walters: As Illinois' defensive coordinator, Walters helped turn around the Illini under Bret Bielema, coordinating a unit that was matched only by Georgia and Alabama last season. He moves about 90 minutes east of Champaign but stays in the Big Ten, replacing Jeff Brohm (who left for Louisville) at Purdue. 2022 rank: n/a63
63
Georgia Tech
Brent Key: After stepping in for the fired Geoff Collins last season, Key, a former Yellow Jackets right guard, earned enough support after going 4-4 as an interim coach to remove the tag and make him the permanent coach. 2022 rank: n/a62
62
Indiana
Tom Allen: It's been a long fall for Allen. He rocketed up the charts after Indiana went 14-7 over the 2019 and 2020 seasons, reaching as high as No. 20 in our 2021 rankings. Now, he's down to No. 62 after going 6-18 the last two years. 2022 rank: 40 (-22)61
61
Arizona
Jedd Fisch: I'm a little surprised Fisch didn't get a boost. He took over an Arizona team that had gone 1-16 over two seasons and immediately went 5-7 in his debut campaign. I guess our voting panel didn't stay up late enough on Saturdays to see it. 2022 rank: 61 (+0)60
60
Boston College
Jeff Hafley: The last two seasons at Boston College, Hafley received a lot of credit from our voters for punching above his weight, but his first season without a bowl appearance sent him plummeting. All I'll say at this point (I'll say more as we go on!) is that there seems to be an awful lot of bias toward coaches in certain conferences. 2022 rank: 34 (-26)59
59
West Virginia
Neal Brown: I'm somewhat surprised Brown is still in our rankings. After the Mountaineers went 5-7 last season, there was some speculation Brown could lose his job as the program hasn't been able to break through in his four years. He drops seven spots in our rankings, but he'll get one more crack at it. 2022 rank: 52 (-7)58
58
California
Justin Wilcox: There may not be a harder place to coach in the Power Five right now than Cal. Not only are you trying to recruit to a school with higher academic standards in the transfer portal era, but you're doing so at a place with members of the administration who believe the program shouldn't even exist! That can't be fun. Wilcox had gone 20-18 in his first three seasons at Cal but is only 10-18 since the COVID-19 season of 2020. I don't think that's a coincidence. 2022 rank: 44 (-14)57
57
Washington St.
Jake Dickert: After going 3-3 as the interim coach in 2021, Dickert seemed like a logical hire for Washington State and his first full season supported that idea. The Cougars went 7-6 last year and reached a bowl game, enough to bump Dickert up a few spots here. 2022 rank: 63 (+6)56
56
Vanderbilt
Clark Lea: After going 2-10 (0-8 SEC) in his debut season at Vanderbilt, Lea led the Commodores to a 5-7 record and two SEC wins last season. That's the kind of progress you want to see, but it was only worth a one-spot bump in our rankings. This is shocking to me because SEC coaches move up in these rankings after having worse seasons than the one they had the year before. 2022 rank: 57 (+1)55
55
Colorado
Deion Sanders: I figured Deion's name recognition would give him a boost, and I was right. I had him in the bottom five of my ballot due to his lack of Power Five and FBS coaching experience, but I also think he has a much higher ceiling than the other first-year coaches in the class. Whatever happens in Boulder, it'll be interesting to follow. 2022 rank: n/a54
54
Cincinnati
Scott Satterfield: Perhaps the fact that Satterfield fell 11 spots in these rankings is why he seemed so eager to leave Louisville for the opening at Cincinnati. Satterfield has had plenty of success in his career, but he didn't have nearly enough of it with the Cardinals. 2022 rank: 43 (-11)53
53
Syracuse
Dino Babers: When Syracuse went 1-10 during the 2020 season, we wondered if Babers' time at Syracuse had run its course. The 10-3 season of 2018 seemed like an outlier. However, while the Orange haven't reached those heights, they've rebounded nicely in the last couple of years. They went 7-6 last season and got back to a bowl for the first time since that 2018 season. Babers gets a little boost because of it. 2022 rank: (+3)52
52
Oklahoma
Brent Venables: After Lincoln Riley shocked the world with his move to USC, Venables said all the right things when he returned to Norman, Oklahoma, but not much went right afterward. Not only did Riley take a lot of key players with him to USC, but the Sooners dealt with injuries to key players all year. Hopefully, Venables' second season will provide fewer challenges. 2022 rank: 45 (-7)51
51
Missouri
Eli Drinkwitz: The good news for Drinkwitz is the Tigers have reached a bowl game in all three of his seasons at the school. The bad news is they haven't won more than six games in any of those seasons. He drops five spots after a second consecutive 6-7 season saw him fall to 17-19 overall at Mizzou. 2022 rank: 46 (-5)50
50
Rutgers
Greg Schiano: It feels like our voters were giving Schiano the benefit of the doubt for a while because we understood the challenges of Rutgers and known he'd had success there before. Unfortunately, we haven't seen significant promise in his three seasons. The Scarlet Knights are only 6-20 against Big Ten opponents the last three years, and half of those wins came in Schiano's first season back. 2022 rank: 36 (-14)49
49
Maryland
Mike Locksley: I don't think Locksley is getting enough credit from our panel. He's improved Maryland's win total in each season (not including the shortened COVID-19 campaign) and is doing so in one of the toughest divisions in the sport. Maryland's eight wins last year were the most it's had in a season since 2010 when Ralph Friedgen was in charge. That's only worth only a one-spot jump? 2022 rank: 50 (+1)48
48
Houston
Dana Holgorsen: With Houston moving to the Big 12, Holgorsen is our first coach from the four new schools to join the Power Five this season. Of course, this will not be Holgo's first foray into the big-time as he went 61-41 at West Virginia. Aside from the 12-2 season in 2021, his tenure at Houston has been mostly underwhelming. 2022 rank: n/a47
47
Michigan St.
Mel Tucker: Tuck fallin'. Tucker finished last season at No. 24 in our rankings as the Spartans were coming off an 11-2 season that saw them reach the Peach Bowl. Last year, Sparty didn't have nearly the same level of success in the transfer portal and didn't reach a bowl at all, finishing 5-7. As a result, Tuck dropped significantly. 2022 rank: 24 (-23)46
46
Texas Tech
Joey McGuire: I was skeptical of the McGuire hire at Texas Tech, but I've quickly come around after one season. My fellow voters seem even higher as he climbed 16 spots up to No. 46 after an 8-5 record last season. More importantly, Tech's 5-4 mark in the Big 12 was the first time it finished a season with a winning record in the league since Leach's final season in 2009. Three coaches have tried and failed to do so, and McGuire did it in his first year. 2022 rank: 62 (+16)45
45
Northwestern
Pat Fitzgerald: In 2020, Northwestern went 7-2, won the Big Ten West and played in the Big Ten Championship Game. It was the school's second division title in three years, and Fitzgerald was ranked No. 8 in our coach rankings. A 3-9 mark saw him drop to No. 21 last season. A 1-11 record sees him plummet 24 spots to No. 45. That's the largest drop of any coach in this year's poll. It seems excessive to me, but defending a 4-20 record over two seasons is hard. 2022 rank: 21 (-24)44
44
Duke
Mike Elko: Speaking of coaches at smaller private schools, Elko is heading in a different direction than Fitzgerald. I can't imagine many people were predicting a 9-4 record in Elko's first year in charge of the Blue Devils, but that's what happened, and it led to a quick 20-spot jump. 2022 rank: 64 (+20)43
43
Florida
Billy Napier: If you knew Florida would have a QB that would be drafted No. 4 in the NFL Draft before last season began, you probably would've predicted a season better than the one the Gators had in Napier's debut. Florida went 6-7, winning only three SEC games and finishing the year with an embarrassing 30-3 loss to Oregon State in the Las Vegas Bowl with most of its star players (including that QB) sidelined. It's no surprise Napier's stock took a hit here. 2022 rank: 32 (-11)42
42
Arkansas
Sam Pittman: The Head Hog stays on the rollercoaster ride here. Pittman was ranked No. 50 after going 3-7 in 2020 and climbed 30 spots to No. 20 after going 9-4 last year. Now, after finishing 7-6 in 2022, he falls 20 spots. It seems extreme, but I'd argue he climbed too high last year and this is simply things normalizing. 2022 rank: 22 (-20)41
41
BYU
Kalani Sitake: The 2023 season will be BYU's first in the Big 12, but the Cougars have played schedules featuring plenty of Power Five opponents under Sitake. They've gone 56-34 in Sitake's seven seasons. 2022 rank: n/a40
40
South Carolina
Shane Beamer: The Gamecocks improved by one victory in Beamer's second season, and he climbs a spot in our rankings. Seems fair to me. While I believe this assessment is fine, I'm a little surprised he didn't receive a bigger bump. 2022 rank: 41 (+1)39
39
Miami (Fla.)
Mario Cristobal: It shouldn't surprise anybody that after a season that saw Miami lose at home to Middle Tennessee and suffer four losses of 24+ points, Cristobal's stock took a hit. Did he forget how to do everything that helped him win 35 games in four seasons at Oregon and put him at No. 19 last year? I doubt it, but there's no denying he's off to a rough start in Coral Gables. 2022 rank: 19 (-20)38
38
Notre Dame
Marcus Freeman: As I said, I start first-year coaches at the bottom of my ballot. That's what I did with Freeman last year. My fellow voters disagreed, and he began at No. 49. Losses to Marshall and Cal are great examples of why I take a wait-and-see approach, but the Fighting Irish won six of their last seven while dealing with QB injuries, so Freeman finished his first season on a high note. 2022 rank: 49 (+11)37
37
Texas
Steve Sarkisian: What happens if Quinn Ewers doesn't get hurt against Alabama? Where does Texas finish, and where is Sark ranked in this alternate universe? We'll never know. Instead, the Longhorns went 8-5 but were never serious contenders in the Big 12, so Sark moves up two spots and nothing more. 2022 rank: 39 (+2)36
36
Oregon
Dan Lanning: There's plenty to be optimistic about following Lanning's first season as coach. Not only did the Ducks win 10 games, but they rebounded from a 49-3 beatdown from Georgia to open the season by picking up wins over ranked UCLA and the Utah team that won the conference. They're likely to start 2023 around the top 10, and Lanning begins the season creeping a lot closer to the top 25 himself. 2022 rank: 54 (+18)35
35
Iowa St.
Matt Campbell: OK, here's how these rankings work. When you win more games than you should at a school nobody expects to win a lot of games, you rocket up the rankings. But if you dare have one subpar season and fail to live up to the expectations you set, you will be punished severely. Campbell is the latest example. So what if he's responsible for the most successful run in program history? He went 4-8 last year. He stinks now. Just in case it isn't clear, I am not criticizing Campbell with these comments. I'm criticizing my colleagues. 2022 rank: 12 (-23)34
34
UCF
Gus Malzahn: The former Auburn coach returns to our rankings as UCF joins the Big 12, and The Gus Bus still gets plenty of respect for what he accomplished in the SEC. Malzahn is 18-9 in his two seasons with the Knights. 2022 rank: n/a33
33
Louisville
Jeff Brohm: After leading Purdue to its first Big Ten West title last season, Brohm left for his alma mater. Maybe that's why he dropped three spots? Brohm was 36-34 in his six seasons with the Boilermakers but 17-9 the last two seasons with a 12-6 record in the Big Ten. Louisville's hoping for more results like that in the ACC. 2022 rank: 30 (-3)32
32
Oregon State
Jonathan Smith: The former Oregon State QB has things headed in the right direction in Corvallis. After going 9-22 in his first three seasons, Smith's Beavers are 17-9 the last two years and just won 10 games for the first time since 2006. I can't wait to see how far he falls if he only wins eight games next year. 2022 rank: 37 (+5)31
31
Washington
Kalen DeBoer: It was a wonderful introduction for DeBoer at Washington. He was hired away from Fresno State after going 12-6 in two years with the Bulldogs, and he nearly matched that win total in his first year with the Huskies. Washington won 11 games last year. It's the most in a season since Chris Petersen led the program to the College Football Playoff in 2016. 2022 rank: 51 (+20)30
30
Iowa
Kirk Ferentz: Man, somebody out there really hates Ferentz. I had him at No. 12 on my ballot, so he had to be quite low on others to drop to 30. I have no idea what Ferentz did to warrant a drop of 17 places. The Hawkeyes went 8-5 last year, which is basically the same thing they've done the last 20 years. That kind of consistency had Ferentz ranked high in the first place. Another coach in our top 25 went from 10 wins in 2021 to eight in 2022 and climbed four spots. 2022 rank: 13 (-17)29
29
Pittsburgh
Pat Narduzzi: Earning respect from our voters is not easy for Narduzzi. Last year, I remarked that Narduzzi climbed only four spots in our rankings to No. 27 after reaching the ACC Championship and a New Year's Six bowl. Meanwhile, two SEC coaches jumped at least 20 spots for going 7-6. This year, Narduzzi follows an 11-3 season with a 9-4 year despite losing his Heisman Trophy finalist QB and drops two spots! 2022 rank: 27 (-2)28
28
Baylor
Dave Aranda: It's no surprise to see Aranda fall out of the top 25. He probably got too much credit in our rankings last year following a 12-2 season and a Sugar Bowl appearance. However, after going 6-7 in 2022, that season is the only winning year Aranda has had in Waco. I'm still a fan and expect more winning seasons in the future, but this is a pretty fair spot for now. 2022 rank: 11 (-17)27
27
Nebraska
Matt Rhule: We've got a run on Baylor coaches! Rhule returns to the college game after not faring well with the Carolina Panthers, but our voters still respect him for what he did in college. He took over programs at Temple and Baylor that were in rough situations and quickly turned things around. If he has Nebraska winning 10 games by his third season the way he did at his previous stops, he will be in the top 15 at a minimum. 2022 rank: n/a26
26
Auburn
Hugh Freeze: Welcome back, Hugh, but you'll have to wait at least a season before you crack the top 25. He's polarizing, sure, but Freeze's dismissal at Ole Miss had nothing to do with the results on the field. Those were just fine. They continued in his four seasons at Liberty, and now he's back in the SEC. 2022 rank: n/a
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Stanford
Troy Taylor: I can't speak for every voter, but I know I have a simple method for the bottom of my ballot. You're going at the bottom if it's your season as a head coach. It works because it makes sense and keeps me from having to actually rank somebody as the worst coach. Taylor has head coaching experience, so he wasn't 69th on my ballot, but I guess my colleagues aren't as impressed by three straight conference titles at Sacramento State. 2022 rank: n/a68
68
Miss. State
Zach Arnett: Arnett steps into an awful situation. It'd be one thing to replace a coaching legend if that coach had retired, but to try to fill Mike Leach's shoes after his unexpected death is an enormous task. He did get a win in Mississippi State's bowl game, though. 2022 rank: n/a67
67
Virginia Tech
Brent Pry: It's never a great sign when you have a year under your belt, and you're ranked behind other newcomers. Pry drops a couple of spots in our rankings after a 3-8 debut at Virginia Tech. 2022 rank: 65 (-2)66
66
Virginia
Tony Elliott: Another first-year coach in Virginia falling, but Elliott's Cavaliers team ended its year with heartbreak. Three members of Virginia's team (D'Sean Perry, Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr.) were shot and killed in a mass shooting on campus in November. It led to the cancellation of Virginia's final two games after a 3-7 start. 2022 rank: 60 (-6)65
65
Arizona St.
Kenny Dillingham: Capping a successful career as an offensive coordinator, Dillingham helped Bo Nix take a significant step forward with the Oregon Ducks last season. Now, he gets to lead his alma mater as the 33-year-old replaces Herm Edwards at Arizona State. 2022 rank: n/a64
64
Purdue
Ryan Walters: As Illinois' defensive coordinator, Walters helped turn around the Illini under Bret Bielema, coordinating a unit that was matched only by Georgia and Alabama last season. He moves about 90 minutes east of Champaign but stays in the Big Ten, replacing Jeff Brohm (who left for Louisville) at Purdue. 2022 rank: n/a63
63
Georgia Tech
Brent Key: After stepping in for the fired Geoff Collins last season, Key, a former Yellow Jackets right guard, earned enough support after going 4-4 as an interim coach to remove the tag and make him the permanent coach. 2022 rank: n/a62
62
Indiana
Tom Allen: It's been a long fall for Allen. He rocketed up the charts after Indiana went 14-7 over the 2019 and 2020 seasons, reaching as high as No. 20 in our 2021 rankings. Now, he's down to No. 62 after going 6-18 the last two years. 2022 rank: 40 (-22)61
61
Arizona
Jedd Fisch: I'm a little surprised Fisch didn't get a boost. He took over an Arizona team that had gone 1-16 over two seasons and immediately went 5-7 in his debut campaign. I guess our voting panel didn't stay up late enough on Saturdays to see it. 2022 rank: 61 (+0)60
60
Boston College
Jeff Hafley: The last two seasons at Boston College, Hafley received a lot of credit from our voters for punching above his weight, but his first season without a bowl appearance sent him plummeting. All I'll say at this point (I'll say more as we go on!) is that there seems to be an awful lot of bias toward coaches in certain conferences. 2022 rank: 34 (-26)59
59
West Virginia
Neal Brown: I'm somewhat surprised Brown is still in our rankings. After the Mountaineers went 5-7 last season, there was some speculation Brown could lose his job as the program hasn't been able to break through in his four years. He drops seven spots in our rankings, but he'll get one more crack at it. 2022 rank: 52 (-7)58
58
California
Justin Wilcox: There may not be a harder place to coach in the Power Five right now than Cal. Not only are you trying to recruit to a school with higher academic standards in the transfer portal era, but you're doing so at a place with members of the administration who believe the program shouldn't even exist! That can't be fun. Wilcox had gone 20-18 in his first three seasons at Cal but is only 10-18 since the COVID-19 season of 2020. I don't think that's a coincidence. 2022 rank: 44 (-14)57
57
Washington St.
Jake Dickert: After going 3-3 as the interim coach in 2021, Dickert seemed like a logical hire for Washington State and his first full season supported that idea. The Cougars went 7-6 last year and reached a bowl game, enough to bump Dickert up a few spots here. 2022 rank: 63 (+6)56
56
Vanderbilt
Clark Lea: After going 2-10 (0-8 SEC) in his debut season at Vanderbilt, Lea led the Commodores to a 5-7 record and two SEC wins last season. That's the kind of progress you want to see, but it was only worth a one-spot bump in our rankings. This is shocking to me because SEC coaches move up in these rankings after having worse seasons than the one they had the year before. 2022 rank: 57 (+1)55
55
Colorado
Deion Sanders: I figured Deion's name recognition would give him a boost, and I was right. I had him in the bottom five of my ballot due to his lack of Power Five and FBS coaching experience, but I also think he has a much higher ceiling than the other first-year coaches in the class. Whatever happens in Boulder, it'll be interesting to follow. 2022 rank: n/a54
54
Cincinnati
Scott Satterfield: Perhaps the fact that Satterfield fell 11 spots in these rankings is why he seemed so eager to leave Louisville for the opening at Cincinnati. Satterfield has had plenty of success in his career, but he didn't have nearly enough of it with the Cardinals. 2022 rank: 43 (-11)53
53
Syracuse
Dino Babers: When Syracuse went 1-10 during the 2020 season, we wondered if Babers' time at Syracuse had run its course. The 10-3 season of 2018 seemed like an outlier. However, while the Orange haven't reached those heights, they've rebounded nicely in the last couple of years. They went 7-6 last season and got back to a bowl for the first time since that 2018 season. Babers gets a little boost because of it. 2022 rank: (+3)52
52
Oklahoma
Brent Venables: After Lincoln Riley shocked the world with his move to USC, Venables said all the right things when he returned to Norman, Oklahoma, but not much went right afterward. Not only did Riley take a lot of key players with him to USC, but the Sooners dealt with injuries to key players all year. Hopefully, Venables' second season will provide fewer challenges. 2022 rank: 45 (-7)51
51
Missouri
Eli Drinkwitz: The good news for Drinkwitz is the Tigers have reached a bowl game in all three of his seasons at the school. The bad news is they haven't won more than six games in any of those seasons. He drops five spots after a second consecutive 6-7 season saw him fall to 17-19 overall at Mizzou. 2022 rank: 46 (-5)50
50
Rutgers
Greg Schiano: It feels like our voters were giving Schiano the benefit of the doubt for a while because we understood the challenges of Rutgers and known he'd had success there before. Unfortunately, we haven't seen significant promise in his three seasons. The Scarlet Knights are only 6-20 against Big Ten opponents the last three years, and half of those wins came in Schiano's first season back. 2022 rank: 36 (-14)49
49
Maryland
Mike Locksley: I don't think Locksley is getting enough credit from our panel. He's improved Maryland's win total in each season (not including the shortened COVID-19 campaign) and is doing so in one of the toughest divisions in the sport. Maryland's eight wins last year were the most it's had in a season since 2010 when Ralph Friedgen was in charge. That's only worth only a one-spot jump? 2022 rank: 50 (+1)48
48
Houston
Dana Holgorsen: With Houston moving to the Big 12, Holgorsen is our first coach from the four new schools to join the Power Five this season. Of course, this will not be Holgo's first foray into the big-time as he went 61-41 at West Virginia. Aside from the 12-2 season in 2021, his tenure at Houston has been mostly underwhelming. 2022 rank: n/a47
47
Michigan St.
Mel Tucker: Tuck fallin'. Tucker finished last season at No. 24 in our rankings as the Spartans were coming off an 11-2 season that saw them reach the Peach Bowl. Last year, Sparty didn't have nearly the same level of success in the transfer portal and didn't reach a bowl at all, finishing 5-7. As a result, Tuck dropped significantly. 2022 rank: 24 (-23)46
46
Texas Tech
Joey McGuire: I was skeptical of the McGuire hire at Texas Tech, but I've quickly come around after one season. My fellow voters seem even higher as he climbed 16 spots up to No. 46 after an 8-5 record last season. More importantly, Tech's 5-4 mark in the Big 12 was the first time it finished a season with a winning record in the league since Leach's final season in 2009. Three coaches have tried and failed to do so, and McGuire did it in his first year. 2022 rank: 62 (+16)45
45
Northwestern
Pat Fitzgerald: In 2020, Northwestern went 7-2, won the Big Ten West and played in the Big Ten Championship Game. It was the school's second division title in three years, and Fitzgerald was ranked No. 8 in our coach rankings. A 3-9 mark saw him drop to No. 21 last season. A 1-11 record sees him plummet 24 spots to No. 45. That's the largest drop of any coach in this year's poll. It seems excessive to me, but defending a 4-20 record over two seasons is hard. 2022 rank: 21 (-24)44
44
Duke
Mike Elko: Speaking of coaches at smaller private schools, Elko is heading in a different direction than Fitzgerald. I can't imagine many people were predicting a 9-4 record in Elko's first year in charge of the Blue Devils, but that's what happened, and it led to a quick 20-spot jump. 2022 rank: 64 (+20)43
43
Florida
Billy Napier: If you knew Florida would have a QB that would be drafted No. 4 in the NFL Draft before last season began, you probably would've predicted a season better than the one the Gators had in Napier's debut. Florida went 6-7, winning only three SEC games and finishing the year with an embarrassing 30-3 loss to Oregon State in the Las Vegas Bowl with most of its star players (including that QB) sidelined. It's no surprise Napier's stock took a hit here. 2022 rank: 32 (-11)42
42
Arkansas
Sam Pittman: The Head Hog stays on the rollercoaster ride here. Pittman was ranked No. 50 after going 3-7 in 2020 and climbed 30 spots to No. 20 after going 9-4 last year. Now, after finishing 7-6 in 2022, he falls 20 spots. It seems extreme, but I'd argue he climbed too high last year and this is simply things normalizing. 2022 rank: 22 (-20)41
41
BYU
Kalani Sitake: The 2023 season will be BYU's first in the Big 12, but the Cougars have played schedules featuring plenty of Power Five opponents under Sitake. They've gone 56-34 in Sitake's seven seasons. 2022 rank: n/a40
40
South Carolina
Shane Beamer: The Gamecocks improved by one victory in Beamer's second season, and he climbs a spot in our rankings. Seems fair to me. While I believe this assessment is fine, I'm a little surprised he didn't receive a bigger bump. 2022 rank: 41 (+1)39
39
Miami (Fla.)
Mario Cristobal: It shouldn't surprise anybody that after a season that saw Miami lose at home to Middle Tennessee and suffer four losses of 24+ points, Cristobal's stock took a hit. Did he forget how to do everything that helped him win 35 games in four seasons at Oregon and put him at No. 19 last year? I doubt it, but there's no denying he's off to a rough start in Coral Gables. 2022 rank: 19 (-20)38
38
Notre Dame
Marcus Freeman: As I said, I start first-year coaches at the bottom of my ballot. That's what I did with Freeman last year. My fellow voters disagreed, and he began at No. 49. Losses to Marshall and Cal are great examples of why I take a wait-and-see approach, but the Fighting Irish won six of their last seven while dealing with QB injuries, so Freeman finished his first season on a high note. 2022 rank: 49 (+11)37
37
Texas
Steve Sarkisian: What happens if Quinn Ewers doesn't get hurt against Alabama? Where does Texas finish, and where is Sark ranked in this alternate universe? We'll never know. Instead, the Longhorns went 8-5 but were never serious contenders in the Big 12, so Sark moves up two spots and nothing more. 2022 rank: 39 (+2)36
36
Oregon
Dan Lanning: There's plenty to be optimistic about following Lanning's first season as coach. Not only did the Ducks win 10 games, but they rebounded from a 49-3 beatdown from Georgia to open the season by picking up wins over ranked UCLA and the Utah team that won the conference. They're likely to start 2023 around the top 10, and Lanning begins the season creeping a lot closer to the top 25 himself. 2022 rank: 54 (+18)35
35
Iowa St.
Matt Campbell: OK, here's how these rankings work. When you win more games than you should at a school nobody expects to win a lot of games, you rocket up the rankings. But if you dare have one subpar season and fail to live up to the expectations you set, you will be punished severely. Campbell is the latest example. So what if he's responsible for the most successful run in program history? He went 4-8 last year. He stinks now. Just in case it isn't clear, I am not criticizing Campbell with these comments. I'm criticizing my colleagues. 2022 rank: 12 (-23)34
34
UCF
Gus Malzahn: The former Auburn coach returns to our rankings as UCF joins the Big 12, and The Gus Bus still gets plenty of respect for what he accomplished in the SEC. Malzahn is 18-9 in his two seasons with the Knights. 2022 rank: n/a33
33
Louisville
Jeff Brohm: After leading Purdue to its first Big Ten West title last season, Brohm left for his alma mater. Maybe that's why he dropped three spots? Brohm was 36-34 in his six seasons with the Boilermakers but 17-9 the last two seasons with a 12-6 record in the Big Ten. Louisville's hoping for more results like that in the ACC. 2022 rank: 30 (-3)32
32
Oregon State
Jonathan Smith: The former Oregon State QB has things headed in the right direction in Corvallis. After going 9-22 in his first three seasons, Smith's Beavers are 17-9 the last two years and just won 10 games for the first time since 2006. I can't wait to see how far he falls if he only wins eight games next year. 2022 rank: 37 (+5)31
31
Washington
Kalen DeBoer: It was a wonderful introduction for DeBoer at Washington. He was hired away from Fresno State after going 12-6 in two years with the Bulldogs, and he nearly matched that win total in his first year with the Huskies. Washington won 11 games last year. It's the most in a season since Chris Petersen led the program to the College Football Playoff in 2016. 2022 rank: 51 (+20)30
30
Iowa
Kirk Ferentz: Man, somebody out there really hates Ferentz. I had him at No. 12 on my ballot, so he had to be quite low on others to drop to 30. I have no idea what Ferentz did to warrant a drop of 17 places. The Hawkeyes went 8-5 last year, which is basically the same thing they've done the last 20 years. That kind of consistency had Ferentz ranked high in the first place. Another coach in our top 25 went from 10 wins in 2021 to eight in 2022 and climbed four spots. 2022 rank: 13 (-17)29
29
Pittsburgh
Pat Narduzzi: Earning respect from our voters is not easy for Narduzzi. Last year, I remarked that Narduzzi climbed only four spots in our rankings to No. 27 after reaching the ACC Championship and a New Year's Six bowl. Meanwhile, two SEC coaches jumped at least 20 spots for going 7-6. This year, Narduzzi follows an 11-3 season with a 9-4 year despite losing his Heisman Trophy finalist QB and drops two spots! 2022 rank: 27 (-2)28
28
Baylor
Dave Aranda: It's no surprise to see Aranda fall out of the top 25. He probably got too much credit in our rankings last year following a 12-2 season and a Sugar Bowl appearance. However, after going 6-7 in 2022, that season is the only winning year Aranda has had in Waco. I'm still a fan and expect more winning seasons in the future, but this is a pretty fair spot for now. 2022 rank: 11 (-17)27
27
Nebraska
Matt Rhule: We've got a run on Baylor coaches! Rhule returns to the college game after not faring well with the Carolina Panthers, but our voters still respect him for what he did in college. He took over programs at Temple and Baylor that were in rough situations and quickly turned things around. If he has Nebraska winning 10 games by his third season the way he did at his previous stops, he will be in the top 15 at a minimum. 2022 rank: n/a26
26
Auburn
Hugh Freeze: Welcome back, Hugh, but you'll have to wait at least a season before you crack the top 25. He's polarizing, sure, but Freeze's dismissal at Ole Miss had nothing to do with the results on the field. Those were just fine. They continued in his four seasons at Liberty, and now he's back in the SEC. 2022 rank: n/a
2023 college football coach rankings: Mel Tucker, Sam Pittman plummet among Power Five coaches ranked 69-26
Mike Elko and Kalen DeBoer were among major risers outside of the top 25
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