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First, Benedict simply wanted to see Candle coach. So on Saturday, Nov. 29, four days after Jim Mora announced he was departing for Colorado State, Benedict traveled to Mount Pleasant, Mich., to watch Toledo face Central Michigan in its regular season finale. It was a blustery, cold, snowy day at Kelly/Shorts Stadium.
“He didn’t know I was there, and it wasn’t meant for him to know I was there,” Benedict said Saturday by phone, hours after UConn announced Candle as its next coach. “It was nice being at a football game where I didn’t have a rooting interest, per se. My main focus was on his movements, watching him interact with his players, watching his players interact with his other coaches, watching the organization on the sideline. I wasn’t there to evaluate his offensive or defensive schemes. I was there to take it all in. I primarily focused on him. I watched him more than I was watching the game.” <-
->… “One of, if not the, most important thing I do is hire head coaches,” Benedict said. “I take this role and responsibility extremely seriously. Not that any previous search or any search is easy, but this cycle within college football, I don’t know if it’s unprecedented, but certainly there was a lot going on relative to coaching movement. That put even more of a premium and probably more pressure on the situation for me to have a good result. I have been doing nothing other than trying to find and identify who that next leader was going to be. My first intuition about this search as we quickly started building a list of candidates was to go see Jason Candle. I went and saw Jason Candle.” <-
