What would you do?

4. Do your due diligence as an AD and bring more candidates in.

Nothing screams out for statistical analysis more than the hiring of football coaches. You should be able to create a formula that gives a reasonable measure of the likelihood of success. If I was in charge, I would have found an analytics company capable of performing that measurement across a broad range of coaching candidates and pursued the ones at the top. It would be interesting to know the number of interim coaches over the last 20 years who have become head coaches and their level of success as both interim and head coaches; what percentage had previous head coaching experience before being an interim coach; the differences in success from those with previous head coaching experience and those without; the differences for those with offensive or defensive backgrounds; whether age made a difference, etc. I would have been reluctant to turn the reins over to Coach O without having some empirical evidence that he had greater than 50% chance to be a successful head coach based upon his record as an interim coach.