Back in 2012, Central State University President John
Garland fired Winslow from the position of athletic director. Winslow responded
by making a number of apparently bitter comments in the media.
The Springfield News-Sun reported on the back-and-forth
between Winslow and the Central State president:
“I’m sure my termination is personal,” Winslow said. “It’s John taking a personal shot at me on his way out the door. I know I speak my mind and challenge people here ... and maybe that’s got something to do with it. Regardless, it’s wrong.”Monday evening, Garland had a different take on the dismissal:“Kellen is partially right. It wasn’t for cause or performance, but it wasn’t for personal reasons either. That’s not accurate.“He may very well feel it’s personal — when things like this happen, people want to believe there has to be a reason like that — but it’s just about making a change. His contract was 2 1/2 months from expiring and I just view it as an early nonrenewal.”Pressed on why that happened, Garland simply said: “Kellen is obviously very high-profile and has a lot going for him and I have no intention to hurt or harm him. I don’t want to put him in bad light or create a sense of turmoil at the university.”
FAMU President Elmira Mangum hired Winslow as her first
athletic director in 2014. His condescending attitude toward Rattlers soon got
him in trouble.
On October 28, 2014, Winslow confirmed that Holmes had been
fired as the head football coach. Over
his nearly two seasons as head coach, Holmes amassed a record of six wins and
16 losses. Holmes’ firing came at a time when the team was showing steady
improvement, having won two out of its last three contests and with the
Homecoming game just four days away.
Winslow’s disrespectful treatment of Holmes and his decision
to continue to make insulting comments about the university and its supporters
finally led many FAMUans to lose patience with him. Hundreds of FAMU students
and alumni booed Winslow at the 2014 Homecoming Convocation.
The FAMU Board of Trustees (BOT) Athletics Oversight
Committee approved a motion declaring that it had “no confidence” in Winslow on
November 7 and recommended that the full board also support the action.
John Michael Lee came to the defense of Winslow in a
November 8 email to the BOT. He used Holmes’ 0-5 start in 2014 as a reason to
claim that the firing was the right thing to do.
“While I understand the point-of-view that the firing of
Earl Holmes during homecoming was done outside of the normal ‘tradition’ of the
university, I believe that the ultimate decision to sever ties with coach
Holmes- the first coach in the 127-year history of FAMU to start the football
season 0-5 and lead the team to an all-time low football attendance for the
university- was the right decision despite the timing,” Lee wrote in his email to the BOT.
Lee added that: “I believe that the FAMU BOT Athletic
Oversight Committee’s decision to issue a vote of no-confidence to athletic
director Kellen Winslow – who reports directly to FAMU President Dr. Elmira
Mangum- is simply ‘petty politics’ meant to circumvent the president’s
oversight of athletics.”
The full BOT went on to approve a “no confidence” vote in
Winslow on November 17. Winslow resigned in December and Mangum later hired Lee
to a $130,000 job as assistant vice-president for alumni affairs at the university.
The 2015 Rattler football team under new Head Coach Alex
Wood started out even worse than the previous year by chalking up a 0-6 record
during its first games. It ended with a 1-10 record, which made it the first time in
72 years that FAMU won only one contest in an entire season.
The decision to choose Lee as the “New Head of Alumni
Affairs” was suspicious because one of the most important jobs for any
university’s top alumni affairs official is communication. Lee’s poor writing became the subject of a discussion
at a June BOT meeting. At the meeting, then-Chairman Rufus Montgomery said that
he was baffled by the writing problems that he saw in a November 8, 2014 email
from Lee despite the fact that Lee has a Ph.D. degree.
Winslow and Lee are two of the last people who should have
been criticizing Earl Holmes because neither one of them should have even been given serious consideration for jobs at FAMU.