SWC75
Bored Historian
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
- Messages
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As just one example, not too long ago you wrote a post touting the brightness of the future of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Now why on earth would you care about the Jaguars? What possible reason might you have to believe in them?
I'm not surprised my comments on McDonald to this day go over your head. McDonald had the right idea - speed up the offense and play to the Dome's strengths. He just so happened to be particularly ill equipped to carry out the concept and couldn't execute. It is what it is, but it was the right gamble to roll the dice on a guy like him that at least had the right idea and could have been an up and comer. We're not going anywhere better than scraping in to bowl games playing traditional football. So we needed to take a chance on adapting to what's working in college football, McDonald had the right idea, and he and it failed. It happens. At the time he was our guy, might as well have hoped he was on the right track. And again, he was, he was also utterly incapable of seeing it through. You want to ignore the nuance, that's fine. It's just a little weird to ignore the nuance when you buy in wholesale to a .500 coach as being the greatest thing ever.
Here's a comment I just made on Bud and the Manchild: this was the most efficient-looking SU team I've seen in a long time. They weren't mistake-free but we are used to double figures in penalties, 2-3 turnovers from the first team, being unable to run ten plays in a row without a drive-killing mistake, blown coverages on defense etc. I did't see that on Friday, (yes it's against Colgate but we've done those things against FCS teams, too). I think the difference is that we got not just a head coach but the nucleus of a staff that has been successful at two other schools and absolutely believe that they will have the same success here. They've probably simplified and taken the rough edges out of their system. It think the player enjoy playing in this system, find it relatively easy to learn and absorb the confidence their coaches have in what they are doing. Bud said that the players said that the coaches didn't just tell them what to do: they tell them "If you do this you will win." I think it makes a huge difference.
We've been firing coaches, (or losing them and their entire staffs to the NFL), and having to have a new guy cobble together a staff with whoever is available after a season. We get guys who have recently been fired or part of a fired staff or guys promoted to what might be their level of incompetence. We get guys from all over the place who have coached in different system and have different philosophies. The new guy often finds that the guy he was able to get isn't really the guy he wants and changes get made. These coaches see something other schools are doing and decide to try to copy it without having coached in that system before. The result is a group of players who are trying o see if something works instead of doing something that they know will work.