CC: Some Good Words about Hoke

posted yesterday or day before

and Carr was against RR, and Hoke comes in with no "power" or major rep of his own then would he be a pawn of LC and how he wants the program to run?  It certainly seems that Carr won the battle of RR.  If Hoke gets the job, it'll be interesting to see if Carr starts making publice comments about how great of a hire he is and becoming more involved.

I said it a few days ago, MUllen wouldn't be a bad hire fomr an X-Os standpoint and he runs a spread as well.  He might get better talent here.  There are negatives on every candidate.  JH's only negative was he might go to the NFL eventually.

Wow.  The more you think about it, the more screwed we are.  If DB doesn't get this right, the consecutive streak of 100k+ plus end as well.

However, he wants to shred our spread and many of our good players including DROB will transfer. It will be a total rebuilding process with a coach who really has not proved himself. But if we want to be a nice clean program that finishes in the bottom of the big 10 and occasionally wins 6 or 7 games and go the the pizza pizza bowl, then Hoke is our man. It is starting to look that way. May be I'm wrong and in 4 or 5 years he will have the program back in competition for the b10 title?

...everything goes better with Hoke.  ; )

The guy who wrote this article used to be at Ball State.

In any case, I don't doubt that Hoke is a great guy and his players love him. I'm not thrilled about his overall losing record in crappy divisions, but my biggest concern is attrition. We just spent 3 years dealing with attrition and losing. Now we finally had a chance to field a team that isn't mostly frosh and sophs, and I'm really really worried that unless DB pulls a big name guy with a history of success out of his butt, we'll lose recruits and current players, setting us back at least another 3-4 years. Hiring Hoke would likely mean losing players, which in turn would lead to more losing seasons, in turn leading to U of M = ND.

I'm normally a cup half full kind of guy, but this is becoming a nightmare.

Why does everyone think its just down to Hoke and Miles? 

There are still wildcards out there: Gruden, Patterson, etc. 

Remember, Rich Rod was not on our radar until the very end. 

.......a hire of Hoke would be a win for Carr. Yes, Hoke was an assistant under Carr, but nothing I hear about Hoke steers me to believing that he is just a "crony" of Carr's. To me, whether or not Carr likes him is completely irrelevant to the situation. The players he has coached rave about him, he absolutely wants to be UM's HC, not as a step up from his current assignment, but because he bleeds maize and blue.

Those who simply look at his overall won/loss record are failing to look deeper into just how good a coach he is. He didn't take two perpetually winning schools and eventually bump them up in wins. He took two losing doormats of programs to at or near the top of their conferences, completely turning them around in his time there.

To me, Hoke shouldn't be a "fallback" plan, but should be mentioned near the top of the list as DB considers who our next coach should be.

I am proposing a new tag.  How about "Not CC."

cuz everything on the Board right now is CC

He would bust his ass for Michigan, he would recruit like a mad man, he has a very traditional mind set that the grey hairs who basically run the university would love and he would hire highly competent coordinators to execute.  

It is time to accept that Brady Hoke will be our next coach by next week.  It is almost a guarantee.  He is the only coach that the entire athletic department truly feels comfortable with, and trust me he will get some really heavy hitter coordinators because that will be the key.  There will be coaches in waiting (specifically Scott Loeffler).

every time I hear "Brady" or "Hoke" or "Brady Hoke"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4QKiYar9pI

I'm not sayin.  I'm just sayin.

Two years ago, another BCS team fired its head coach after the worst four seasons in the school’s history. That coach had succeeded a very successful head coach who was considered to have reached the end of his line after having had a few down seasons and having been thoroughly embarrassed in a bowl-game loss.

The new coach had come to the team in 2005 with the caché of having been an assistant coach on Super Bowl championship teams. He was hailed as a savior when he was hired. Not only was he expected to revamp and re-energize the offense so that it would become more exciting, but he was considered to be a "defensive guru" who would instantly develop one of the top college football defenses in the nation. The new coach’s first team finished with the first double-digit-loss season in the school’s history (1-10 with no conference wins). He finished 10-37 (3-25 in conference) in four seasons. His last three defenses – using his hand-picked assistants, schemes and most of his own recruits all were ranked in the bottom 20 of FBS teams.

When that coach was fired, few followers of Syracuse football expected that Greg Robinson would be hired as a football coach ever again. Yet within weeks of his firing, Robinson was hired to take over the Michigan defense. You know the rest of that disastrous story for Michigan.

To replace Robinson, Syracuse hired Doug Marrone, then an assistant coach with the New Orleans Saints. Marrone was a Syracuse alum who once had captained the Syracuse team as an offensive lineman. Marrone considered the Syracuse head coach position to be his dream job – so much so that for years he had compiled a notebook filled with suggestions for how he would handle the Syracuse job if it ever was offered to him. The reaction to Marrone’s hiring was greeted by many Syracuse fans with a collective, "Huh, WTF?"

In two seasons, helped by instilling a no-nonsense, "act like professionals" attitude among his players, and fortunate to have hired former Stanford and Michigan defensive coordinator Scott Shafer to run the Syracuse defense, Marrone unloaded most of Robinson’s players and used former Duke point guard and high school All-American QB Greg Paulus who had become a Syracuse graduate student, to quarterback his first team (one that matched the best win total that Robinson had achieved in any of his four years). He also converted two of Robinson’s running back recruits, Doug Hogue and Derrell Smith, into very good Big East linebackers who have a decent chance of getting NFL tryouts. He recently finished his second season at Syracuse with an 8-5 record and a win in the inaugural New Era Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium, blocks away from where Marrone grew up. He has begun to make Syracuse fans start to forget The Greg Robinson Error.

There are few positives to take from Brady Hoke’s candidacy to succeed Rich Rodriguez. Although I don’t consider Rodriguez to be a great head coach (winning 59% of his games as a head coach doesn’t raise him to the level of greatness; Bob Stoops has won 80% of his games as a head coach*), it might have been better for Michigan to allow Rich Rodriguez to have another year with entirely new defensive assistants and a special teams assistant.

But Brady Hoke considers Michigan to be his dream job. If he’s hired, Hoke may lose several experienced players and not gain many good recruits. He may not have instant success, especially if he’ll be losing Denard Robinson and Devin Gardner and starting 2011 without an experienced QB on the roster – assuming, but not knowing, that either Tate Forcier will be leaving or that he won’t regain academic eligibility at Michigan.

Hoke may be greeted with the same negative reaction that Syracuse fans gave to Doug Marrone. But if Hoke gets the job and shows the same passion and desire to succeed in turning around Michigan’s recent fortunes that Marrone has shown in winning more games in two seasons than his more-celebrated predecessor won in four seasons at Syracuse, then maybe the dark days of the Rich Rodriguez experiment at Michigan (except for the Brock Mealer and "Shoelace" successes) soon will be forgotten.

*Considering the uncertainty surrounding the Big XII’s future, Bob Stoops might be the best choice to succeed Rich Rodriguez at Michigan – a defensive-minded coach with proven success as a head coach in a BCS conference, and willing to run a high-powered, hurry-up offense.