He is my all-time favorite coach. Congrats to him.
He was a good coach and great recruiter. Was great coach until the last two games of the year. I miss him too. It was fun living in Ohio being a Michigan fan back then. I think in a couple of years we will get back to that kind of streak again. I don't think the big ten is ready for what is coming their way.
Cooper won a shit load of games, clearly he was a hell of a coach.
between tressel and cooper is that tressel has beaten michigan. if coop could've done that one thing he'd be on woody's level
But even more to the point, the vast majority of that 2002 team was recruited by Cooper. If he had benefited from the competent quarterback play Krenzel provided, he'd have been able to get them to the National Title, too.
The best coaches and players win the big games. Ironically enough, Cooper was hired because he beat UM in the 1987 Rose Bowl with heavy underdog ASU.
I worked and roomed one summer with someone who played for Cooper at Tulsa. He said Cooper was still running the same plays, and he could pretty much predict what was coming about 90 percent of the time.
If washed-up, ex-third string FB who was by then a professional partier could predict Cooper's plays while watching games in a bar over a decade after he had graduated, you can bet that anyone who did football for a living could do the same thing.
That is why Cooper lost the big ones. He could beat a team when he had a visible talent advantage, but lost to teams with equal or slightly less talent. Predictability was the reason Carr started losing late in his career. Tressel is dangerously close to becoming predictable himself.
Hopefully, the progression works like this:
RR>Tressel>Carr>Cooper
I guess that's enough for the HoF nowadays.
Kind of hard to win the big games with the likes of Stanley Jackson and Kirk Herbstreit lining up under center.
How does Troy Aikman get inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame before the College Football HOF?
I think his impact in college football was probably diminished after the fact because he transferred to UCLA from Oklahoma; he didn't break any records or win the Heisman. Also, to answer your question more directly, I don't think it's a stretch to say that Aikman was a better QB in the NFL than he was in college.
I find it hard to believe many coaches for either OSU or UofM won't be inducted at some point.
It's worth noting that the qualifications for the college football hall of fame are not very stringent. For example Bo's first defensive coordinator, Jim Young, is in with his 6 bowl appearances in 17 years as a head coach.
The whole notion of a Hall of Fame for a sport in which players get to compete for no more than four seasons seems silly to me. Our society has gone overboard with the HoF concept.