Long Dave Brandon Interview in Detroit News
It's just you. In fact, I am thinking a lot of your life problems probably are "just you."
...And my 80's-themed avatar can beat up your 80's-themed avatar. See, anyone can be an internet tough guy.
with a 2nd year starting 5th year senior QB, with a talented group of recievers, a large group of talented RBs, a large group of talented OL (young I will give you that), and a very telented and veteren defense to win 75% of their games. Actually higher. If Michigan is 9-3 with 3 losses to ND, MSU, and OSU, I will not be happy, as it does not meet the Michigan Metric of winning the BIG. Hoke set this standard his first year when he turned around a team to be 11-2 yet didn't win the BIG and was in his mind a dissapointment.
Michigan has high standards and should have high standards. And, outside the OL, I don't see any position group on the team that can't get us a BIG chamionship. The Coaches are surely aware of this, and I'm sure are taking the steps to get this group where they need to be to compete.
Why does Hoke get that right but not RR? When RR said the defense was young all the time he got ripped to shreds around here.
I was as happy and hopeful about the Rodriguez hire as anybody, but firing him after his third season was the right decision.
His predecessor lost his last three games (after three years at the helm) by 20, 30 and 38. He had to go.
Goddamn right. Anyone who clings to "RR needed more time" should have your post permanently attached to their signature, along with "6 conference wins in 3 years"
turn things around under other circumstances. With the toxic atmosphere around Michigan at the time, it never would have worked. Yes, I wish he was given more support initially, but it didn't happen and more time wasn't going to change it.
We can watch Arizona and get an opinion if his system could work. What we can't do is go back and give RR a chance at Michigan. Brady Hoke shouldn't be penalized because of what happened to RR unless you want to totally destroy Michigan football. Hoke has had good recruiting classes and deserves time to develop the talent he has brought in. Rich Rod isn't a factor in that. Bringing up RR doesn't help show support for Hoke.
There is always attrition when coaching staffs change. Hoke did very well in keeping the remaining players,but it's very likely that there will be roster will be hurt if Hoke left. He is very popular with the players. I also think there are a lot of schools who would be looking for a coach that can recruit like him and this staff. Don't think recruiting wouldn't be hurt going forward if the staff is at another school and very possibly another B1G school.
Part of the difference between Rodriguez and Hoke, though, is just how bad the program was under Rodriguez. His last (and best) team barely managed a 7-5 record, their closest loss was by 10 points. And as we have discussed a lot recently, his recruiting was pretty abysmal, and the program is still suffering for it. At the time, a lot of people (myself included) saw the incremental increase in wins every season and thought he deserved more time, but with some added hindsight, it should be clear that the program was in even worse shape than I think a lot of us realized.
Conversely: Hoke has been gangbusters at recruiting (at least on paper). His 7-5 season (his worst) was not as bad as Rodriguez's 7-5 (his best). Plus, Hoke has already shown his willingness to address his albatross: firing Borges to fix his horrible offense, as opposed to Rodriguez's downward trending defensive debacles.
Do you read what you write?
nail meet head
Overall I like your comment. The defense in that era along with a "fancy offense" that did cool things against weak to average teams than got steamrolled by nearly every competent defense was bad. So even RR's strong point (offense) was not a good thing once the competition came around. That surprised me - because his WVU offenses were pretty spectacular. That said RR never had a RB like he had at his height at WVU here - if you put an elite RB behind a Denard it would have been a lot more interesting offense.
Not a RR fanboy but I'd like to point out IMOo Hoke is afforded MANY advantages RR did not get; especially in budget. He is walking around with 2 coordinators making close to a million each. RR couldnt get the budget to sign an average market rate DC. How would RR done if he was afforded a million to hire coordinators? (well he didnt need one offensively but you get the point) That was unfair to him.
Your most important comment was about recruiting. RR laid the seeds for ANY coach's demise in 2012-2013. The OL in 2012 had 2 very good players and 3 meh upperclassmen and then 2013 was just horrid due to things like recruiting 5 WRs in 1 class and 2 OL. But if Lombardi had been coaching those issues would be there. That said even with those disadvantages I think an elite coach finds a way to win more in 2013 and make the wins we did have (Akron, UConn, Northwestern) not look so bad. And the awful non competitive performance at KSU would not have happened.
Earlier up the thread I do want to say the "8-4 is cool" ethos around here is troubling. I hope that is a 1 year situation due to the youth on offense and not people's expectations. Our friends in EL have put together 3 years out of 4 of 11+ wins. Double digit wins should be an expectation from 2015 forward with the type of talent coming in and the relative weakness of the Big 10. In any year you are going to play 2 bottom dwellars in the Big 10 and 3 bad to average non conf teams so that is 5 wins a year. Getting to 10 wins then requires a 5-3 record against teams with a heartbeat. If you cannot do that with the talent coming in, brand, facilities, salaries of your coordinators etc you dont deserve to be coach at UM long term. Go 5-3 or 6-2 annually versus teams with a heartbeat ... this is Michigan fergodsakes. And yes i get some years there will be a major injury or just a bad season but double digit win seasons should be the floor for a program of this caliber spending this type of money on the program.
Very well said.
The team didnt seem very enthused for the Kansas State game.
RR should have been given the chance. Zero respect for crotchy old loyd and his hit squad. That said, the man had to go. I get physically ill thiking of Whisky running the ball 42 straight times and the hot mic picking up the coach saying go show them how to play football. Ugh.
Is this the Monday drinking thread?
True. Depressing. Everyone is making good points, but horse is still dead. No need to beat the poor thing. (where's the guy where the horse beating is his avatar? we need him....)
Good article, there's a few quotes in there that I'm sure will bring out the anti-Dave crowd (almost everyone here). While I don't agree with everything he does, I appreciate his frankness here.
I read it more along the lines that no matter what decision he makes, 20-30% of the fanbase will hate it automatically. The Bando's and Professor X's of the world, then obviously whoever is adversely affected by the decision.
one can't discount that much of the automatic hate is generated by <10 win seasons. If there are double digit wins and you throw in 50% wins against rivals, the hate factor will drop dramatically. Not entirely though, one need only remember the universal hate of the halo.
He needs to stop saying that we're the "winningest program in the history of college football". Notre Dame has a higher percentage due to playing fewer games. This burns my soul, but that's what we get for the last 7 years of "This is Michigan".
Also, did anyone else think, "uh-oh", or "try winning" when reading this quote regarding the fireworks vote:
"We’ll figure out other ways to create excitement"
You're right about the percentage thing. That's a shame. But as long as we have the most wins in the history of college football we will be the "winningest program in college football." Notre Dame can claim it too I guess, but more specifically they have the "highest winning percentage in college football."
Give him a break. It's still the truth.
I will respectfully disagree. This to me feels like the Cal Ripken thing. Yes, he played the most consecutive games, but for those of us who saw him play over the last several years he did it at a detriment to his own team. It was about ego.
Notre Dame wins more often than we do. That is what winning percentage is. If they had played as many games as we had, they'd be ahead of us. As it is, they're only 36 wins behind us. We'd need more imbalance like the last seven years (minus Hoke year one) for that total to change, but I think the significant stat has already shifted against us.
Conversely, if we played as few games as they have, then we'd have the better %. Who's to say ND won't go into a down cycle like we have the last few years? These %'s are not static variables that go unchanged as the seasons go by.
Regardless of your argument, which is up for debate, the FACT is that we are the winningest program in college football history.
I don't think that anyone will argue that we've been the best program in the last 10 years. And I don't know if anyone is all that impressed by being the all-time winningest program in the context of today. But as far as tradition and history and truth are concerned -- we are still the winningest program in college football history.
I don't quite get the Ripken analogy by the way. A political statement trumpeting the program's history is nowhere near the same as Ripken playing every day at ~37. It's not like we have Rick Leach out there at QB.
Well, again, we're literally one game behind in the percentage department. You make it sound like an insurmountable obstacle.
And what's this about Cal Ripken? In 1998, the year in which he ended his streak (and three years after he broke Gehrig's record) he hit .271. Last year only seven shortstops hit .271. Two-thirds of the teams in the league would kill to find a shortstop that hit .271. The year after, he hit .340. There's no basis at all for claiming Ripken kept his streak alive at the expense of the team.
"Notre Dame wins more often than we do"...have you seen them at all over the past 20 years?
Most wins = winningest. And the percentage stuff has been swinging back and forth for years. One win by us and one loss by them is all it would take to put it back where it belongs.
A: There’s no conspiracy, although people want to think that. There’s a computer firm in Chicago and the Big Ten has this algorithm, and you plug in all the variables and the computer spits out what’s do-able.
They sent me the schedule and I called and said, ‘Is this some kind of mistake? Have you people lost your mind?’ Well, then you dig a little deeper, and Minnesota’s coming here two years in a row and they’re not too happy. Everybody is a little bit sore about something, and that was our thing to be sore about.
But in 2015, we got BYU here for the first time ever, we got Oregon State here, we got UNLV here for the first time, we got Michigan State at home, we got Ohio State at home. That’s a schedule that’s gonna be wow."
No longer be angry, UM fans, Minnesota is mad too!
really, BYU, Oregon State and UNLV?
I translate that to "Wow I can't wait to raise ticket prices again"
He really wants us to believe that with the Big Ten basically starting from scratch for conference scheduling there was no way to avoid having our two biggest rivals on the same home/away cycle?
I don't know what happened and I doubt it was an active "conspiracy," but there's just no possible way that the computers only spit out circumstances where our MSU schedule got flipped. If anything, the programming should have started with maintaining the Home/Away pattern for all protected Big Ten matchups. That it didn't work that way is amazing.
So all this talk of Hollis strong arming DB into 2 games at home in a row in return for being in the division was just an internet meme? I've seen it so many times on this board and a few others you'd think it was reality...
I haven't read the article yet but all I want is to have the gosh darn snare drum taps back.
And while there is good reason, there should never be another complaint about the schedule with Michigan State this year. He explains exactly what happened and it was completely out of his control. He tried to rectify the issue, but it's out of his hands.
An overall excellent read, filled with openess and honesty.
Well, he doesn't explain exactly what happened. He explains that this is the schedule the Big Ten office gave us (which was obvious anyway), and that it was done by a computer program (probably equally obvious), but he doesn't explain why.
He said "There’s a computer firm in Chicago and the Big Ten has this algorithm, and you plug in all the variables and the computer spits out what’s do-able." Several questions come to mind, including "why wasn't alternate home-and-away dates between Michigan and Michigan State one of the 'variables' in the algorithm?" And "what do you mean by 'do-able'"? There are probably 80 million or so schedules that are "do-able," why was this particular one selected? And after it was selected, why was it approved?
I'm certainly not saying that it was Mr. Brandon's fault--I don't think it was--but why was the computer not programmed correctly, and why was the programming not corrected once this schedule was produced?