OT: Jedd Fisch to be next Arizona Head Coach
December 23rd, 2020 at 10:43 AM ^
Solid. I hope he does well as Arizona is probably one of the toughest jobs in the Power Five.
December 23rd, 2020 at 10:57 AM ^
No reason why Arizona should be such a tough job other than administrative failures. Great weather, proximity to both Texas and California recruiting, fun party school, hot girls. And when the team is good, the atmosphere in the stadium can be electric. I rushed the field when we upset Oregon when I was there.
December 23rd, 2020 at 11:38 AM ^
Do all those girls at ASU really do porn? Asking for a friend.
December 23rd, 2020 at 11:48 AM ^
Having gone to law school at UofA, I have to offer a different take.
"Great weather"??? HELL NAW! Not unless you like triple-digits at the 7pm kickoff every game until October, when it'll dip into the 90s. I did not enjoy it.
The stadium sucks. 55K or thereabouts, max.
The fanbase sucks. Despite the small stadium, it sells out for homecoming and ASU and that's it. I was also at that Thursday night game against then #2 Oregon with Dennis Dixon (I assume that's the one you're talking about). There were rows of empty seat all around. A few years later, I saw them play Stanford with Andrew Luck. Same story. People care much more about the tailgating than the games.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:07 PM ^
I'm going to join in and concur with this. I speak as someone who has lived in Tucson for the past 15 years.
U of A has several things working against it to be host city for a football power:
- The fan base is really, really tepid. Rabid basketball fans, tepid football fans. There are many football Saturdays where it's almost impossible to know there's a game that day, given the lack of buzz outside the immediate campus area.
- Tucson really does not have much of an activity life for young people to get excited about. It's not as bad as some places, but it's a good deal less attractive than many. It's not entirely comprised of snowbird retirees, but there's a lot of them in town.
- If you're not accustomed to living in a desert, this place will feel like a foreign planet to you. For a highly recruited player out of east Texas, or southern California, Tucson will look like a those pictures of the 1930s dust bowl. Phoenix is a fair bit different: there's a lot more lawn and palm trees up there; Tucson has a tradition of "desert-scaping" with rocks and plants that require almost no water.
- Texas talent has lots of near-home options (UT, UH, Baylor, A&M, etc.). California talent has lots of near-home options (USC, UCLA, etc.) Sure, they may pull some 3-stars from TX or CA, but they won't pull many high-4 or 5-star players.
The good news for Fisch is this: people here will be happy with 7-5, very happy with 8-4, and ecstatic with 9-3. That's the expectation.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:21 PM ^
I think you are discounting the party lifestyle on campus. Tucson as a city isn't great by any means but the campus is pretty insulated. You can have a great time without having step foot off campus. Lots of palm trees and lawns on campus. The University hosts massive pool parties for goodness sake. These pool parties are legendary...
https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2015/12/10/rob-gronkowski-patriots-arizona-pool-parties
ASU has also been up and down but Herm Edwards has turned them into a pretty decent P5 school, so I think UofA can achieve something similar.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:41 PM ^
I never attended U of A as a student, so I wouldn't know about on-campus pool parties.
That said ... try telling a player from Houston or Los Angeles that a good time can be had, but it's mostly on-campus only. And try telling that player that if he wants to get in a car and go find some other activities, Tucson is 100 miles from anything.
A fair comparison would be Morgantown, WV ... it's a bit of a drive from Pittsburgh, and beyond that, there's not much going on there. Rodriguez made WVU work for a spell by having a ground-breaking offense at the right time with the right players. Otherwise, it's mostly a place for 2- and 3-stars.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:58 PM ^
I mean, the basketball program had no problem recruiting elite players from all over the country. Of course there was some bags dropped but that doesn't mean the football team couldn't do the same thing. Build a winning program and a winning tradition and the croots will come. There are far more desolate places with even less to offer than Tucson. Not like Lansing is Malibu either.
December 23rd, 2020 at 1:24 PM ^
I wish him the best of luck. It's going to be quite the challenge.
But like I said in my first post ... the expectations here are not that high, so if he produces a good program and goes 8-4 or 9-3 year after year, he'll be a hero.
Basketball is a different beast. All it takes is two or three good players to really turn a team's prospects around. Getting a few great basketball players to come to Tucson is one thing, getting a dozen or so great football players to town is another.
December 23rd, 2020 at 1:47 PM ^
If Mike Price and Mike Leach can win at Washington State, then you can win anywhere with the right coach. Tuscon looks like a resort town compared to Spokane.
December 23rd, 2020 at 2:01 PM ^
A few months back someone here mentioned the same thing about Oregon State and Corvallis, Oregon.
Mike Leach did okay at WSU a few seasons, but I would not call his overall there to be great:
That said, if Fisch can achieve 7-5 or 8-4 consistently, he'll do well enough at Arizona. He'll have to trade wins with ASU to stay off the hot seat.
Sumlin's record at UofA was:
The fourth column was the conference record ... going 4-5, 2-7, then 0-5 and getting absolutely trashed by rival ASU will not keep a coach around long.
December 23rd, 2020 at 5:26 PM ^
Wazzu isn’t in Spokane. It’s in Pullman, the gateway to Idaho. Spokane is about 90 minutes away and Pullman is much smaller (when my wife went there they had to go shopping in Moscow, Idaho).
December 23rd, 2020 at 10:10 PM ^
I think you're really overrating how much these guys party. Do they want to? Sure, but not anymore than other students I bet, and perhaps even less so. Football players put in insane days. They aren't going out drinking 5 days a week. If pool parties are your main selling point, that says a lot about why Arizona hasn't had much football success.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:33 PM ^
"...Tucson has a tradition of "desert-scaping" with rocks and plants that require almost no water."
Haha!! Gotta admit, when I hear the word 'Tucson', I immediately, and only, think of the old John Wayne cowboy flicks where they're out in the desert somewhere, and its impossibly dry, sandy, barren, and filled with nothing. This image will forever be my first thought upon hearing that word...
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:54 PM ^
Some of those old westerns were filmed outside of Tucson. To the west of Tucson there's a place called "Old Tucson," which at one point used to be a film studio location. It's now a kind of tourist attraction.
The typical image of Tucson is one showing mountains and Saguaro cactus, and while that *does* exist in places, Tucson and much of the area surrounding Tucson is an ancient valley that's flat, full of scrub plants, and empty as can be. I have a motorcycle, and I've rode all over southern Arizona ... there's some really pretty places; and there's a whole bunch of nothing.
December 23rd, 2020 at 2:42 PM ^
I actually think this is a decent gig. Think of all of the Power 5 schools that are in crappy locations: Wazzu, Oregon State, K State, Texas Tech, Purdue, Arkansas, OK State, Mississippi State, and yes, even Iowa State and Oklahoma. A number of these schools have managed to lure solid recruits to play there. When you tell a recruit you have nice weather for 7 months/year, and you will play USC, Oregon, Washington, and Stanford, and many of your games will be on the Pac 12 Network for your parents to buy and watch, it's convincing.
Arizona HS football is pretty decent. Phoenix is the 10th largest metro area so there are plenty of players to share with ASU. (it's metro area has more people that Detroit) And SoCal is a hotbed for talent so there are plenty of recruits here willing to play at a Power 5 football program that is a day's drive away.
The downsides are the facilities (I've been to the outside of the stadium and it looked like no great shakes) and no strong tradition of winning.
We know Fisch can coach offense. If they get a great DC and recruit the right players on defense, in a league that doesn't play defense well, they could make some progress. But I do think Herm Edwards has got ASU is heading in a really good direction and getting the top recruits in AZ to come to Tucson will be a challenge.
December 23rd, 2020 at 3:33 PM ^
Well, if he wants a great DC, I hope he's not up with MGoBlog, otherwise he's bound to steal one of the brilliant ideas and leave UM picking up the scraps.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:14 PM ^
Went to undergrad there. I may be wrong but I think it might be a different atmosphere in the Zona Zoo (undergraduate student section). If you went to any basketball games, you'll see that the crowds can be electric if the team is good. The problem has been that the team has been so bad that no one really bothers with the football team. The one year we were semi decent, I remember packed crowds, lots of water bottles filled with vodka. Agreed that currently its more about partying than fan fare but i'm confident that would change if the team was good.
In October/Nov, the temp can drop 10-20 degrees at night. In the later winter months its even more dramatic. I'd say weather is better because athletes can go to pool parties year round (though I bet spring and fall camp are excruciatingly hot).
Certainly not anywhere near the atmosphere schools like Michigan have but I don't see why Arizona would be a harder school to coach at than Rutgers, Illinois, Purdue or Maryland.
December 23rd, 2020 at 2:21 PM ^
Rutgers and Maryland are in much more talent-rich states than Arizona. For various reasons they’ve historically underperformed, but there is upside if they can keep local kids home.
Illinois probably is also although most of traditionally goes elsewhere than UI.
Purdue might be a fair comparison.
The state of Arizona doesn’t produce that much talent (although it’s slowly improving in that regard due to population growth). It’s not all that far from Southern California, but UA has to compete with every other Western school for that talent. It’s not an impossible job but requires a really dynamic recruiter who can pull in out-of-state kids.
December 23rd, 2020 at 3:48 PM ^
Dude, Tucson is not close to Texas recruiting hot beds. That's like saying Ann Arbor is close to recruiting hot beds in Louisiana and Alabama. Socal, yes.
December 23rd, 2020 at 4:29 PM ^
If we are talking about proximity, Tucson is much closer to Texas than Michigan is to Alabama. They are also culturally much more similar. They are both southwestern states and are separated by one state (New Mexico). Sumlin had connections in Texas but he was able to recruit from Texas very well. I'd say Arizona's relationship to Texas is similar to Ann Arbor and Missouri. Sumlin certainly started a pipeline from Texas to AZ so with the right assistant hires Fisch could definitely poach some players from Texas. Tucson is closer to El Paso than San Diego.
December 23rd, 2020 at 5:53 PM ^
Texas? Sure, but El Paso isn't where the recruits are. Tucson to Dallas is farther than Ann Arbor to Birmingham.
December 23rd, 2020 at 6:51 PM ^
Fair enough, I admittedly don't know where most of the top texas recruits come from. I still think Dallas is more culturally similar to Tucson than Ann Arbor is to Birmingham but that's just my opinion.
December 23rd, 2020 at 1:32 PM ^
Arizona is definitely not a football hotbed. RR did about as well as you can expect there and if Jedd can win 7-8 games a year and make bowl games that would be a huge success there. I think he’s good enough to accomplish it and then be able to make a move to a traditional power
December 23rd, 2020 at 11:50 AM ^
You had me a hot girls
December 23rd, 2020 at 5:10 PM ^
It's Arizona..so everyone's hot ..:)
December 23rd, 2020 at 5:29 PM ^
And if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass when it hopped. All the hot girls and bombdotcom parties in the world can't make up for Arizona being a 3rd rate program.
December 23rd, 2020 at 10:44 AM ^
Good shit, Jedd!
The man has been hopping around for two decades and finally landed his first head coaching gig.
I wish him great success!
December 23rd, 2020 at 10:45 AM ^
Are you sure he wouldn’t rather be OC or co-OC here?
/s
December 23rd, 2020 at 10:46 AM ^
So I see this story cross my Twitter feed about 5 minutes ago and I think to myself "hey, I wonder if it's been posted yet on MgoBlog" and it wasnt. So I got out my laptop (I hate creating threads on my phone - tough to embed and formatting is choppy to say the least) and pull the Feldman & Schefter tweets and create a really nice post.
But, because I've been burned before the last thing I do before hitting save is open up another browser window and check again to see if this has been posted and guess what - now it has.
So......good shit Jed. Best of luck out west.
Edit: Even now a second post on this subject just got created.
December 23rd, 2020 at 10:51 AM ^
I always have a moment of uncertainty when I hit post and wait for the page to refresh. Been burned way too many times doing the same thing.
December 23rd, 2020 at 1:00 PM ^
Post it anyway and rely on the moms to deem your post better and delete all others. It's not like these threads contain any really insightful discussion anyway.
December 23rd, 2020 at 10:47 AM ^
So I guess it wasn't just a publicity stunt by his agent.
December 23rd, 2020 at 10:48 AM ^
I guess Arizona is Mgoblog's second favorite team now, good luck to Jedd in the desert
December 23rd, 2020 at 10:50 AM ^
I wonder if this could be an off ramp for anyone currently on the staff. Maybe Don Brown, who apparently does want to coach again. Or perhaps this is a spot for JayBaugh to move if he either wants to establish himself apart from his dad or doesn’t want the rumored demotion. Or maybe it’s a place for Zordich as DC.
December 23rd, 2020 at 11:05 AM ^
Definitely curious how he builds his staff. Could he pull Partridge? Or one of our analysts from that time like TJ Weist or Jimmie Dougherty? Jedd has also coached in several other places so he has connections all over.
Don Brown would be a great hire for him, especially since Michigan is paying his salary essentially.
December 23rd, 2020 at 11:12 AM ^
Arizona fans don't seem happy from what I've seen. They wanted either Antonio Pierce or Brent Brennan, and I gotta say I don't blame them. Resume wise I'd rather have either of those guys, especially Brennan.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:19 PM ^
Agree, MgoBlog loves Jedd but Brennan was the man they should have went after.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:39 PM ^
My source on the matter said the AD wanted Brennan but the prez wanted Fisch. Take it FWIW
December 23rd, 2020 at 11:18 AM ^
Good luck, Jedd!
This site has had an unnatural obsession with him since 2015, and for good reason. The Harbaughffense, while Jedd was here, was the best it's ever been in Ann Arbor. He'll need whatever shit he has left to make Arizona a decent team.
December 23rd, 2020 at 4:19 PM ^
December 23rd, 2020 at 11:59 AM ^
I wonder if it's worthwhile to kick the tires on Kevin Sumlin for the offensive staff. Considering he had the lowest paid staff in the Pac-12, I won't put his failings solely on his shoulders.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:21 PM ^
Sumlin has been riding Manziel's college career for too long. He's not a good coach at all and has a serious alcohol problem.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:26 PM ^
He needs to sit out a year or two. He’s collecting two checks so he should be able to. I get why he took the job (black head coaches rarely get a second P5 shot once they get fired), but it was bad from word go, starting with the issues with Khalil Tate.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:12 PM ^
Obligatory: Good shit, Jedd
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:25 PM ^
People tend to forget the 4-6 games during the Jedd Fisch era where the playcalling was still incredibly poor.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:28 PM ^
Dang, would love to see him to come back to michigan once again... i am sure that he will do well with Arizona.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:35 PM ^
CP as DC
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:42 PM ^
I wouldn’t want to coach Cam Newton either