OT: 2017 outlook for U Arizona and RichRod
It's off-topic season, and this piece from the "Arizona Desert Swarm" blog (their Maize 'n Brew) might be of interest to some here. It's a preview of the 2017 football season for U Arizona and (of course) RichRod.
http://www.azdesertswarm.com/2017/5/5/15559524/arizona-wildcats-2017-pr…
It sounds like he's a goner. I didn't find anything in the piece unfair even though Arizona is a more challenging job than most. It's been interesting to see what he's done with a largely clean slate there.
Remember two years ago when people said that we shouldn't have gotten rid of him because we were on the cusp of greatness from our 50 point asswhipping to Mississippi State into 2011. yeah about that
I remember Brian and Ace on the podcast. "No. No manball."
I'll admit it did look pretty bleak in 2014 when Hoke was having a nosedive of a season and Rich Rod had upset No. 2 Oregon and was ascending to the top of the Pac-12, but even then I didn't want him back. I'm sorry but I'm one of these crazy Michigan fans who just can't easily forgive the shitshow that was 2008.
And 2009. And 2010 for that matter.
It just was not a good fit. We should have never hired Rodriguez.
That said, he belongs in Arizona. Basketball school with low-ish expectations and weak defensive competition sounds perfect for him.
Hoke was more distressing because we'd been through it already for three years at that point. Hoke destroyed the offense but fixed the defense. RR destroyed the defense. Now we look decent at both thank god although our offense still has a ways to go.
I still believe RR left Hoke with a decent number of options on both sides of the ball. That 2011 defense was all RR recruits for the most part, and Mattison is a great coach but that type of turn-around doesn't happen in just an off-season. RR's overall recruiting cratered as he looked progressively lamer, but I still believe Casteel as his DC (instead of being forced to accept a different DC because Michigan wouldn't pay something like an extra $200k) would have smoothed out the rough patches a bit and maybe have saved RR. I mean, Carr's last year featured a defense that couldn't stop App St., Oregon, or Wisconsin, and didn't have a lot of depth to it after the upperclassmen.
If the choice was Brady Hoke or Rich Rod, give me Rodriguez any day of the week.
I'm flabbergasted. How can you say this when Rodriguez was so objectively awful here? It is because of him that Mark Dantonio got any steam going at MSU.
Maybe you were "more distressed" because it is more recently in your mind, but I went to school at Michigan during the Rodriguez years. Believe me, nothing sucked more.
Hoke made a ton of mistakes but overall he was a far better coach for Michigan than Rodriguez. Rodriguez fucked our program in ways that we are still feeling today. (He didn't intend to, but it was a clusterfuck from the start and you are simply being myopic if you can't see that.) Hoke's biggest and most critical error was bringing on Darrell Funk.
As I said, the only reason why anyone would pick Rodriguez is because they favor the spread. I'm sorry but I'd rather have a manball offense paired with a great defense than an offense that only scores 14 against Mississippi State paired with a defense that stops no one.
Hoke's QB and OL recruiting were absolutely terrible.
Compared to Rodriguez??
Rodriguez recruited 2 OL in two years. I won't argue with you on quarterbacks, because Hoke brought in Russell Bellomy, Shane Morris, and Wilton Speight. We have yet to see how Speight finishes his career, but yes those other two (and Malzone if you want to throw him in) were not exactly NFL caliber.
However, Rodriguez's QB was not much better. He recruited spread quarterbacks. Do we really need to say more than that? Show me one Rodriguez quarterback that has done anything in the pros at that position. If one wants to think that it would have been heavenly to watch Geno Smith at Michigan, then they can go ahead and think that. I personally was never very impressed by Rodriguez's work at QB. I did love Denard and Devin, but mainly because I'm partial to any player who puts on a winged helmet.
I will disagree with you on Hoke' OL recruiting. Aside from Kalis it was fairly good, and universally better than Rich Rod's. Hoke's problem was that he couldn't DEVELOP the OL talent. I attribute most if not all of that to Darrell Funk.
Rodriguez at least won more games every year he was coaching. Without Hoke's Sugar Bowl winning season that he inherited in 2011, he would have been regarded as a much worse coach.
And if Rich Rod had started 9-3 rather than 3-9, we may have regarded him differently too.
Hoke fixed the defense. Rodriguez knocked the program back to square one and wanted to start over, as if Michigan had never been a winning program before.
Honestly, how people can see Rodriguez's time in Ann Arbor as anything other than an abject disaster is beyond me.
Rich Rod recruited something like 10 offensive linemen in his 3 years at Michigan. They weren't all good, but a couple made it to the NFL (Lewan, Omameh, and Schofield), and I honestly wonder how the uncertainty surrounding RR's tenure at the end affected recruiting. Maybe not a huge amount, but it happens. By comparison, other than Mason Cole does anyone believe there are offensive line players on this team from Hoke poised for NFL careers?
And to me, Denard and Gardner are light-years better as QBs than anything Hoke brought in. Morris looked overwhelmed when he saw the field, Bellomy the same, and Speight nearly left the team untilo Harbaugh basically rebuilt him (and based on comments here, people want to boot him anyway for Peters).
And as I've mentioned elsewhere, Hoke didn't "fix" the defense. He made them competent, but it was a unit with systemic issues that still gave up bushells of points. What saved them was the glacial pace of the offense, which kept a lot of games relatively close because of a shortened overall game, not because they suddenly figured out how to defend spread teams.
For as much as it amazes you people see RR's tenure as anything other than an abject failure, I remain amazed there are people defending Brady Hoke's run. The only reason people aren't railing on him is because Jim Harbaugh was brought in and fixed the mess he left behind. Otherwise, the last 2 years would have been a successive run of 3-9/4-8 seasons.
Hoke didn't "fix" the defense.
Michigan was 110th in total defense in 2010.
Hoke's first year they improved to 17th(!!).
If that's not "fixing" the defense, what the hell is??
For as much as it amazes you people see RR's tenure as anything other than an abject failure, I remain amazed there are people defending Brady Hoke's run.
I'm only "defending" him in the sense that I believe that he was objectively a better coach at Michigan than Rodriguez. I've said multiple times that he was just as stubborn and incompetent but in different ways.
I don't want Rodriguez or Hoke back, but Hoke was better.
he threw like a girl
Seriously? It's 2017 - come up with something better than a tired, misogynistic criticism of someone.
His last 2 years, Devin Gardner completed 60% of his passes for 7.7 ypa and 31 TDs (and he ran for 15 more) behind a terrible offensive line and for two OCs who had no idea what to do with him. If Jim Harbaugh can turn Jake Rudock (a guy who was booted from Iowa) and Wilton Speight (someone who nearly left Michigan) and turn them into competent QBs, he sure as hell could have helped Gardner.
We will never know about QB's under RR because he only had 3 years here, the last one where he obviously a dead man walking. Every coach needs to have a minimum of 4 years of their recruits before you can judge them....I think he would have matched our 2011 squad had he been given the chance to run that team. We would have had to score 45 pts a game to win but we probably would have done it give the talent on OL we had plus Denard in his 3rd year in the same system.
I'm happy where we are now but the RR thing will always piss me off....the same way it did when ND fired Ty Wilingham before he got a 4th year. That's a BUSH league move and did more to hurt the program than giving RR a 4th year would have done. What good coach would come here thinking they're only going to last 3 years if they hit tough times? No one by the looks of it - we had to settle for someone totally unqualified who would have walked here if he was asked.
This is 100% personal preference. I was at Michigan during the middle of the Carr era, a little after the national title when he found numerous ways to waste top-flight talent and finish with 2-3 losses a year. It was so staid, so predictable. And that's what Hoke felt like; an attempt to recapture the "glory" days of beating the cupcakes and losing to anyone with a hint of innovation because that wasn't what a "Michigan Man" did. Rich Rod was a failed experiment but at least it was an experiment, an attempt to do something different and try to change with the times. For a school and program that at times felt (and still feels) set in its ways, it was a break with tradition that I welcomed. And he went from 3-9 to 7-6, showing some life along the way and fashioning an offense that was getting better each year despite having lots of young talent. Compare that to Hoke, who took RR's talent and won for exactly one year, then proceeded to fumble his way down to a 5-7 season that was immensely more disappointing than RR's 3-9 year and, let's be honest, showed no signs of getting better.
And this myth that Hoke's defenses were juggernauts needs to die in a fire. After this first year when they had a legitimatey good defense (helped by an amazing turnover margin and great short-yardage defense), it gave up 41 to Alabama, lost to Nebraska 23-9, and then lost to both OSU and South Carolina. Next year, gave up 23 to ND, 24 to Akron, 21 to UConn, 43 to a bad PSU team, 47 to IU, 29 to MSU, 24 to Iowa, 42 to OSU, 31 to KSU. Then his final year, 31-0 to ND, 26-10 to Utah, 30-14 to Minny, 26-24 to fucking Rutgers, 35-11 to MSU, 23-16 to double fucking Maryland, and 42-28 to OSU. And they could never score points to save their lives, to the point they needed a last-second FG to beat NW 10-9 for Hoke's last win at Michigan. Michigan often kept scores relatively close because they moved at a glacial pace offensively, shortening games at the expense of anything resembling offense coherency. His 2012 defense was 20th in PPG allowed and 30th in defensive S&P, and his 2013 defense was 67th in the country in PPG allowed and 50th in defensive S&P, around Memphis and Duke. I'll save you the offensive rankings; rest assured, they trended down the same direction. At least with RR, it was a team that trended up on offense, from 92nd to 72nd to 18th to 11th.
Hoke was a fine recruiter and a good defensive line coach. That's it. He was terrible at in-game management, terrible weaving together a coherent offensive philosophy with the players he had available. Rich Rod was terible at crafting a defense and hiring the right people for the job, but Brady Hoke was welcomed like a conquering hero and left the program in disarray that was only mitigated because the school was lucky enough to hire a top-5 coach who is a damn miracle worker.
+1,000 to you...very well put and dead on.
He couldn't field a good defense. Or an average one. Or even a mediocre one. He lost to Toledo, a team that Michigan should be able to out-talent in any given year, regardless of scheme and coaching change. He couldn't even be competitive with OSU. Each year it seemed like they were just toying with him. His "high octane" offenses got completely shut down by any halfway decent defense it went up against. His teams were bad. Really, really bad,
Yeah some fans and media just hated him from the start, which was a tad unfair, but he was a complete and utter failure here.
no evidence to contradict this
Carr lost to a non Div I team - shit happens.
The RR experiment didn't work at Michigan... partly because of RR and his ability but also partly because some of our alums and fans think that the only people who can coach at Michigan have to have had some prior history there
I went to all the home games in RichRod's tenure. Michigan Stadium was full (attendance didn't become a problem until later on, under Hoke) and he was always cheered warmly when they announced his name. Sure, some people were skeptical that he'd work out, and there were probably some assholes out of the 100,000 who disliked him for whatever reason but on the whole the fanbase was in his corner. Blaming the fans for his failure doesn't hold water, I'm sorry.
I don't know why people keep searching for alternate explanations for his performance when it's glaringly obvious that he has no idea how to manage the defensive side of the ball. Nor is he competent regarding special teams. Nor is he a very good recruiter (and he compounds this problem by taking too many chances on academically borderline guys, many of whom don't last in school). He is a good offensive coach but that is it. It's not enough.
Sparty knows going 3-9 is bad for you.
It's amazing the lengths people will go to make excuses for Rich Rod's mediocrity. 10 years of complete nothingness and people are still chalking it up to bad luck, not enough talent, etc. Are the results on the field not enough?
I'm not saying he's bad. I'm saying he's good for 7-8 wins a year with some outliers going high and low of that. He's middle of the road which is exactly what I said
same special team mistakes, nearly every game. Same dumb QB shuffle usually due to injury, every game. Same patchwork, undersized defense devoid of talent because RR puts all the athletes on the offensive side. Same undisciplined horrendously stupid penalties that kill the team. Same mindset of we'll get better just have to play better with a total lack of disciplined coaching or any advanced level of blocking or scheme fundamentals.
I think Rich Rodriguez will be an offensive coordinator somewhere next year. Give him a year or two there, and then he'll end up at a smaller program, like Lane Kiffin did. Rodriguez has adjusted his offense well. He just doesn't know a darn thing about defense or special teams.