I've always been suspicious of coaches who come in with the idea of getting rid of everything the previous coaching staff did, burn down the house, take the losses, and give yourself 3-4 years to implement "his program". Its not his program. Its the taxpayer's program. Its the school's program.
When Callahan took over at Nebraska, he erased references to Solich and Osborn. He bombed. When Brewster got here he burned down
the Mason program and went 1-11 his first year. He bombed.
When Wacker was here, he was a very likable coach but even into his fifth season he was telling everyone how young the team was, loaded with freshmen and maybe sophomores. You know what that says? That the program isn't developing the talent into juniors and seniors. At Michigan, Bo used to say that your team is only as good as your seniors. When you have few seniors, what do you have?
My apprehension is that in 2020 and 2021, Fleck will still be telling us how young his team is. Frankly, I see some good freshmen out there who I think will have a hard time even making it to their junior and senior seasons. They're getting hurt from being over-exposed. They transfer out.
Its very likely that the ONLY reason the Gophers won 5 games last season was because of the holdovers from Kill/Claeys, and that they were enough to prevent disaster.
Here's an opposite example....Texas A&M. Jimbo Fischer didn't come in there and tear down everything Sumlin did. Rather, he took what Sumlin had left him and made it BETTER. Good coaches KNOW they don't have all the answers. He has improved that team and has made no built-in time frames for winning. When a coach tells you it takes 2-3 years to win, what they are doing is making excuses for losing.
When you make such excuses, the team DOES pick up on that. When you don't have success by a certain time, they lose faith in the coach. That time may very well be nearing. Nobody is saying they need to be 6-2, but at least concrete progress. The team is regressing.
A good, experienced, no-nonsense coach would have inherited the 9-4 team, perhaps cleaned out those that needed to go, but would have built upon that right away. But, you get those coaches who just "know it all" and believe that the coaching profession began with them.
At least when Mason and Kill took over, they took over losing teams and showed immediate improvement on the field that showed everyone they were going somewhere. Mason almost beat Penn State his first season in Happy Valley. Kill's teams played with intensity. Remember, Jerry Kill also came in with established principles for his program, and his team lived them. What happened to Claeys was really not indicative of what the program had largely been.
We've seen this show before. Not just at the U, but at countless other schools who had been taken in by that "one in a gazillion coach" who just "knew it all". Creative slogans are no substitute for true fundamentals and growth. If things don't change soon, we'll be rowing the boat alright, right over Niagara Falls.
Traditionally, the best coaching tenures at the U have featured, solid, tough-minded no-nonsense football coaches who had teams that reflected that. Whenever this school tried to get cute, it met with failure...sometimes humiliating failure. This even applies to modern times. I'm still hoping that maybe this team will scrape bottom and start on its way back up. That's my hope. But I've been a student of this program, and of CFB, long enough to know what I'm seeing compared to what I've seen before.
Enough of my pedestal. I've been chased off this board enough to know my welcome is often very short-lived.
