(06-21-2017 08:03 AM)djtothemoney Wrote:  

(06-20-2017 09:19 PM)Love and Honor Wrote:  

(06-13-2017 10:29 AM)rath v2.0 Wrote:  It's actually a good move for Miami. The students will show up for a change before heading uptown at halftime

FWIW, the start time change is better for us since students can show up to the game after going uptown for day drinking.

Here's what I'm wondering about Fickell. When he was interim head coach he took over a 12-1 team that had a litany of NFL talent. He lost to Purdue and should've lost to Toledo, going 6-7. The next season they went 12-0. I've never heard of another example of someone inheriting that kind of talent doing that poorly, the only comparison I can think of is that guy at Arkansas after Petrino motorcycled himself but even they only won 3 games the next season. And outside of one season at Akron, he's spent 15 of 17 years in his career at a blue blood with nearly unlimited resources and was never trusted to be an independent DC even after being the freakin head coach. The guy is a big name and I don't think the guy will be bad necessarily, but do you really think this guy is the next Kelly when you no longer have a BCS conference like he had?

I think the jury is still out, obviously, but he seems to be hitting all of the right boxes that the previous two coaches lacked on. Keep in mind, I was never a huge fan of Butch.

1) Recruiting Ohio hard. There's so much talent in this area, there is no reason to bring a bunch of kids up from the South to fill your team.
2) Mentality - "If they are keeping score, we want to win" little things like this just ooze confidence and make me want to take a bullet for the guy.
3) Assistant Experience - We actually have a pretty solid list of Assistant coaches, we don't have a grad student running Special Teams for example.

I'm not saying he's going to have us competing for a Natty, but if we are in the running for a league title in the next couple years, it is a success.

The biggest thing lost on a lot of people about his '11 season is that he was in EVERY game and played a tough schedule. I think of all 7 losses only 1 was by more than 7 points, which to me shows that he had some learning to do on pulling those games out (which is understandable given his coaching experience to that point). As many have said, what he has done here so far gives me a ton of hope for the future, and that season definitely isn't the scar people seem to think it was. He was bookended by two national championship winning coaches who have head coached for literal decades, and he's inserted into a ****** situation as a position coach with 8 years of coaching experience. Of course there will be drop-off there.

This roster has a ton of holes is BAD places to have them (O-Line and QBs, kicking game) so I don't expect 8 wins, but I think that given our schedule 5-6 wins this year would be good, and hopefully we'll be able to fill those holes with a full season/off-season cycle.