Hartford Currant Article About Edsall- very nice read about Edsal
Pasqualoni will be a better coach in all aspects, even the way he represents the School.
[i][i][i]Do you know how many ranked teams UConn has beaten in football?
One. South Florida.
Do you know how many ranked teams UConn has beaten that have finished the season among the top 25 in The Associated Press poll?
None.
This is not meant as criticism, Husky fans. As Paul Pasqualoni begins his tenure in Storrs it is meant as perspective. It would be entirely unfair to the new coach to over-inflate expectations or, as impressive as it has been, to distort the overall growth of the program.
There was something unnervingly self-serving in Randy Edsall's words in the month leading up to his BCS Bowl spanking. As he talked about all the milestones the program has reached since the days of working out of the trailers, Edsall wondered if there were any more notches in the belt he could cut at UConn.
I have long maintained that nearly everything Edsall says publicly is planned, if not actually rehearsed in the bathroom mirror. Randy doesn't do spontaneous. And as evidenced by his introductory Maryland press conference when his initial response to Zac Boyer of The Courant came off mean-spirited, his attempts at humor often fall flat. Randy doesn't do funny, either.
So we probably should have known in December when he suddenly began waxing about Earl Weaver and Bert Jones after 12 years of never mentioning Baltimore sports, he was laying bricks for his best one-liner ever.
You know the one. Maryland is his "dream job."
Now that is fall-down hilarious.
The answer to Edsall's question about notches in the belt, of course, was there were plenty left. And we're not talking pie-in-the-sky national title. For starters, how about an outright Big East championship? Or how about getting to a BCS Bowl game where you aren't automatically penciled in as a hopeless underdog the moment you qualify for it.
Forgive me if a few of the remarks here seem a little stale. I was out three weeks with health problems and will do my best to link my observations about Edsall's departure to the hopes of a new regime.
With some time to reflect, yes, it was time for Edsall to leave. Absolutely for him. And probably for UConn, too. Oh, not the manner in which he left, of course. Putting Jordan Todman in front of the team moments after the Fiesta Bowl loss to announce he was leaving for the NFL yet saying nothing about his own plans was weak. Not returning with the team to Connecticut was weaker. Not returning to his beloved training complex to personally say goodbye to his assistants and remaining players, well, that makes all Edsall's talk about family and brothers ring hollow. Turns out he's just like any highly ambitious, glory-seeking coach.
If you're thinking I'm hinting that Edsall could be disingenuous — bingo. He pulled something on former beat guy Shawn Courchesne that only the necessities of keeping a job kept us all in the same room. After Edsall dismissed some players for drinking beer the night before a game at South Florida in 2006, a few of them contacted The Courant insisting they had been overly punished. Considering that players with more serious legal problems weren't dismissed over the years, the punishment did seem severe and I said so. After continually refusing comment, Edsall finally did talk to The Courant and pointed us in the direction of earlier arrests, etc., by those players. Yet when we recognized the past transgressions in print, Edsall turned around and insisted to a national TV audience that the punishment had nothing to do with repeat offenses.
Whether he used The Courant to throw those players under the bus as revenge for complaining or went out of his way to embarrass The Courant, well, that's for Edsall's conscience to decide. Either way, Shawn and I never looked at him the same again.
That's not the reason for being time to leave, of course. That has to do with the growing disconnect between Edsall The Glorified Builder and Edsall The Second-Guessed Coach. There is no denying that along with the school's huge financial commitment and Dan Orlovsky's decision to stay in state, Edsall did a terrific job in building the program. For that he deserves great praise and gratitude. Yet there also is an expiration date on hosannas. Edsall clearly recognized this, just as he clearly did not like the criticism he received at midseason when the team was badly underachieving at 3-4. If we had said in August that UConn would finish 5-2 in the Big East, 8-5 overall and be 33rd in votes in the final AP poll, most would say that sounds about right. Good job meeting expectations.
Only Randy seemed to want "Great job!" The truth is, the Big East was down, finished with no ranked teams and the Huskies didn't score an offensive touchdown in the last two games. Edsall's teams were disciplined and well-schooled, but he was only a fair game-day coach. He lacked creativity. His idea of risk was putting a few sprinkles on a vanilla cone. He called for the inside draw as often as he drew a breath.
The long, industrious road continues to be good for building UConn football, but it no longer was good for building Randy Edsall. He never was going to get fired, but he didn't want to face any fire, either. Was he upset that Jeff Hathaway didn't back him more on academics? Was he irritated that fans showed up late? Was he bothered that his assistants didn't get paid more? Sure. But the bottom line was that marketability was at an all-time high and with a smaller and smaller window to sell his little-engine-that-could story and with and less and less patience for his annual where-is-Randy-going story, he jumped when he got the chance. You can't blame him. I'm just saying the Huskies are 1-16 lifetime against ranked teams.
And that's why I'm warming to the Pasqualoni hire. Sure, the lovefest with the state high school coaches is a little much. Memories don't win games. If Larry McHugh and Hathaway are overplaying the Connecticut hand, the hire will be remembered more as Yankee Conference than BCS. Yet if keeping more state kids at State U. is a piece of the larger puzzle, if it is a harbinger that Pasqualoni will duplicate the recruiting success he had at Syracuse up and down the East Coast, well, the long, industrious track UConn football has been on can continue without Edsall's wondering what else he can do to top himself.
Maybe UConn needs a proven hand to keep steady momentum and a more open offensive plan to keep us interested. If that's the case, down the line, with the program built stronger and stronger, maybe UConn will find the young big-name coach who will put the notches in the belt Randy Edsall could only dream about.[/i][/i][/i]
(This post was last modified: 01-16-2011 03:02 PM by cuseroc.)
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Hartford Currant Article About Edsall- very nice read about Edsal
