(09-11-2015 11:31 PM)EagNBran Wrote:  I think the worst part is that later on, some people went to The Citadel football board to talk about it. That was his only other head coaching job he had had years ago. Apparently, he was trying to schedule games the week that playoffs started in FCS or whatever division they're in. He had no faith that he could ever get them to playoffs, so he wanted to schedule games during those weekends. Talk about a man with a vision.

The worst part? This was all public knowledge. It shows that the committee who hired him did absolutely no research.

Don't blame the "the committee" for dropping the ball. Many on the committee knew Johnson was clueless and were against him. The whole operation was a farce, though. Saunders had decided on Johnson from the get-go. The same thing happened during the AD "search" that gave us Hammond. The latter process was pretty well documented, but in that case, those opposed were publicly called out and drug through the proverbial mud.

How big a disaster Saunders was for USM (and not just athletics) cannot be overstated.

Traveling down memory lane, I remember many of us began hoping we would go winless the rest of that season and at the end praying for sure that we would loose that last game as well, .... We had to pay ej, that hurt, he lands on his feet at Auburn and we have empty pockets and a ruined program.

(09-10-2015 09:19 AM)USM@FTL Wrote:  Perfect storm. So many things went wrong. My favorite is the offensive coordinator, just hired, goes to rehab for pills after Spring drills and gets demoted. Newly hired recruiting coordinator takes over as OC preseason and installs his blue-chip QB, who he just coached to a state title, but has the accuracy of a bottle-rocket. We had no passing game AT ALL.

I actually thought we looked pretty good that year, until we benched Chris Campbell for I-AA Battery Boy. That dude truly is an awful football player.

(09-11-2015 01:21 PM)HarborPointe Wrote:  

(09-10-2015 04:11 PM)HERD1 Wrote:  So you guys had the talent in 2012? It wasn't a "cupboard being bare" kind of thing where Fadora left you in bad shape. What I am getting is that you had the talent but Ellis was just that bad of a coach?

There was plenty enough talent post-Fedora to compete. The whole "Fedora didn't leave anything" is a myth people still upset about Bower being pushed out use to throw stink on Fedora (of course, these same people never mention that we were about a dozen scholarship players short when Fedora took over). If the purposeful, calculated lack of recruiting was really a thing, why in the world would Blake Anderson have applied to take Fedora's place knowing the bottom was about to fall out?

Contending for the championship in 2012 with a new QB would've been a tall order, no doubt, but no way was the talent scarce enough to explain going 0-12. Look up the box score from the 2011 championship game. Plenty of underclassmen other than Lampley contributed to the victory. The real issue there was by the time Johnson fudged everything up and we changed coaches again 12 months later, Monken was left with a lot of holes from all the turnover, and HE very arguably had a talent issue.

So how did we get there? Putting it as succinctly as possible, it was a combination of:

1. A bat-s*** crazy, egomaniacal president who was rubbed the wrong way by Fedora's celebrity and some of his behavior

2. A vacuum in the athletic director's position due to the former AD "retiring" and an interim AD not wanting to jeopardize his chances of becoming the permanent hire

3. Influential old-timers who wanted to go back to defense-first, ball-control, old-school "footbawl" as opposed to what Johnson himself referred to as "soccer with helmets" when he was DC at South Carolina

It was a perfect storm of face-palmery.

Warning to all other schools: If you ever hire a coach, and the only school official who speaks at the press conference is your president, don't waste any time. Start a riot right then.

I was going to rehash the whole sordid story, but you pretty much nailed it.

But fear not, I'm sure the Bower Babies/Hammondologists will be along soon enough to blame it all on Fedora.

Influential donors had a big hand in the ELoss hire and fiasco.

(09-12-2015 07:59 PM)nastybunch Wrote:  I guess we can call name too, LR... I guess you are a Fedorite...right?

Fedora got USM closer to be relevant than anything Bower had done for years and wasn't a dismal failure like The Great Hammond. Are you going to grace us with more "facts" about how great The Great One is and how he was unjustly forced out or just keep crying?

Kind of like you are doing now, hypocrite?

(09-12-2015 09:26 PM)nastybunch Wrote:  Kind of like you are doing now, hypocrite?

Boo hoo. I've posted criticisms of The Great Hammond's performance on this board at least twice, and so have others, and you Hammond apologists do nothing but sling lame insults and cry like babies.

Hammond's strong point was that he a decent ambassador for USM and a good fundraiser, which is what we should have used him for and he'd still have a job in the athletic department. Unfortunately, this being USM and him being "one of us" we promoted him beyond his ability and things didn't go welll.

Let's review the facts (yet again) shall we:

Fact: Hammond was on the committee that hired EJ and was involved in that terrible contract. See: EJ Contract

Fact: Hammond hired Tyndall and then let him commit pervasive NCAA violations right under his nose. I'm not suggesting he knew, but he was obviously clueless about what was going on right in front of him.

Fact: Hammond got the school sued because of his alleged treatment of athletic department employees. See: Lawsuit

Fact: Hammond failed just as badly as RG at getting us into a decent conference. See: The fact that we are still in C-USA and Tulane is not.

Hammond was far from perfect, but he wasn't as bad as many of you want to believe. He got the common fan on board and knew how to raise money, something none of our current administration knows how to do.


On Saunders forcing the Ellis hire, that's interesting. I've never heard of her being against it, but I didn't hear her being super for it either. From the info I've heard, she saw us as a stepping stone school. We could hire a coach knowing they'd leave in the next few years, but that they'd leave us better than they found us. She was okay with this and accepted it.

(09-13-2015 10:29 AM)EagNBran Wrote:  Hammond was far from perfect, but he wasn't as bad as many of you want to believe. He got the common fan on board and knew how to raise money, something none of our current administration knows how to do.


On Saunders forcing the Ellis hire, that's interesting. I've never heard of her being against it, but I didn't hear her being super for it either. From the info I've heard, she saw us as a stepping stone school. We could hire a coach knowing they'd leave in the next few years, but that they'd leave us better than they found us. She was okay with this and accepted it.

EJ wasn't a stepping stone hire, he was the favored candidate of the people who disliked Fedora and his ambition and wanted another Coach For Life like Bower. EJ was lazy and thought he could coast to retirement with 6-8 win seasons indefinitely, but he wasn't even competent enough to do that.

(09-13-2015 10:29 AM)EagNBran Wrote:  Hammond was far from perfect, but he wasn't as bad as many of you want to believe. He got the common fan on board and knew how to raise money, something none of our current administration knows how to do.

McGillis is holding his own on the fundraising front. You just have to pay a little attention to see what he's doing because he doesn't have a congregation of cheerleaders shouting from the rooftops every time he collects a dollar. The completion of the baseball weight room and the down payment on the Bower Academic Center are just a couple of examples off the top of my head.

Please do elaborate on "getting the common fan on board." Did lower-tier Eagle Club contributions go up substantially while Hammond was in charge? Did there exist people whose contributions were being turned away until Hammond was hired? I really want to know what the substance behind that claim is, as opposed to it just being a meaniness political rallying cry.

Quote:On Saunders forcing the Ellis hire, that's interesting. I've never heard of her being against it, but I didn't hear her being super for it either.

Well, you heard what you heard, but give more credence to what you saw. Again, Saunders was the ONLY campus official who spoke at Ellis Johnson's introductory press conference. She was also the only person who even posed for any photos with him. Neither acting AD Hammond nor outgoing AD Giannini nor the search committee even so much as issued a statement on Johnson's hire via a press release. There honestly can't be a whole lot of doubt as to who made the call.