(11-01-2015 10:06 AM)Orange County Owl Wrote:  

(11-01-2015 07:17 AM)Tiki Owl Wrote:  It is becoming easier to talk yourself out of going to a football game and that isn't a good sign.

Yep. I can tell you that, for me personally, moving family/life events around so I can watch this season's team ended with Friday night's debacle.

+1. And the next logical step is not renewing the football season tickets.

(11-01-2015 10:40 AM)uhcoog27 Wrote:  

(11-01-2015 10:33 AM)owl at the moon Wrote:  

(11-01-2015 10:02 AM)uhcoog27 Wrote:  I'm telling you guys:

http://www.gofrogs.com/sports/m-footbl/m...79468.html

Telling us he's a good one to get?
Or that "co-offensive coordinators" can work?

Ha! The former.

Ok thx we'll add him to our stockpile!!!

(10-31-2015 02:43 AM)exowlswimmer Wrote:  We cannot outspend the P5 on coaching talent! Maybe instead of hiring "proven" retreads, we move DB into a special advisor position for JK and hire some smart young entrepreneurial football minds (new HC, grad assistants and assistant coaches who would work on their MBA with a Sports Management angle at the Jones School, or other graduate school interests while figuring out how disrupt the game flow and best use the talent we have.)

We know we will lose them eventually to the NY Yankees of College Football but by replenishing and using our assets we could position ourselves to break the cartel and again become relevant.

I thought this part of the OP deserved a little more consideration (I struck the bit about kicking DB upstairs because I didn't think it was critical to the main point and it distracted folks anyway).

I tend to think that the headwinds facing Rice - awful conference, dearth of inspiring opponents, small student body, etc. - are far beyond the ability of any coach to truly overcome. So I don't lay very many of our problems at DB's feet, certainly not the biggest ones.

But I do think that whenever the time comes to replace DB, we ABSOLUTELY need to go outside the box in our next coaching hire. I don't care if the person comes from Div. III, HS, Wall Street, or wherever. Rice is the PERFECT place for a heavily analytics-focused approach to coaching. Get the coach from Pulaski Academy up in Little Rock that never punts, or anyone that embraces a "Moneyball"/"Scorecasting" approach to football. I really believe an experiment in the unconventional could succeed at Rice, or at least generate sorely-needed buzz and buy-in from students and fans, even ones that may not be traditional sports fans (which needless to say we have plenty of in our student body). Frankly, what do we have left to lose if the experiment fails?

I know this is not a new idea for the Parliament, as many have championed ruowls as just the sort of person to bring this type of approach, but regardless of the specific person, I think this is an important drumbeat to keep going.

Many of you will remember (from "Dr. Strangelove" perhaps) the Clemenceau aphorism that "war is too important to be left to generals." I have often jokingly complained from the stands or my armchair on Saturdays that "football is too important to be left to coaches." Much of coaching involves decision making, which requires analytical skills, and I'm sorry but there are plenty of people with those skills in far greater measure than the PE majors from Podunk State that the coaching ranks are disproportionately comprised of.

I do have two additional thoughts that came to mind:

1. I hear more about advanced analytics driving decision making in baseball, basketball, and other sports more than in football. Is football decision making somehow inherently less capable of being improved than decision making in other sports? Intuitively this would not seem likely, as there are crucial decisions to be made all the time in football (choice of offensive/defensive play, clock management, unlimited substitution possibilities, etc.), but from my perspective as a fan I've heard few data-driven suggestions to improve football decision making beyond "stop automatically punting on 4th down" and "go for two after a TD more often" (which of course have largely not been adopted). Just wondering what others think about this - hopefully it is not the case that football is somehow immune to improvement via analytics. (If so, I guess I will have to take back that slander about Podunk State PE majors, haha.)

2. It was postulated in the book "Scorecasting" that the reason why coaches continue to almost always punt on 4th down despite data seemingly saying you should rarely do so is the psychological phenomenon called fear of loss. A loss hurts twice as much as a gain feels good, so coaches shy away from doing something unconventional like going for it on most 4th downs even if it is the "right" thing to do because they are irrationally sensitive to the potential negative reactions of fans (and their bosses, like GMs/ADs) should the decision not work out. All this is to say that I hope our AD, when the time comes to replace DB, can somehow overcome fear of loss and make a really unconventional and forward-thinking hire. I am encouraged by the facts that he is a Stanford guy and NOT a football guy (I am even more encouraged by the fact that he is a track/XC guy, as everyone knows these are the smartest of all athletes! ), but I also realistically know that he almost certainly has aspirations beyond Rice and an unconventional experiment that fails would probably doom his career, whereas a conventional coaching hire that fails would not.

And remember all the criticism Pete Carroll of the Seahawks got for calling a pass play near the goal line that got intercepted although it is better to mix up the plays according to game theory.

(11-02-2015 06:00 PM)illiniowl Wrote:  

(10-31-2015 02:43 AM)exowlswimmer Wrote:  We cannot outspend the P5 on coaching talent! Maybe instead of hiring "proven" retreads, we move DB into a special advisor position for JK and hire some smart young entrepreneurial football minds (new HC, grad assistants and assistant coaches who would work on their MBA with a Sports Management angle at the Jones School, or other graduate school interests while figuring out how disrupt the game flow and best use the talent we have.)

We know we will lose them eventually to the NY Yankees of College Football but by replenishing and using our assets we could position ourselves to break the cartel and again become relevant.

I thought this part of the OP deserved a little more consideration (I struck the bit about kicking DB upstairs because I didn't think it was critical to the main point and it distracted folks anyway).

I tend to think that the headwinds facing Rice - awful conference, dearth of inspiring opponents, small student body, etc. - are far beyond the ability of any coach to truly overcome. So I don't lay very many of our problems at DB's feet, certainly not the biggest ones.

But I do think that whenever the time comes to replace DB, we ABSOLUTELY need to go outside the box in our next coaching hire. I don't care if the person comes from Div. III, HS, Wall Street, or wherever. Rice is the PERFECT place for a heavily analytics-focused approach to coaching. Get the coach from Pulaski Academy up in Little Rock that never punts, or anyone that embraces a "Moneyball"/"Scorecasting" approach to football. I really believe an experiment in the unconventional could succeed at Rice, or at least generate sorely-needed buzz and buy-in from students and fans, even ones that may not be traditional sports fans (which needless to say we have plenty of in our student body). Frankly, what do we have left to lose if the experiment fails?

I know this is not a new idea for the Parliament, as many have championed ruowls as just the sort of person to bring this type of approach, but regardless of the specific person, I think this is an important drumbeat to keep going.

Many of you will remember (from "Dr. Strangelove" perhaps) the Clemenceau aphorism that "war is too important to be left to generals." I have often jokingly complained from the stands or my armchair on Saturdays that "football is too important to be left to coaches." Much of coaching involves decision making, which requires analytical skills, and I'm sorry but there are plenty of people with those skills in far greater measure than the PE majors from Podunk State that the coaching ranks are disproportionately comprised of.

I do have two additional thoughts that came to mind:

1. I hear more about advanced analytics driving decision making in baseball, basketball, and other sports more than in football. Is football decision making somehow inherently less capable of being improved than decision making in other sports? Intuitively this would not seem likely, as there are crucial decisions to be made all the time in football (choice of offensive/defensive play, clock management, unlimited substitution possibilities, etc.), but from my perspective as a fan I've heard few data-driven suggestions to improve football decision making beyond "stop automatically punting on 4th down" and "go for two after a TD more often" (which of course have largely not been adopted). Just wondering what others think about this - hopefully it is not the case that football is somehow immune to improvement via analytics. (If so, I guess I will have to take back that slander about Podunk State PE majors, haha.)

2. It was postulated in the book "Scorecasting" that the reason why coaches continue to almost always punt on 4th down despite data seemingly saying you should rarely do so is the psychological phenomenon called fear of loss. A loss hurts twice as much as a gain feels good, so coaches shy away from doing something unconventional like going for it on most 4th downs even if it is the "right" thing to do because they are irrationally sensitive to the potential negative reactions of fans (and their bosses, like GMs/ADs) should the decision not work out. All this is to say that I hope our AD, when the time comes to replace DB, can somehow overcome fear of loss and make a really unconventional and forward-thinking hire. I am encouraged by the facts that he is a Stanford guy and NOT a football guy (I am even more encouraged by the fact that he is a track/XC guy, as everyone knows these are the smartest of all athletes! ), but I also realistically know that he almost certainly has aspirations beyond Rice and an unconventional experiment that fails would probably doom his career, whereas a conventional coaching hire that fails would not.

(11-02-2015 06:00 PM)illiniowl Wrote:  

(10-31-2015 02:43 AM)exowlswimmer Wrote:  We cannot outspend the P5 on coaching talent!

I tend to think that the headwinds facing Rice - awful conference, dearth of inspiring opponents, small student body, etc. - are far beyond the ability of any coach to truly overcome. So I don't lay very many of our problems at DB's feet, certainly not the biggest ones.

I wanted to expound on these two good points, but lacking time right now won't do it justice.
Rice Athletics as a whole is a remarkably successful enterprise IMHO: championships in baseball, soccer, swimming, cross-country; good tennis teams and field event athletes; Olympians and professionals. This is obviously even more remarkable given the fact that our athletes are actual students.
However, through all of this there is one constant that has existed for longer than even I have been an ardent fan (over 40 years): the relative failure of mens' basketball and football to achieve more than moderate success.
It begs the question: WHY
What is different about FB and Basketball? Why can we succeed everywhere else, but not here?

Of course there couldn't possibly be only a single factor, or even just a very few. But, the obvious commonality is that both of those sports are big-time, crowd and TV driven commodities. They represent the epitome of big-time college athletics: the spirit, the tailgating, the crowds; the cheerleaders and bands; the beautiful sideline reporters and the famous and flamboyant TV commentators; the students covered in body paint; the stands packed with one team's colors on one side and the opponents' colors on another.
And Rice U. does this very, very, very poorly.
Of course, that's who we are, and it's partly why I'm a Rice fan - - but we have less game day excitement on campus and at the stadium than any little high school in Texas.

We can complain about having no peers among all the directional school in CUSA, but at least this part of what they do isn't an embarrassment.

No, I don't think DB is a great coach. But our overall performance on the field for DECADES has corresponded very closely to the rankings of our recruiting classes. We may not like being #90 or whatever, but that's exactly where our recruiting rankings would predict we should be. This has never changed. In fact, if anything Rice historically has over-achieved a bit in this regard (again, for DECADES).
And we will never attract the kind of talent it takes to really take that next step when recruits see an empty stadium, minimal student support, and virtually no band.

(11-02-2015 06:12 PM)75src Wrote:  And remember all the criticism Pete Carroll of the Seahawks got for calling a pass play near the goal line that got intercepted although it is better to mix up the plays according to game theory.

To me it wasn't the play call, but the execution. At that stage of the game, there was absolutely nothing to lose from jumping every route.... which is exactly what they did. He wasn't running a post because there was no room to do so... the ONLY route he could run was a slant, so as soon as he turned in, the defender jumped the slant. He absolutely guessed, and guessed right. The ball was thrown a bit behind (where the defender was coming from) and the rest is history. Had the ball been thrown in front, or had the WR blocked off the db slightly better, it is a TD and 'a great call'.

Putting it in OUR perspective, we'd probably blame the coach... and others would blame the players... and BOTH would be right to some degree.... but the reason many of us would blame the coach, even when it is an execution problem is because we haven't demonstrated that we are anywhere NEAR the point where 'execution' of a single perfect play is the difference between us winning or not. Unlike a team who has made it to the Superbowl, we have MULTIPLE such plays where the execution fails. The best way I can say it is there is a difference between a player making a mistake that costs us a game, and a team making multiple mistakes that cost us a game. While each individual failure is 'on the player', the collective failures are 'on the coach'.

(11-02-2015 06:00 PM)illiniowl Wrote:  

(10-31-2015 02:43 AM)exowlswimmer Wrote:  We cannot outspend the P5 on coaching talent! Maybe instead of hiring "proven" retreads, we move DB into a special advisor position for JK and hire some smart young entrepreneurial football minds (new HC, grad assistants and assistant coaches who would work on their MBA with a Sports Management angle at the Jones School, or other graduate school interests while figuring out how disrupt the game flow and best use the talent we have.)

We know we will lose them eventually to the NY Yankees of College Football but by replenishing and using our assets we could position ourselves to break the cartel and again become relevant.

I thought this part of the OP deserved a little more consideration (I struck the bit about kicking DB upstairs because I didn't think it was critical to the main point and it distracted folks anyway).

I tend to think that the headwinds facing Rice - awful conference, dearth of inspiring opponents, small student body, etc. - are far beyond the ability of any coach to truly overcome. So I don't lay very many of our problems at DB's feet, certainly not the biggest ones.

But I do think that whenever the time comes to replace DB, we ABSOLUTELY need to go outside the box in our next coaching hire. I don't care if the person comes from Div. III, HS, Wall Street, or wherever. Rice is the PERFECT place for a heavily analytics-focused approach to coaching. Get the coach from Pulaski Academy up in Little Rock that never punts, or anyone that embraces a "Moneyball"/"Scorecasting" approach to football. I really believe an experiment in the unconventional could succeed at Rice, or at least generate sorely-needed buzz and buy-in from students and fans, even ones that may not be traditional sports fans (which needless to say we have plenty of in our student body). Frankly, what do we have left to lose if the experiment fails?

I know this is not a new idea for the Parliament, as many have championed ruowls as just the sort of person to bring this type of approach, but regardless of the specific person, I think this is an important drumbeat to keep going.

Exactly. There is an entire universe of stats-geeks and video gamers out there who are making up their own 'games' based on these sorts of analysis. Few schools could attract those fans as Rice could, and they are far less invested in 'whom we are playing'. In fact, a great number of them would LOVE to see 'the smart kids with the smart coach' (even though those schools also have smart kids and often smart coaches) beat those 'neanderthals' from ESU. It's more a question of reaching fans, of connecting than of simply doing exactly what everyone else does and being better at it than some and worse at it than others. IMO, DB is slightly better than average at doing exactly what everyone else does.... which means I have no doubt that he or most of his staff could go elsewhere and succeed... to places where they don't have financial restrictions, or academic restrictions or admission restrictions or whatever else. So when one of our coaches goes somewhere and is successful, I don't see that as us being 'wrong' about them... merely that they are better suited to places that don't have the restrictions we do.

Rather than try and win IN SPITE OF our restrictions, which is always going to be a losing battle... we're seeking to TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THEM. It may not change our record, but it will change the way we attract fans.

(11-02-2015 07:12 PM)Barney Wrote:  I wanted to expound on these two good points, but lacking time right now won't do it justice.
Rice Athletics as a whole is a remarkably successful enterprise IMHO: championships in baseball, soccer, swimming, cross-country; good tennis teams and field event athletes; Olympians and professionals. This is obviously even more remarkable given the fact that our athletes are actual students.
However, through all of this there is one constant that has existed for longer than even I have been an ardent fan (over 40 years): the relative failure of mens' basketball and football to achieve more than moderate success.
It begs the question: WHY
What is different about FB and Basketball? Why can we succeed everywhere else, but not here?

Of course there couldn't possibly be only a single factor, or even just a very few. But, the obvious commonality is that both of those sports are big-time, crowd and TV driven commodities. They represent the epitome of big-time college athletics: the spirit, the tailgating, the crowds; the cheerleaders and bands; the beautiful sideline reporters and the famous and flamboyant TV commentators; the students covered in body paint; the stands packed with one team's colors on one side and the opponents' colors on another.
And Rice U. does this very, very, very poorly.
Of course, that's who we are, and it's partly why I'm a Rice fan - - but we have less game day excitement on campus and at the stadium than any little high school in Texas.

Not disagreeing with this, but as you say there are multiple factors.

One of the largest factors is that the 'path to the pros' and the riches that can come from that are far greater in 'the big 3' than anywhere else, thus the value of a Rice scholarship in track is FAR greater than the value of that same scholarship at UTSA. Even in women's basketball, the average player in the WNBA doesn't make more than the average female Rice grad.

In baseball, Rice has a winning program with great coaches... and we did it before these other schools started concentrating on it. Now they're concentrating on it and we're not as unique... but still, because of the way the draft works, the leverage of a Rice degree helps.

Basketball has no such leverage... at least not significant... and other schools succeeded here before us. We're 'TCU' here as opposed to Rice in baseball... playing catch-up and we'll likely have to spend far more to do so... as they are now in baseball. (I chose TCU, and that may not be a great example, but you guys know what I mean I think)

In football we are not only late, but there is no leverage for the draft. The only thing really working in our favor is that our coaches are getting our players more exposure... AND the NFL is looking deeper in the draft these days than they did just 10 years ago. Not all the stars in the pros were 'great' players on 'great' college teams. Some of them were the result of a system and some of them have peaked. The NFL seems to realize this with the large sums having been wasted on high profile players and the number of 'unknown' stars.

(11-01-2015 08:38 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(10-31-2015 08:58 PM)ricex Wrote:  

(10-31-2015 08:18 PM)temchugh Wrote:  Who here knows the current $$ for the buy out? Why do you assume that it is more than we can afford? Why do you assume that it is not already low? Why do you assume that JK was too stupid to foresee this scenario at the time of the last extension? I have no idea what the buy out would cost, but I'm my default assumption is not that JK is bad at his job.

My understanding of a buy out is the amount another school would pay Rice to hire DB out of his existing contract. If we fire DB we would have to pay the entire contract amount to DB rather than a buy out amount if I understand it correctly. Need a little legal help here Owl69.

It's a contract. You can pretty much contract for anything the parties agree to, as long as it is legal. I don't know the specifics of Bailiff's deal, but I know how those deals work in general and I wouldn't expect this one to vary materially. When there are variances, it is probably because of some imbalance in bargaining power, which doesn't exist here. If we tried to hire Urban Meyer or Nick Saban, we'd probably have to agree to a huge buyout if we fired him, but he could probably leave us very cheaply. I understand that Frank Solich's deal at Ohio operates that way, but he hasn't done well enough there to get anyone to hire him away. Lou Holtz's contracts always had a provision that if Notre Dame offered him, he could get out free.
Typically buyouts operate both ways. There's some amount he has to pay back if he leaves, and there's some amount you have to pay him if you fire him. The two amounts may be the same, or they may be different. They do generally tend to track to some extent, which makes sense because they are typically bargained for. As a rule, the more you want him to pay if he leaves, the more you are going to have to pay him if you fire him. Usually it's a formula based on number of remaining years. Something like 50% of salary for remaining years might be a typical range where the numbers fall, so if you have three years left at $700,000, the contractual buyout is $1,050,000. Remember that the two will typically be bargained together, and the coach is typically motivated more by not wanting such a big buyout that he can't leave if the right job comes knocking. He expects to succeed, not fail.
Remember also that the amount is frequently bargained further if push actually comes to shove. A fired coach may take less to get confidentiality about certain things or to get his assistants taken care of or some other consideration. The school may take less to get certain concessions in other areas as well.

Just thought of one other way of looking at this. If we sign a coach to a 5 year contract for $750,000/year, we are obligated to pay him $3,750,000 and he is obligated to remain here for 5 years. Failure by either party to fulfill those obligations is a breach. Now if Notre Dame or Southern Cal comes calling with big money, our coach may want to leave before 5 years, and if he goes 0-12, 1-11, 0-12, we might want to fire him before then. So the parties typically negotiate some sort of liquidated damages provisions (usually involving a formula rather than a fixed amount) to cover those two situations. Since they are typically bargained for each other, they tend to look a lot alike going either way. There are examples where the bargaining power is one-sided and the two or not mirror images, but typically if it's going to cost him a million dollars do get out of the last two years of his deal, then it's going to cost us a million to fire him after he goes 1-35.

Then of course, when an actual situation presents itself, the parties may bargain things up or down from that point. There may be other issues on one or both sides--confidentiality, taking care of assistants and other staff, and so forth--which constitute ample consideration for negotiating a different severance deal.

I would always favor setting the buyout at or near the low end. I don't want someone to be stuck in a place he/she does not want to be, and I want to minimize the cost to me if I decide that a change is necessary.

On another thread a poster stated

"JK on the clock

JK faces a crucial decision within the next couple of days, and it will tell us much about his directorship. If JK axes Bailiff, I trust him to find a bright young mind (in the mold of Rhoades) to rejuvenate the program and allow Rice to realize its potential. If JK retains Bailiff, it calls into question his evaluation and strategy of how to improve Rice Athletics. At the same time UH is filling its stadium before nationally-televised audiences, Rice struggles to attract literally anyone to games. The crowd today would be a strong signal to any AD that a change is necessary, if only to reintroduce the hope and enthusiasm that things will get better. This is Bailiff's ninth year, and the program is a mess.

I shudder to imagine JK still thinks Bailiff is the right man for the job. I hope the ONLY reason he would retain Bailiff is due to the financial complications of the buyout, but I also expect JK to be wise enough to consider the financial losses associated with retaining Bailiff."

"If JK plans to give Bailiff one more year due to financial issues, it only delays the inevitable, digging Rice into a deeper hole. Bailiff isn't going to do any better than 7-5 next year and probably considerably worse -- "top 20," ha!! Would JK continue to retain Bailiff under the most rosy scenario of 7-5 next year? Bailiff's abilities (or lack of them) should be glaringly obvious by now: he simply isn't a D1-caliber coach."

These Sunday Morning Quarterbacks have no idea of the pressures a modern day AD is facing. Football is only one of the issues facing this executive. I have recently been much more circumspect in my criticism of the "stacked deck" the NCAA has dealt most schools, which impacts greatly the sport I represented the Blue and Grey over 30 years ago. I trust JK's judgment and also understand that coaches don't actually play the game. Otherwise, Coker was the right choice for HC nine years ago given his previous record. Let Rice do things the Rice way, we don't always agree, but discretion with DB will eventually help us retain the coach we need. Coaches want to be treated like everyone else, with dignity and respect, even when things aren't going well.

(10-31-2015 02:43 AM)exowlswimmer Wrote:  We cannot outspend the P5 on coaching talent! Maybe instead of hiring "proven" retreads, we move DB into a special advisor position for JK and hire some smart young entrepreneurial football minds (new HC, grad assistants and assistant coaches who would work on their MBA with a Sports Management angle at the Jones School, or other graduate school interests while figuring out how disrupt the game flow and best use the talent we have.)

We know we will lose them eventually to the NY Yankees of College Football but by replenishing and using our assets we could position ourselves to break the cartel and again become relevant.

I thought this part of the OP deserved a little more consideration (I struck the bit about kicking DB upstairs because I didn't think it was critical to the main point and it distracted folks anyway).

I tend to think that the headwinds facing Rice - awful conference, dearth of inspiring opponents, small student body, etc. - are far beyond the ability of any coach to truly overcome. So I don't lay very many of our problems at DB's feet, certainly not the biggest ones.

But I do think that whenever the time comes to replace DB, we ABSOLUTELY need to go outside the box in our next coaching hire. I don't care if the person comes from Div. III, HS, Wall Street, or wherever. Rice is the PERFECT place for a heavily analytics-focused approach to coaching. Get the coach from Pulaski Academy up in Little Rock that never punts, or anyone that embraces a "Moneyball"/"Scorecasting" approach to football. I really believe an experiment in the unconventional could succeed at Rice, or at least generate sorely-needed buzz and buy-in from students and fans, even ones that may not be traditional sports fans (which needless to say we have plenty of in our student body). Frankly, what do we have left to lose if the experiment fails?
I do have two additional thoughts that came to mind:

1. I hear more about advanced analytics driving decision making in baseball, basketball, and other sports more than in football. Is football decision making somehow inherently less capable of being improved than decision making in other sports? Intuitively this would not seem likely, as there are crucial decisions to be made all the time in football (choice of offensive/defensive play, clock management, unlimited substitution possibilities, etc.), but from my perspective as a fan I've heard few data-driven suggestions to improve football decision making beyond "stop automatically punting on 4th down" and "go for two after a TD more often" (which of course have largely not been adopted). Just wondering what others think about this - hopefully it is not the case that football is somehow immune to improvement via analytics. (If so, I guess I will have to take back that slander about Podunk State PE majors, haha.)

2. It was postulated in the book "Scorecasting" that the reason why coaches continue to almost always punt on 4th down despite data seemingly saying you should rarely do so is the psychological phenomenon called fear of loss. A loss hurts twice as much as a gain feels good, so coaches shy away from doing something unconventional like going for it on most 4th downs even if it is the "right" thing to do because they are irrationally sensitive to the potential negative reactions of fans (and their bosses, like GMs/ADs) should the decision not work out. All this is to say that I hope our AD, when the time comes to replace DB, can somehow overcome fear of loss and make a really unconventional and forward-thinking hire. I am encouraged by the facts that he is a Stanford guy and NOT a football guy (I am even more encouraged by the fact that he is a track/XC guy, as everyone knows these are the smartest of all athletes! ), but I also realistically know that he almost certainly has aspirations beyond Rice and an unconventional experiment that fails would probably doom his career, whereas a conventional coaching hire that fails would not.
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