(04-18-2012 11:09 AM)ajg Wrote: (04-18-2012 10:14 AM)arkstfan Wrote: <snip>
For the next several years those guys stomped all over Apple but the long range focus paid off. Five years later Compaq was struggling and in another year bought out, five more years down the road Gateway was struggling and bought out. Four years after Gateway is shut down, Apple is the richest company in the world.
Chasing markets is a today answer to make money today.
I appreciate the sentiment about a long range outlook. It makes sense for most endeavors.
What I don't understand about the Apple analogy is this, how does choosing a school with a history of recent success on the football field equal a long range outlook while choosing a team in a large market and little success, but much potential, equal short range thinking.
The old bromide is true - winning cures a multitude of sins. And it is also true that you cant make a million people move to a small town.
If a big market team gets good, the bandwagon will be overflowing. It's not easy but with the right coach and a few good recruiting cycles huge things can happen.
Credit to Boise, they have done some great things, but what goes up can come down. What if they got hit with sanctions? No allegations here (other than I have always wondered how they got all those highly ranked California recruits to move to Idaho) but ask yourself what would happen to all that national interest?
In college you look to see how they run things.
For example when ASU was mired in a particularly bad run I noticed that the Red Wolves were climbing out of the bottom 1/3rd of the all-sports standings. Got to the mid-point and continue up to the top 1/3. Football followed them a bit later.
Right decisions were being made and those paid off.
Look at how a school hires. If you fire a coach for poor success, does the replacement look more like or less like the guy you fired.
You ought to be able to go back to the archives to see a discussion early in 2011 about the new hires in football. At the time I said, ASU, UL, and UNT had all made good hires because they hired the guy who looked like the best fit for their circumstances. UNT improved 2 win, UL improved 6 wins, ASU improved 6 wins.
I questioned ULM's hire the year before because I felt like they were replacing Weatherbie with a guy who was probably the most similar candidate to Weatherbie. Berry is now two years in and his two years are -1 win compared to Weatherbie's final two.
I thought the jury was out on WKU's hire. While I was underwhelmed by Elson, I didn't have enough info on him other than he had the good fortune of better knowing what he was walking into. His first two years are +7 over the last two years of Elson.
All schools make mistakes but you can catch trends and more importantly you can assess the likely improvements based on whether they are trying to do the same thing with a different face.