(11-15-2015 10:58 AM)loki_the_bubba Wrote: (11-15-2015 10:15 AM)texowl2 Wrote: In the last 25 years, I have left 3 games early. Nichols st (weather, horrific play and some personal reasons), UH 2012 and yesterday having decided to leave after the MOB, ran into someone, saw USM score their 7th. My disgust is complete.
You have a stronger stomach than me. I've left three games early just this season.
Working around rugby trips, I've been to two games. Left both at the half.
I really cannot stand to watch this team play. It's just so frustrating that it makes me physically ill.
I don't think Bailiff's approach can produce fewer than 4-5 losses per season on a consistent basis. He's had one year better than that out of nine, and five years worse. My expectations were much lower than that before 2012. My thinking about not firing him was that he had exceeded my expectations so hugely in 2012-14 that perhaps he could exceed them even more. What I saw yesterday is more back to what I have expected.
We have never defended the deep ball well in nine years. That is like the cardinal sin of building a defense. Letting that go uncorrected, and apparently unaddressed, for nine years, tells me that despite his defensive background, he isn't serious about developing a good defense.
We had a couple of years where our kicking game was mediocre, largely because of Boz and Martens. Other than those years around the middle of the Bailiff era, our special teams have been consistently awful. And that's with different coordinators, which tells me that Bailiff isn't serious about developing a strong kicking game either.
I don't understand what we are trying to do on offense. I think we are supposed to be trying to run the football. But we have these periods in big games where we abandon the run almost completely. Every time, the results have been the same--3 and outs or turnovers, with the defense giving up TDs going the other way. I don't know what the hell we are trying to do. I call what we do running plays instead of running an offense.
We have pretty consistently had sloppy, mistake-filled, ill-disciplined performances. I mentioned before, a friend who used to coach against Bailiff when he was at Texas State has told me that Bailiff's reputation around the Southland was that his teams played hard but were very sloppy and made a lot of mental errors. That was true of his Rice teams until yesterday. Yesterday, they did not play hard.
I don't know what the plan is. I can't see any evidence of attempting to win with defense, offense, or special teams, and I don't know what else there is, so I don't know how we plan to win. The only idea I can come up with is what someone suggested for Braun's approach, recruit better and hope to God it works. If that's the plan, the EZF will probably help. But we're not going to out recruit Texas. If we are going to line up and do the same things everybody else does, and they are doing it with better athletes, we're not going to win those games.
There is one other factor that I think is critical. This is the same one that I had in the forefront in 2009-2011: Timing. There will soon be another shift in the tectonic plates of college athletics. If the XII doesn't get a team into the playoffs this year (and if ND wins out they probably won't), they're going to look to expand. Yes the NCAA is looking at letting them have a championship game with fewer than 12 teams, but that's not really the issue (and the XII isn't that happy with a championship game anyway). The issue is that with everybody playing everybody and with Iowa State and Kansas and maybe K-State and WVA, and this year Texas, their strength of schedule sucks. They need to add a couple of teams to bump up everybody's SOS, two divisions with an 8-game conference slate lets them add an intersectional game to bolster schedule strength, instead of just playing weak sisters OOC. Where that enters in is that UH will make a strong push to go to the XII at that point. Our chances of that are nil, but there might be a move to fill UH's slot in the American. That would actually be a pretty good place for us, with the likes of SMU and Tulsa and Tulane and Navy and Memphis, at least schools that people have heard of and that have some semblance of tradition from the past. If we're to be considered for that slot, we need to move up in football and basketball, and in a hurry. We missed any serious consideration for the last move because of 2009-11. If we had 4 or 5 straight bowl appearances, we would probably get strong consideration, but if we end up 5-7 or 6-6 this year, and no better the next, then we are probably punting another opportunity to move up. Timing is critical, and this ship needs to be righted in a hurry.
I guess where I am is that at lest up until UTEP, I was thinking Bailiff would get us into a 4th straight bowl and winning season, and that would position us nicely going forward. That expectation has changed over the last two weeks. He is not going to continue to exceed my expectations. We need someone with a plan. If he is not going to put together a plan, and then bust his butt to sell that to players, coaches, administrators, students, alumni, and casual fans, and then make that plan happen, we are not going where we need to go.
We simply cannot have efforts like yesterday. I think he has to go. I'd reconsider if we finish 3-0. But that's what it's going to take, minimum. And that is not going to happen.
