texowl2
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RE: Rice vs UH Game Thread
(09-12-2021 11:21 AM)GoodOwl Wrote: (09-12-2021 10:41 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: (09-12-2021 07:47 AM)jowls13 Wrote: If you have elite level players, winning becomes easy, no matter the “system.” For an NFL example look at Adam Gase. Tremendous success with Peyton Manning and a super talented team in Denver. He had 1 scheme that he never wavered from. Did not work anywhere else. In fact in Miami and New York as head coach, he was thought of as possibly the worst coach in league.
Good coaches get the most out of their players and taylor things to their strengths. They find ways to put players in positions to succeed and ultimately find ways to win games. Bloomgren does none of that. His body of work over 4 years is frighteningly bad. At this point, it is fair to say HE IS A TERRIBLE COACH.
I don't think he is universally a terrible coach. Obviously he was anything but a terrible coach as the O-line/Co-OC at Stanford. But his system is ill-suited to the athletes that he is apt to recruit at Rice. It is the same square pegs into round holes situation that I often criticized with Bailiff, and that concerned me from day one of "pound the rock." Bailiff caught lightning in a bottle twice, with CC and TMcH as QBs (although his first year with CC was pretty dreadful). Bloomgren hasn't had that happen yet, probably because his round holes are harder to force Rice athletes into than Bailiff's were.
Look at the philosophies of the coaches who have had some success here in the last 50 years:
Fred Goldsmith--sound defense, win the kicking game, and have a QB
Ken Hatfield--do something different on offense (his teams were better early, when he had better defenses; his offenses continued to score, but his defenses declined)
Al Conover--big emphasis on special teams (his teams also played good defense, with the likes of Cornelius Walker)
And look at the ones who have failed:
Bo Hagan--fair offense, godawful defense
Homer Rice--offensive genius, godawful defense
Ray Alborn--had some success, but recruited too many bad actors who didn't pan out
Watson Brown--offensive genius, bad defense
Jerry Berndt--decent offense, terrible defense
Mike Bloomgren--improved defense and special teams, offense totally ill-suited to personnel
I'd put David Bailiff in the middle, some success and some failure but no consistency, and I'd put Bill Peterson and Todd Graham in the too small a sample size category.
Trying to come up with "best practices" from that sample, I would opt for a combination of Fred's and Ken's philosophies:
Play sound defense, win the kicking game, and do something different on offense.
The something different on offense would depend on your talent. It could be anything from Ruowls' passing game to Ken's option, or what I have liked since seeing Erk Russell and Paul Johnson run it with Tracy Ham at Georgia Southern (and Johnson later at Hawaii with Garrett Gabriel) 30+ years ago--a combination of the two--the option running game with the West Coast passing game, adding some run-and-shoot and air raid principles (basically West Coast for quick passing game, air raid for drop-back passes, and run-and-shoot for play action passes). It's supposedly hard to teach, but there are only about 35-40 plays (10 runs, 10ish West Coast because of the way the nomenclature works, 6 run-and-shoot, 7 air raid, and 4-5 screens and draws), so it's not a big playbook. If Georgia Southern's and Hawaii's athletes were smart enough to master it, ours should be able to. McCaffrey probably throws the ball as well as Gabriel, if not Ham, so he could probably execute it. It would be oriented more toward the run with JJ and probably the pass with Green. But the run scheme (and related personnel requirement) is totally different from "pound the rock." The o-line is more quick than big, and you don't need a pure pocket passer. Our running backs would be fine.
Quite frankly, I would never have believed that we could improve our defense as much as we have under Bloomgren and Smith and not get a lot better overall, but our offensive disaster has exceeded anything that I would ever have expected. If Bloomgren keeps trying to pound square pegs into round holes, he will (or at least should be) gone at the end of the year.
You must have a carbon-copy of this post saved and just paste it over and over, we've seen it so many times. And it remains pretty spot-on. Wish that someone in the Athletic Dept. would read it at least once, but I don't think they have the acumen to understand it. Bloom will be extended, not fired. See: Way, the Rice.
They extended Bob Polk, not sure why they would not continue doing such.....
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