coaching and recruiting philosophy. I still believe he's a good schemer, but only in a league where fundamentals don't have to take a back seat to designing a system that a busy college kid can't digest.
I thought (quietly) about how backwards his recruiting philosophy was in the beginning, and how it could have only been good for stuffing the run... well, turns out I was right about that.
Where was the quickness going to come from? He wanted 360 NT's. Fine. He wanted 300 LB DE's... okay. He wanted OLB's who ranged from 255 to 275 (remember he recruited Bailey, Drew, DeLoach and Dawson there... and played CornWash there too for way too long). Okay, so surely he wanted some range with his ILB's right? Nope. He was dead set on trying to get 255 LB ILBers too. Thank Dawg, he wasn't that successful there, sans a poor Johnny O'neal, who's a square peg in this system. Okay... surely he wanted to make up for a lack of mobility with his db's... nope, we turned away no shortwge of Ronald Darby's and Nickell Robey's.
We were so hellbent on being big, that we were willing to be massive at the expense of speed, mobility and conditioning. We were stiff slugs... but boy were we big. People remember how we had the biggest OL in all of football, what many people didn't know is that we also had the biggest DL in all of football. You won't find a larger three man or four man front (we had over thirteen hundred pounds up front when Motel 6, Kwame, DeAngelo and Abry were in) in history. Hell yeah, we could stuff the run, and rush the passer (thanks to three freaks. Houston, Jarvis and Floyd)... but most everyhing else (like stoping a team on third and long, keeping our wind and lining up properly) was unreasonably challenging for us.
I thought (quietly) about how backwards his recruiting philosophy was in the beginning, and how it could have only been good for stuffing the run... well, turns out I was right about that.
Where was the quickness going to come from? He wanted 360 NT's. Fine. He wanted 300 LB DE's... okay. He wanted OLB's who ranged from 255 to 275 (remember he recruited Bailey, Drew, DeLoach and Dawson there... and played CornWash there too for way too long). Okay, so surely he wanted some range with his ILB's right? Nope. He was dead set on trying to get 255 LB ILBers too. Thank Dawg, he wasn't that successful there, sans a poor Johnny O'neal, who's a square peg in this system. Okay... surely he wanted to make up for a lack of mobility with his db's... nope, we turned away no shortwge of Ronald Darby's and Nickell Robey's.
We were so hellbent on being big, that we were willing to be massive at the expense of speed, mobility and conditioning. We were stiff slugs... but boy were we big. People remember how we had the biggest OL in all of football, what many people didn't know is that we also had the biggest DL in all of football. You won't find a larger three man or four man front (we had over thirteen hundred pounds up front when Motel 6, Kwame, DeAngelo and Abry were in) in history. Hell yeah, we could stuff the run, and rush the passer (thanks to three freaks. Houston, Jarvis and Floyd)... but most everyhing else (like stoping a team on third and long, keeping our wind and lining up properly) was unreasonably challenging for us.
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