Quote:
Originally Posted by Swaggs
I hope they have a gameplan, because I don't see a real clear and apparent one.
I feel like Brown was close to a perfect hire on paper (young, Appalachian background, successful head coach with three 10+ win seasons in his last three seasons at Troy, no personal baggage, etc.), so I'm hesitant to penalize Lyons for hiring him, but he gets some blame for the extension (which, I understand he did because South Carolina may have been interested).
I'm not sure who we get that is necessarily an upgrade at HC. If it is $16M-$20M to buy him out, I'd rather them dump an extra $5M into upgrading his staff next year and keeping him, because even the more exciting names being mentioned as replacements (Freeze, maybe Jimbo) are not all that certain to be better. Apparently Fickell was the runner up when Brown was hired, but was lukewarm because there isn't a Catholic high school in Morgantown any more - so he's almost certainly not going to be interested this time around with Cincy now moving to the Big 12.
I'm not sure I trust Gee to make a good hire for AD, either. Hopefully, Huggins has some pull in the decision-making process. This seems like foreign territory for us.
|
A lot of people liked the Brown hire, but I wasn't one of them. An air raid guy that's calling plays but can only put up average or worse offenses every year was a huge red flag for me. I'm also not impressed by fluking your way into beating a couple of P5 schools. The overall teams he was putting on the field just weren't consistently efficient when you looked at the metrics.
I do think Freeze would be a huge upgrade over Brown and I'm not a huge Freeze guy. There are some other interesting options out there as well although most come with risk.
We're likely back to Brown calling plays again next year, if he's back, because he and Harrell do not have a very good relationship and Brown hasn't shown the ability to identify good assistants or move on from bad ones (Matt Moore is somehow still the Oline coach). He's recruited incredibly well, but that's been all for nothing since his staff just hasn't developed the talent they've brought in. The number of guys that have been drafted under Brown is embarrassingly few.
From the people I've chatted with they feel there's a plan on a new AD in place or they wouldn't have moved on from Lyon and that new AD will likely have a head coach in mind on his first day on the job.
I was worried the win over the worst OU team in recent memory would save Lyons and Brown but it sounds like they're moving forward on needed change.