Stability wins in the SEC

#53
#53
If you don’t screw the stability to begin with you’re never in a position to hire a butch jones caliber coach. That’s the point you missed
I love Fulmer, but Fulmer remained to loyal to his assistants. I am glad he is the AD now and I supported him as coach until that last year. The game was changing and his staff didn't adapt, but it's not just Fulmer it happens to many coaches, like Spurrier said after 10 years at the same place it gets tough in todays climate everybody want to win and the competition is intense. Fulmer had won championships and many games and it is hard for coaches to change when they aren't that far removed from success. But your right getting the right fit after that type of coach leaves can be a struggle even for big schools that were earlier identified. GBO!!!!
 
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#54
#54
Stability on helps when you have legit coach. Dooley should have been better, his father was. Butch, well he didn’t have a learning curve, if he did, he could have been better. If his locker room was normal.

CJP, it’s still too early to tell if he will be able to get it done. I liked his in game decisions, but his game plans were suspect. He tried to force the issue too much in 2018 until it pays off in 2019 which I expect.
 
#56
#56
It's a chicken/egg thing.

Do you win then have stability?

or

Do you have stability and then win?
 
#57
#57
Auburn has had 3 different head coaches in the last 10 years and have went to two BCS title games and won the NC.

Good coaching + talent is all that matters.


If you don't add proper funding to key areas, you are just going in circles.
 
#58
#58
Stability on helps when you have legit coach. Dooley should have been better, his father was. Butch, well he didn’t have a learning curve, if he did, he could have been better. If his locker room was normal.

CJP, it’s still too early to tell if he will be able to get it done. I liked his in game decisions, but his game plans were suspect. He tried to force the issue too much in 2018 until it pays off in 2019 which I expect.

Not many great coaches have sons who can fill their shoes. But Dooley doing well as an OC at Mizzou baffles me. Why does it seem coaches who failed here did well before they came here and for the most part do well after they leave. Maybe it's the board, maybe its the boosters or maybe it's the Haslams. IMO? It's that damn road butted up to the burial mound.
 
#59
#59
We lost all stability when fulmer was fired. Throughout sec history when you lose or fire an iconic hall of fame caliber coach there’s most always a 4-6 year period where big time programs have bad/mediocre years before getting back, sometimes it takes even longer. It’s happened to Florida, bama multiple times, Auburn, Georgia etc. whether is was right or the wrong time to fire fulmer has been talked to death. You don’t fire big time coaches unless you have an ace up your sleeve to replace him and we had bad luck with our ace. Now we’re suffering the consequences. Alabama went through the same 10 year stretch prior to saban (although never this bad). Georgia is where they are because mark richt built a stable program. Our fan base would have ran him off long before Georgia did. Kirby didn’t do anything special. Just walked into a loaded roster and kept the ball rolling in recruiting. The 2 best teams in our league are where they are because of stability. Stability makes it possible to recruit at high levels and go to the next level. When Tennessee and Florida ran the sec for a decade or so it was because we were the most stable programs. Until our fan base and administration have patience, which at this point is hard, we’re going to continue to go through the same exact cycle. Firing coaches and wanting them fired year after year doesn’t fix programs, it sets it back even more. Fulmer was brought back to stabilize the program and excerize the patience needed to bring it back. That’s what he’s doing with Pruitt. It’s going to take a few years and multiple classes but I’ll ride with Phil any day of the week. Have patience. Stop being the fire coaches every year fan base. It just makes the process that much longer. We finally have a Tennessee guy running the program again, well be back.
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#60
#60
Stability on helps when you have legit coach. Dooley should have been better, his father was. Butch, well he didn’t have a learning curve, if he did, he could have been better. If his locker room was normal.

CJP, it’s still too early to tell if he will be able to get it done. I liked his in game decisions, but his game plans were suspect. He tried to force the issue too much in 2018 until it pays off in 2019 which I expect.
IMHO, Dooley hired a good enough staff that he would have been better had he inherited a good roster. He's definitely not a guy with the force of personality to take a program from where it was to competitive. Also IMHO, Jones would have ended the same pretty much regardless of what he started with if he had stayed more than 3 years. His career was built on hanging to Kelly's coat tails and beating chumps. He's a bad coach with a big ego.
 
#61
#61
Not many great coaches have sons who can fill their shoes. But Dooley doing well as an OC at Mizzou baffles me. Why does it seem coaches who failed here did well before they came here and for the most part do well after they leave. Maybe it's the board, maybe its the boosters or maybe it's the Haslams. IMO? It's that damn road butted up to the burial mound.
Dooley is probably a better coach of football than given credit. He was left in a hole bigger than his ability at UT... at MU... he inherited Drew Lock. Lock may be the best QB in CFB right now. The players around him aren't very good.

BUT... Lock is now gone and MU has no one like him to step up. Now Dooley gets tested.
 
#62
#62
Not many great coaches have sons who can fill their shoes. But Dooley doing well as an OC at Mizzou baffles me. Why does it seem coaches who failed here did well before they came here and for the most part do well after they leave. Maybe it's the board, maybe its the boosters or maybe it's the Haslams. IMO? It's that damn road butted up to the burial mound.
He changed to a defensive scheme that has a curve. He didn’t have have time for the curve. Had he stayed with the same defense, maintained that stability, who knows what would have happened.

When dealing with a game of inches and split seconds it’s difficult to win against evenly matched teams. When there is a talent gap, it’s easy for games to get out of hand.
 
#63
#63
I think stability and championship coaching are a chicken-and-egg thing.

In the OP, you argue that success comes from stability. The opposite is equally true, though: stability comes from success. If a coach is hot, he gets renewed and longer contracts.

So. I agree with the implication that we never should've fired Fulmer (there were other options to break his complacency). Other than that, though, I don't think there's an argument to force more stability in hope of greater success. As others have pointed out, it just wasn't gonna happen with Kiffin, Dooley or Jones. Best--even at the cost of lower stability--to cut ties with them as soon as we know they're not what we need.*

So...when we have a championship caliber coach, we'll have stability. Is that Pruitt? Hope so; time will tell.



* I know, I know, Kiffin cut ties with us, not the other way around. But if he'd stayed, his lack of success would've come in the form of NCAA or SEC trouble, and would've been just as painful as 5-7 seasons like those Dooley gave us.
 
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#64
#64
Our issue hasn't been firing coaches; it's been hiring cheap, bad coaches....

If we kept Dooley for 8 years or Butch for 10 years, we'd have stability but we'd suck....
Absolutely.

I'd add also that even though I wouldn't say Pruitt was an elite coaching prospect, I would at least say he understands how SEC football is played. Butch took a team that should've at very least been a playoff contender and a pain for Bama and made them a mediocre team. He let Kamara ride the bench until he was forced by Hurd to give him more opportunities
 
#66
#66
I just disagree. Bama replaces coordinators pretty much annually and cycling through a parade of head coaches between Stallings and Saban seems to have worked out. People don't like they way this sounds, but Tennessee's problem is that the administration has not been as invested in fielding championship football teams as schools like Bama, UGA, Barn, LSU, UF and others that we have to deal with. We took football revenue away from football to pay for other junk. We don't give our head coach the autonomy to truly act as an independent CEO. Basically, if you want to have a championship team you have to have an administration and boosters who will give the head coach all the money and power that he wants and then gtfo of the way and let the man do whatever he thinks he needs to do to win. Tennessee does not have that trust level between administration, boosters, and staff.
 
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#68
#68
Tennessee rode the fan base into the ground with the cheap hires. They got
Lucky promoting Phil from within. Thats not the winning way in todays world.
You pay for what you get. Each year they go down 5000 more seats.
 
#70
#70
I think Georgia pretty much proved you can move from a coach succeeding at a moderately high level to a coach succeeding at an elite level when you don't have bumbling idiots walking the halls of your AD.
 
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#71
#71
Not many great coaches have sons who can fill their shoes. But Dooley doing well as an OC at Mizzou baffles me. Why does it seem coaches who failed here did well before they came here and for the most part do well after they leave. Maybe it's the board, maybe its the boosters or maybe it's the Haslams. IMO? It's that damn road butted up to the burial mound.

Dooley sucked before he came here. As for Mizzou, it seems he completely adopted the offense they were already running. I saw zero change from the year before. And Lock helps.

That is what we need on offense, a system that can live on from coordinator to coordinator. It has to be picked up and kept alive by assistants, analysts, and hc.
 
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#72
#72
I think Georgia pretty much proved you can move from a coach succeeding at a moderately high level to a coach succeeding at an elite level when you don't have bumbling idiots walking the halls of your AD.

Moderately high = 9/10 win season after season after season. And immediate #3, #1 classes sure help. A lot different than firing your coach for winning 4 or 5 games their last year.
 
#74
#74
Tennessee rode the fan base into the ground with the cheap hires. They got
Lucky promoting Phil from within. Thats not the winning way in todays world.
You pay for what you get. Each year they go down 5000 more seats.

Lucky? Keep telling yourself that. Because sooner or later, Phil has to show results. Your fantasies of having him back is no longer just a hypothetical debate on message boards. It's become real. I guess we finally get to see just whether he is all that or not, how fast some of you all turn on him, and whether he unites or shatters the fan base. For me, ought to be fun to sit back and watch, It's not that I don't care anymore, it's just that I don't have the energy to waste on it.
 
#75
#75
Dooley sucked before he came here. As for Mizzou, it seems he completely adopted the offense they were already running. I saw zero change from the year before. And Lock helps.

That is what we need on offense, a system that can live on from coordinator to coordinator. It has to be picked up and kept alive by assistants, analysts, and hc.

However you want to slice it, he managed not to screw it up. Personally, I wish we could figure out who keeps walking in like Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours at the cowboy bar trying to get by on BS, and saying, "Let's see what we can **** with next!"
 
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