You really think P had the staff this year he would have had if he had more time? I don't think it was even close. He wouldn't have lost Terry Richardson. He wouldn't have been paying Hank Hughes and Morehead coordinators salaries to be position costs who weren't running the D and O, respectively. And he might have made other changes.
I know we're supposed to be treating Edsall like the anti-Christ, but isn't there enough criticism you can heap on him for what he actually did (which was take a team with promise and dunk it in the toilet) without blaming him for situations that many programs and coaches go through because of the time pressures in the calendar?
And by the way -- to use what P accomplished this year as a model of what Edsall could have done is beyond stupid. No other way to say it. We were so disorganized on the field at times this year that how you'd use P's season as a good example for anything is beyond me.
Now, that is neither to blame P too much for needing a second season to implement his stuff, or giving Edsall a pass for his train wreck at Maryland. But sheesh, please at least attempt to be credible.
Hold on friend. I don't have a clue as to how or why you have such an attachment to Edsall, and personally, I'm sorry if you're offended, but this is a public forum...and that said, I was responding to the comments you made about Edsall first.
Or, it could have related to the fact that he started far too late to make putting together a new staff work, because he wasn't willing to bail on UConn before the Fiesta Bowl. Don't you think there is a reason that Brian Kelley and Rich Rod and even Todd Graham all left before their team's bowl games?
The concept of 'starting too late' to put together a new staff is flat out wrong. He might not have been willing to bail on UConn before the Fiesta Bowl, or he may not have had the opportunity to, we'll never know. You, though, bringing up those other situations, make it seem that those guys left their teams before bowl games so that it would somehow make it easier to hire better staffs or something? I completely disagree with that too. Edsall's difficulty with coaching hires so far in Maryland is a pretty telling thing about the guy.
Truth be out, the way Hathaway set up all the assistants contracts, was a frigging nightmare for any coach coming in. Any one of the assistants could easily have broken the contracts they had in place for what - 24 hours? before Edsall left without any notice? Could P realistically walk into the UConn offices two weeks later and expect any one of the staff to honor those contracts and not be knee deep in interviews elsewhere already - as he's trying to keep a recruiting class togehter?
I'm sure had all of the guys on staff sweating bullets at night. Most coaching contracts run academic year, not calendar year. But Hathaway did it calendar year. But that's not really relevant.
I"m sure that if P wanted to bring in an entire new staff, it would have happened. What he did do, was move coaches around, and challenge people to learn and do new things, and put people with proven track records of strenght, into positions of strength, not because they were under contract, but because we've got good coaches on this staff. The fact that they were able to move around, and do new things and still ahve some level of success, is all you need to know. The entire coaching staff is much more well rounded this year now.
The rest of my response was simple statement of fact. In the year since, Edsall has headed a program that has seen coaches fired, and players requesting transfer out in huge numbers. PLayers transferring out with unfavorable views of what's happening around them, and talking about it publicly. We have had a program which has seen TWO assistants interview for head coaching jobs, and one get hired, and one walk away from a potential head coaching job to return. We have had several players transfer out, all on good terms, and all to places better suited for their needs and goals. We have several players tranferring IN. I said nothing about the performance of this team on the field, yet you bring it up. Edsall's team finished 2-10 and was a trainwreck. We went 5-7, and had you complaining about how we could have done better with Edsall's systems. In the meantime, we managed to send the seniors out by beating the out of Rutgers on senior day and competing for a bowl game during a transition year. We've managed to attract a load of offensive talent that would never have come with Edsall's systems, and have actually landed a few players, and hopefully more before groundhog day.
I don't think Edsall is the anti-christ, but he was certainly not Bobby Dodd either. I greatly hoped he would become like Bobby Dodd though, but he never recognized a need to change anything about the way he operated, and I'm not sure he'll have the time he needs in Maryland to replicate the level of success that he did here, but I am sure he won't have the privacy and dictatorship authority he had here.
We're well on into better things.
