Anyone who doesn't like longer posts can go to sleep or petition to reinstate the 101 character limit.
The dumb ass thing about this whole thing is that if anyone wants to assess the performance of REs recruiting and game coaching over 10 years or so vs. PP after one year, they ought to be a little dispassionate and not that many folks want to be. I sat in Memorial Stadium and watched an RE coached team get shoved all over the lot by Northeastern. What is significant about that is that UConn was already known to be scheduling up for a planned moved to D 1A at the time, Northeastern had no such pretenses, and UConn was already presumed to be recruiting against the needs for the jump in competition. Count me as many who wondered if RE was the guy who could take us to the next level.
I am neither a hater or defender of RE, I am a fan of the program, and to his credit, he built a program that became competitive much faster than anyone in their right mind had a right to expect. Of course, getting Dan O didn't hurt. But it may well be that RE's approach that made us competitive, also might have been the characteristic that made it hard for him to get us to a higher level. Anyone who thinks that his program was a world beater when it made it to the BCS game should know better. It was fun, but we were no juggernaut. RE is a conservative coach on both sides of the ball and, despite the hoo-ha about the new training facilities, the flood of super recruits that some experts and consequently some on the BY think we should be getting did not materialize. But RE did get some decent players. He sort of shocked me when he left,only because the program was totally his, but I always thought he felt both under-appreciated at UConn but also over-estimated his own talents.
So, he leaves and enter PP. Now, if anyone can say with a straight face that PP inherited a group of seasoned and skilled players at key positions, name them please. And I do not blame RE for kids like Frey and Todman leaving, but that does not translate into PP inheriting anything in the skill positions, regardless of whether or not RE can be blamed. I have said that I didn't like PP's QB rotation early on, but he had 3 green QBs, the only left-over QB with any game experience at all having quit the program. He had no healthy experienced RBs, had to replace 3 very good LBs, had no game breaking WRs and a very young set of DBs. That relates to on the field performance. Was I thrilled with the O? No. But I think that PP deserves a bit of a pass on year one. It is still the case that we won't have much experience at QB, but he did get one kid who rates high as a CT QB (kept a local home) and get a JUCO QB who meets the recruiting test for high school props, but so did Frazer and he was what he was.
As for recruiting overall, PP has a knock here from some related to two basic issues - not beating out RU for NJ kids, which is just about the silliest knock that can be put on the guy, and for not getting kids away from places like PSU, Iowa and such, which I think is also not worth much of a knock for a few reasons. One, RE was getting knocked for not recruiting against the more recognized programs. So which is it, don't recruit those kids at all or recruit against them and lose out. and maybe get a few along the way. Not to mention that some of the less recognized kids are actually better than some of the recognized ones. Second, if anyone thinks that UConn is the kind of program that can jump in on a senior who has been recruitied for at least one to two more years by a better recognized program and win a lot of kids, I want what you are smoking. The test for PP. like any coach, is how well does the team perform and how well does he recruit to get the kind of kids who fit the way he wants to play the game. Last year on the field proved very little of lasting information and his recruiting seems not all that much to complain about. Sayanora.
