Well said.
i've heard Mr. Diaco on the radio a few times and have been quite impressed with him, for the following reasons:
1. He has the right outlook for the team. Building a consistently winning, going-to-bowl-games, challenging for the conference championship every year is not something that happens overnight. (Rome was not, after all, built in a day.) It's a process. Success in that process he defines as improving a little bit each practice, each day, each game. If you do that, eventually the record will reflect it.
2. He clearly has got the team all on board -- whenever I've heard any of the kids on the radio coach's show, they are singing from the same hymnal.
3. He strikes me as viewing his role as more than just a football coach, but also as a teacher, which is of course what you want in a college football coach -- it is, after all, true that most of our players will go on to do careers other than football.
These are all things I could not say about his immediate predecessor.
Will we make a bowl this year? I hope so, but am not counting on it. Winning two out of three, when two of them are against teams currently undefeated is a tall order. That having been said, one of those two games is against a team from the deep south that will be played in East Hartford the Saturday before Thanksgiving. The kids on that team are likely to be unused to playing in such (likely to be adverse, though one never knows) climatic conditions -- their farthest north game this season other than us was in Louisville, quite a distance south. The other (against Temple) will be the last game of the year. It is entirely possible that at that point Temple will have wrapped up the conference, secured its BCS bowl invite and not have very much to play for, so may decide to give its lead players a week off, giving our players a chance against their second string to pull out a W in a game that will be meaningless for Temple but mean all for UConn. It wouldn't be the first time UConn has run off several games in a row to end a season....
But as, Mr. Diaco would tell you, the first order of business is to beat Tulane one week hence. Do that, and we're 5 and 5, needing one win in the last two games to become bowl-eligible. And, for the record, I do believe that a bowl invite would be forthcoming if this team finishes the season 6-6 -- the Cinderella story of going from back to back 2-10 seasons to 6-6 will be attractive to a bowl organizer. Even a 5-7 finish would be quite impressive given the prior two years' results. And they would be able to legitimately say that we are one or two plays removed from being 6-6 (take away the blocked punt turned into a safety and hit a field goal at the end of the Missouri game and we win it 9-7 instead of losing it 9-6).
Given the time to work on building program, I see Mr. Diaco developing us into a team that can legitimately expect to challenge for division and conference championships on a regular basis, and be a regular bowl invitee, even if not to the "premier" bowls.
Just my thoughts on a program I believe to be headed in the right direction.
