The risk taken with hiring Diaco, was a risk that is part of football. It's natural. Does the co-ordinator make the step up in grade to the head coach? There is no doubt that Diaco was a good defensive co-ordinator and position coach. You are what your record says you are.
Winning the Broyle Award - all that does, is validate the fact that a person is a pretty good co-ordinator when it comes to preparing one aspect of the 3 phases of the game.
I was less than impressed with Diaco's ability to prepare a team in all 3 phases of the game in game preparations, and planning and game time performance and decision making, but it was year 1. We'll see what year 2 brings. Whether what happened in 2014 was a purposely designed thing that happened that was known would lead to very little chance of winning, or what happened was actually the best effort to game plan and perform with the goal to win, week to week - is irrelevant now.
Because either way, we need to show improvement to the point where we are showing up week to week, and putting forward performances that indicates a well prepared team with an effective game plan.
I didn't believe in 2014, that we did not have the talent on the field to compete with anyone on our schedule, and I do not believe that to be the case in 2015 either. We've had a clusterf**k of 24 games in the past 2 seasons though. Holy hell. It will be nice to see a team show up in September, that is physically and mentally prepared, well coached, and can plant Villanova and Army for a 2-0 start, and then see where things go from there positively.