So you’re saying the wins were only produced by the players and the loses were all the fault of the coaches? I would give some credit to the coaches for the two ten win seasons. They did develop those players. We are handicapped by our admission policies and it is not easy getting players. Failure to find the right QB candidates led to an issue after Thorson. We were relying on Hunter to be the man and he turned out to be the deer in the headlights. I fault the coaches for not having a good plan B when it became obvious that Hunter was gun shy. But just like any team, you need a competent QB to win. Ramsey and Bryant were not 5-star studs but they knew what they were doing. Hopefully Braun and Lujan can get that out of Wright while developing the QBs that they recruited.
I think we are getting a bit carried away by trying to make the coaching sound like a complete failure. You need players and coaches to have competency to win 10 games twice. I agree that McCall lost his way as well as a bad job by the entire staff in recruiting but there were some good years in there.
The coaches do get some of the credit - altho, wouldn't exactly credit the coaches, for example, when Persa making making something out of nothing.
But at the same time, there are many things the coaching staff got wrong; yes, mistakes are going to happen, but the problem is when the staff keeps repeating the
same mistakes or taking so long to recognize mistakes (taking half a season before realizing that thy had to simply things for the secondary) or not even recognizing them until an outside source let them know (O-line tipping plays).
Admissions is too often the easy scapegoat.
Stanford arguably has tougher admissions and they long have recruited better (altho it hasn't always produced on the field).
But the Cats didn't even need to be Stanford on the recruiting front; for the last half of Fitz's tenure, the Cats' recruiting classes were in the ballpark with the 2 teams it mostly was tussling with for the West title, Wisky and Iowa.
Nebby was the one program in the West that, on paper, had clearly better classes, but they were a total loss on the coaching front.
So, as I've stated before, the opportunity was ripe for the program to take advantage of disarray in the West, especially as both Wisky and Iowa were having their own issues on offense.
What I'm saying is no different than what many Iowa and Wisky fans think - that if their HCs had made better decisions with regard to their respective offenses, the West was there for the taking.
And the QB issue simply wasn't a post Thorson thing.
Could never develop a capable backup (for Siemian, Thorson) which again, goes back to McC's scheme which is so heavily dependent on not only the QB having experience, but the other players on O (whereas we had seen plenty of young, inexperienced players come in and have a major impact on Hank's D).
And while Thorson did just enough to help the historical D in his first season as starter, imagine what that team could have done with just an average passing QB?
Also, whole a lot of the blame has gone to the QBs who tried to succeed Thorson, they all would have been helped out if the
O-line had been at least decent.
The failure to field a decent O-line after the 2012 season is probably Fitz's failure.
As for Hunter, for an O scheme that was known to be more difficult on the QB, who's bright idea was it for him to run the
scout team when he was sitting out that year?
It's coaches repeatedly making decisions that defy plain common sense is what drove me nuts over the past decade or so.
Well, Iowa have had a pretty rough time trying to best Iowa State and they did lose games to Central Michigan, North Dakota State, and NIU during the Fitz era. Plus of course all those losses to us, which really got under their skin.
The grass is not always greener.
Never stated that would want trade places; after all, the 2 programs had about the same highs in the B1GW with Iowa just avoiding the severe downturns.
Iowa has had the upper hand against Iowa St as of late and they have been the better overall program than the Pumpkinheads.
Sure, programs lose to lower level foes from time to time (unless you're one of the truly elite), but Iowa probably hasn't lost to half as many lower tier programs as the Cats had under Fitz.
The one thing we all probably would agree on is wishing we had Iowa's kicking game.
