LOL! Arby Fields would have sucked pumpkins no matter if Walter Payton and Vince Lombardi had been his coach. The guy was slow and afraid to hit the line unless there was a gaping "high school" hole there. Coach McPh can't make chicken salad out of... And how are our RB's doing now?
Setting aside Arby, there was harsh criticism of our RBs even as recently as 2010 and 2011. In 2010, we averaged 3.6 yards/carry. In 2011, it was 3.8. People wanted MacPherson to be fired. People said he was given the job before Walker had fully trained him.
Now as you say, people don't complain about our RBs. That's really my point, though. Coach Mac has needed great talent to succeed. He was great with great talent and terrible with lesser talent. My contention is that we should want coaches who do great with great talent and adequate with lesser talent. There's a difference between terrible and adequate.
Our linebackers have been good to great?!!! Our LB's were mediocre or worse as recently as 2010-2011, or have you forgotten the Army and Wrigley-Illinois debacles...games lost by poor to horrible, vomit-inducing LB play? Sheesh!
You're citing two poor performances by the defense. By that logic, I guess our 2015 LBs were terrible because they didn't make good reads vs. Iowa.
So, no, I don't buy this logic of taking a terrible performance and suggesting that the unit was poor based on that woeful performance. You would not say our 2015 LBs were "poor" because they played poorly in one game. And by the way, I'm pretty sure that we executed a bad game plan vs. Army by using the wrong scheme for the entire game. But you remember that and this is just an exercise in being argumentative for amusement.
JBrown requires great talent? Kinda...that's true for all programs. He requires decent, sufficient talent and he coaches them up well, which you point out quite well. Has he had any 4-stars to work with? Guys like Philips, Jones, and Carpenter (Gator Bowl MVP) improved remarkably over their career, even though they had few, if any, other offers. Zero-star Marquice Cole had speed, if few to no other offers, and he had a pretty decent NFL career, don't you think? Brown turned VanHoose, an unheralded guy with average speed (check his HS track times) but good quickness, into an all-B10 CB. You gotta lot more arm-waving to do to convince me JB is a substandard coach.
I would agree that Phillips, Cole and Carpenter support your argument, but some of the others you've mentioned, like Brendan Smith (BYU, Indiana) and VanHoose (Indiana) had perfectly fine offers. Plus, since the ratings are heavily dependent on offer lists from power programs, a guy like McManis who slipped through without being noticed by other Power 5 programs simply won't earn the rating that he deserved.
I freely admit that the recruiting ratings depend on Power 5 offers, but I also feel that this is a passable basis for the ratings while it's definitely true that plenty of 2-star players were 3- or 4-star talents but were under-recruited for whatever reason.
We will have to disagree on whether or not Coach Brown does well regardless of the recruits that he receives, but I do feel that he is getting a lot of credit for a stacked depth chart.
Our WR's were effective under Johns. What notable talent have we had since? I'll admit, the drops we've seen the past few years have occurred on Springer's watch. But how have player personalities affected the attitude and work ethic within that group? I've heard things.
You're not going to like this, but a lot of the gossip (if it's the same gossip) was awfully race oriented. Let's just not go there or we inevitably discuss the union effort all over again.
How many players count as post-Johns? Are we counting Tony Jones Cam Dickerson, Rashad Lawrence, Christian Jones and part-time WR Colter? All of them played after Johns left but were recruited when he was still around. What about the transfers Shuler and Prater?
I think those guys count and all of them had some reasonable offers.
Since Johns left, class of 2012 had only two WR, Scanlan and McHugh. Wilson was the only one for 2013. Nate Hall, who didn't even play WR, was the only WR signee for 2014. 2015 & 2016 are too soon to evaluate.
I don't think that you can say WR recruiting was 'bad' when we didn't really recruit WR while so many of the aforementioned guys were packing the depth chart. Was this short sighted? Yeah.
You can't say that our receiving corps was bereft of talent until last season, though. And part of the problem was C. Jones being at 60% and Cam Dickerson being... Cam Dickerson.
You (and I) might smell something funny, but you (and I) still don't know enough to partition blame other than pointing fingers at coaches of groups that have underperformed with little critical regard to the talent on hand. At least you haven't convinced me, nor someone much closer to the program and more knowledgeable about football like, well, Fitz. Sorry.
My point is that we should absolutely regard the talent while also considering what the coach has done with well-regarded talent vs. what he has done with lesser talent. If the disparity is great and arguably this is true for Coach Cush, then it bears scrutiny.
I think that Fitz is knowledgeable about football and that's exactly why we stacked the deck at DB and why we're stacking it at WR in the last two years. By stacking, I mean taking guys who could have played on O and playing them on D exclusively, like Igwebuike, Henry, J. Hall, Watkins. In fact our DB deck was so stacked that we shifted two of them over to WR.
Rather than fire guys, he has simply allocated resources in certain ways.
