Scumbaugh Strikes Again!

[YesterdaysCat]

Actually, it matters quite a bit that he didn't do it at NU. It's much easier to win at Notre Dame than at NU.

You are crazy if you think Pat Fitzgerald could have won national titles at ND. I'm not convinced that Fitz could win a title anywhere in any era. He's just not a championship coach. He does a lot of things so very well and represents NU beautifully, but he is a poor game coach and he is not a brilliant innovator (ha ha). Even I, the guy who defends McCall and Springer, will acknowledge that you have to shore up weaknesses. Blind loyalty and stubbornness are recipes for losing. Fitzgerald has many great qualities, but he does a lot of things wrong and you have to be a Purple Kool-Aid addict not to recognize these fatal flaws.

I'm sure Ara was at a disadvantage compared to the other guys, just as fewer financial resources and higher academic standards put Fitz at a disadvantage now.

You have no idea, clearly. Read some of Ara's interviews or books about Ara's career. Northwestern was already a laughingstock as far as resources. Fitz is receiving an abundance of support from the administration and donors, and it's no comparison. At all. Did you not read where I said we basically fired Ara?

In Ara's day, you could field a decent team with fewer players because a lot of guys played both ways due to the substitution rules then. The problem then, as now, was lack of quality depth.

Well, at least we agree that a lack of depth was a major issue. You blew up your own argument by mentioning it, though. Our 1959 season, for example, was lost all because of one play, Dick Thornton getting hurt. The Fighting Irish and other major powers went 5 quarterbacks deep with the sky-high scholarship limit and they paid for those scholies. Northwestern did not fully fund football! Think about that. You know how we refuse to fully fund baseball? Imagine 2010 NU baseball, but instead it's NU football in the late 1950s and 60s, all the while fielding well coached teams and packing Dyche Stadium. It was so incongruous back then and this was before what we call the Dark Ages.

When you really talk to people, you realize that the only reason it took so long for NU football to go winless was because we had Ara and then Alex Agase. By all rights, NU football should have been miserable way before we hired John Pont and really turned off the money faucet. We were already at a trickle before then.

 

[EvanstonCat]

Nope. I'm saying that Coach Barnett was great...amazing...tremendous...awesome. And despite all of his awesomeness, his career winning percentage AFTER removing his initial five losing seasons is 56% - which is coincidentally the same winning percentage of our current Head Coach. So, if you love you some Barnett (like I do) because you think "The guy was a motivational genius on the field, a charismatic recruiter who didn't miss a trick off the field, and a guy who knew how to identify and hire the right people around him to sell his program" and that Fitz is a good man but not a good coach, you've got some desperate and pathetic excuse-making to do to explain why they are winning at the same clip.

Not hard to explain at all. It's called a bow wave. Program has initial success, but then dips, because the recruiting lags that success. Wisconsin went through the same thing, though not as pronounced. Barnett's Rose Bowl recruiting class left NU with a championship ring of their own. Had Barnett stayed, I'm certain we would have seen a trajectory similar to what Alvarez experienced at Wisconsin. Instead we got the Walker years, which many of you and probably Fitz considers a success. Therein lies our problem.

Fitz, on the other hand, while recruiting off of these Walker years was not operating with the same deck of cards at all. Although I rip the Walker years for the mediocrity they represented, the consistency and the lower bowls that we were getting to were still a lot better platform than the pre 1995 platform that Barnett was recruiting off of to fill the upper classes of his 1997-1999 teams. Autry leaving early and Bates getting hurt certainly didn't help, nor did Abrahamson dropping out (not to mention a number of OL getting sick/quitting) - but that happens all the time - however, NU at that time did not have even the depth that we enjoyed (relatively speaking) of the 2000's.

One only need look at what Barnett accomplished in his years at Colorado, and what happened to that program after he left, to understand his value and validate that what happened at NU was no stroke of luck.

 

[YesterdaysCat]

Had Barnett stayed, I'm certain we would have seen a trajectory similar to what Alvarez experienced at Wisconsin. Instead we got the Walker years, which many of you and probably Fitz considers a success. Therein lies our problem.

People consider the Walker years to be a success because we did so well in 2000 and there's no guarantee of how it would have gone with Barney.

Autry leaving early and Bates getting hurt certainly didn't help, nor did Abrahamson dropping out (not to mention a number of OL getting sick/quitting) - but that happens all the time - however, NU at that time did not have even the depth that we enjoyed (relatively speaking) of the 2000's.

If I didn't know any better (which I do), I'd think we are in harmony. 1997 was bad luck; Bates was just that good. 1998 might have been salvaged with Bates and the RS senior QB that we were supposed to have by then. Instead, the offense was something like 100th in the country that year with Hoffman at the helm.

 

[Dragon_Buck]

New decommit in Ann Arbor... remember all those Southern satellite camps (and the commits they took from attendees) last summer? Here's (another) one getting recruited over with a week to go.

Rashad Weaver

3-star DL Rashad Weaver decommits from Michigan, says Michigan changed offer to preferred walk-on situation