- Mar 22, 2016
- 394
- 697
Chump's expertise at recruiting is over rated. He had some success early at Florida when he had the luster of 2 NCs to sell. But as he destroyed the program it became harder for him to sell it. Evidence at USCe where he failed to improve the recruiting. Like Zook, once they moved on to a tougher sell their recruiting became pedestrian. And Chump chased stars not roster needs. That's how we end up without enough OL for a spring game. Or signing Treon Harris at QB that nobody projected at QB in college.
His luster as a DC has waned also. As he turned the offense over to OC's that try to score instead of maximize TOP is defenses have performed worse and worse. Hard to make the defense look good when they actually have to play half the game. And his defenses have always been undisciplined, attracting the wrath of the refs many times a game.
31 to Tennessee; 38 to Florida; 52 to LSU; 48 to Texas A&M; 59 to Ole Miss.
No thank you. I don't want any part of him and looking forward to seeing him fail bigly at a smaller school.
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The truly weird thing about Chump's recruiting is that, despite his clear ability to attract truly elite talent, he is only able to do so at certain positions on either side of the ball. What is weirder still is his apparent inability to recruit those other positions at all. The fact that he left us with actual body shortages at OL and LB is astounding especially for a school in the State of Florida! You'd have thought at a minimum he'd have at least gotten some passable 3 and even 2 stars lined up at those positions who could have filled in for some reps instead of creating the gigantic personnel holes he left behind. Seems to have done the same to SC too.
I guess the bottom line is that having Chump as a head coach results in a singularly epic yet tragically predictable fail pattern with such memorable milestones as:
- the "savior" hire fanfare as he comes in to "right the ship" left in "shambles" by his predecessor
- the early bravado after unexpected early success (with an offense that is nearly as painful to watch in success as it is in failure)
- the need to develop tolerance for his ridiculous on the field tantrums and off the field awkwardness with anyone holding a microphone and/or a camera
- the early "recruiting coups" with a couple truly excellent players in a couple of key position groups (but not enough of them to ultimately matter on either side of the ball)
- the middle underperforming years where the team is not entirely bad but not entirely good having some dropped games that felt like they should have been wins
- the mid tier bowl wins providing diminishing levels of false hope for the following year
- the emergence of the "defeat from the jaws of victory" phase that signals the final turn onto the long and hard straightaway toward the inevitable ugly finish
- the unprecedented injury year and its accompanying smoking crater failures
- the final "super choke" season where you can still see the talent on the team but also the holes in personnel and coaching that have clearly derailed it
- the inevitable "support from the AD" messaging phase
- the ultimate Chump ejection phase by an Administration that's finally willing to eat an extreme buyout and the team chaos of a mid-year firing just to finally move on
- the interim coach period of unbridled weirdness
- the aftermath remnant team with a few excellent players on each side of the ball surrounded by whole position groups with inadequate talent and numbers to support them
- the search for a new (sucker) "savior" coach in a desperate attempt to get on the coaching carousel early in the hope of getting a high impact coach that can keep the remaining excellent players from departing
I am sooooooo glad he's no longer our problem (except, of course, for the exorbitant buyout that we are likely still paying him... Does he have the be$t agent ever, or what?!?)