I don’t think jhbyrd is arguing that McElwain was a great coach. He hasn’t said that from what I can tell. All he is saying is he exceeded expectations in 2015, and therefore won SECCOY that year. I’m with you that he was an awful coach. The expectation, though, was the defense would immediately spiral when Muschamp left. It didn’t happen immediately. It happened more gradually.
Whoever said McElwain was a poor man’s Larry Coker earlier on in the thread is correct IMO. That is a very valid comparison.
The problem is that if you agree with the Coker comparison, you're acknowledging that even a bad coach can have a successful year if there are underlying factors that impact things. In the case of Coker, he simply had too much experienced talent to mess up his first 2 seasons, and only failed once he was asked to restock and develop new players. But looking at 2001-2002 in a vacuum doesn’t tell that whole story. He won a title, almost two.
Similarly, if 2015 was the only part of McElwain’s resume that we had to go off of, then you could argue that he overachieved to an extent based on preseason expectations. I was one of those people. But once you look beyond that, his body of work suggests that factors such as a terribly weak East, some really good fortune against Vu, Ecu and FAU, and a couple of clutch plays by a QB he eventually ran off, were probably more the reason for our record, not some masterful coaching job. Of the 10 coaches he beat, 7 would go on to be fired within 2 years(Freeze had contributing factors). Stoops, Mason and whoever coaches our 2015 opener make up the rest.
The fact that neither JM or Coker have sniffed a high profile job, despite a measure of “success” says a lot. Unlike certain AD’s, most actually look at the bigger picture, not just a small sample size record. I was willing to give him credit when it looked like he may have been the catalyst for those 10 wins, as ugly as they were. But like you, I began fading in ‘16 and was done after Michigan. Just like Coker, I see no problem looking back and altering a viewpoint.