note: quotes are snipped.
I actually like McElwain a bit better than Freeze, so I'm not going to go too too far overboard on this. But...
TheDouglas78;n123376 said:
(1) 3-5,3-5,5-3 as SEC records are successful? He has done well against most of the teams he should beat, Vanderbilt (annual opponent), Texas El-Paso, A bad Texas team, etc...
Barring a mid-year death, new coaches usually are hired when things are not rosy. For football, it usually takes a year or two to stabilize and recruit, so that Year Three is when you hope to see meaningful progress. By that standard, Old Miss and Hugh Freeze are exactly on-track with a strong season and some major wins this year. That makes the decision to hire him at Ole Miss, and his tenure so far, successful from my point of view.
If you want to look at record alone in determining success of a 3rd year coach, that's your prerogative.
Just for fun, here's a comparison with another so-called up-n-coming coach:
Freeze @ Ole Miss
Yr 1 - conf 3-5 (37.5%) - overall 7-6 (53.8%)
Yr 2 - conf 3-5 (37.5%) - overall 8-5 (61.5%)
Yr 3 - conf 5-3 (62.5%) - overall 9-3 (75%)
Other coach
Yr 1 - conf (31.3%) - overall (43.3%)
Yr 2 - conf (37.5%) - overall (48.3%)
Yr 3 - conf (62.5%) - overall (71.0%)
Freeze matches or betters this other coach's record in every year. The benchmark coach went on to have a pretty good (?successful) career later on at the same school, winning 71.8% of his games over 19 years, including two national championships. His name is William Donovan, better known as Billy.
Do I think Freeze will become another Billy Donovan? No, not many do. But Freeze's trajectory is similar so far. Repeat, SO FAR. Climbing to the very tippy-top is exceedingly difficult. If it were easy, all the Cavemen would be becoming coaches, and they'd all have perfect 12-0 records.
(Interestingly, applying Billy's Florida record career of 71.8% to a 12 game football season comes out at about 3.5 losses per season on average.)
TheDouglas78;n123376 said:
But one win against Alabama and a good victory last year against LSU he is the second coming of Spurrier or Meyer to you?
I didn't say or imply anything of the kind.
TheDouglas78;n123376 said:
Would you pay Lamborghi money for something not shown more than a Accord?
You not thinking this through in the right context. There's a 1/2 million Accords for sale, all basically identical. And a dozen other vehicle models that really aren't a great deal different, other than the marketing/brand veneer that's been applied. Normal cars are close to being a commodity. In contrast, there's only a handful of top candidates for Tier 1 college football openings. You can rationalize the "economic value" of a coach all you want. But the reality is that the market price for top openings is NOT set by a rational and totally dispassionate analysis of historic ("proven") performance, the market price is set by the MOST IRRATIONAL actor with a fat wallet.
TheDouglas78;n123376 said:
Whether he is a top 5 available coach (which you can't prove) doesn't mean he is a top 5 coach. It just says you feel its a poor year of available coaching talent.
Just like you can't prove that Freeze is not a top 5 available coach. Ole Miss apparently thought he was an attractive prospect to others, they just bumped his salary quite a bit.
The pool of top-notch, "almost sure thing" coaches ready to move up to elite programs is small every year.
