I said a few months back that one of my wishes for the new coach was that he wasn’t polarizing, namely through actions he took and choices he made. This is slowly happening here yet again. You may not like every player that a previous staff recruited or think they fit exactly what you want to do, but you also can’t think that having a completely nonexistent class will work either. I don’t know if Evers or any of the others will be great, but I don’t like the approach of burning something to the ground just because. Even if from just a perception standpoint, we need positive developments, not the opposite.
The other thing it tells me is that he’s content with losing if it means doing things his way. Someone like Spurrier and Meyer made it work with what they inherited and built in the existing class, as imperfect as it was. You don’t alienate and discard. You find ways to win with what you have because you can’t stand to lose. Guys like Gresham, Sledge, Jon Demps and others weren’t great but they helped build for 2006. This does not appear to be the approach to this point, and it’s officially becoming a concern.
What history shows is that this doesn’t work. Not for the coach, not for the program. And the reason it does not is because in the same day the AD is telling a new coach he’ll be given plenty of time to implement his plan and vision, even if it’s ugly initially, that same AD is selling boosters on great things happening quickly and thus an impetus for their financial commitment. When that doesn’t happen, it implodes and rightly so. It didn’t work for Rich Rod at Michigan, it didn’t work for Strong at Texas, on and on. It doesn’t work. For a “football junkie”, he should know this. And if things don’t demonstrably improve quickly this will be the last of these negotiations Stricklin will be a part of.
I’ll lastly say this, sometimes things are fairly obvious. Whether it was a complete 180 change in direction under WM, an insistence that 2-3*s could work under JM, the decision to bring in a hated DC under Mullen, or just the basic choices of who should be playing and who should be sitting, this board and the fans in general have been an absolutely overbearing bunch. But you know what else we’ve been? Dead on the effing money. I don’t need someone to tell me how much smarter they are than me simply because they’re paid millions. As I said in my New Era post, we’ve seen this before and it’s not that hard to see mistakes even from behind a keyboard. I consider this current stretch to be the first of Napier’s calls and they are not off to a good start.