Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - Printable Version
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RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - BigJohn043 - 10-02-2022
(10-02-2022, 02:25 PM)george Wrote:(10-02-2022, 02:09 PM)msqueri Wrote: Anybody would do better, or at least close enough to anybody if we halfway tried with a hire.Well, we ended up with Walt after we fired Teevens. At the time of Buddy's dismissal it was hard to believe that we could do worse, but we clearly could.
But with a new coach at least we could have hope. Even if the results aren't any better we could get an off season at least of hope. Right now we have none and frankly I haven't had any in several years.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - PersonalLegend - 10-02-2022
(10-02-2022, 02:43 PM)cardcrimson Wrote:(10-02-2022, 02:25 PM)george Wrote:Hard to believe that Walt was up for the head coaching job at Alabama at one point. . . .(10-02-2022, 02:09 PM)msqueri Wrote: Anybody would do better, or at least close enough to anybody if we halfway tried with a hire.Well, we ended up with Walt after we fired Teevens. At the time of Buddy's dismissal it was hard to believe that we could do worse, but we clearly could.
Yeah, people easily forget he was a reasonably successful coach at Pitt (with Larry Fitzgerald, but still). He consistently had Pitt in bowls and was Big East coach of the year and went to the Fiesta Bowl (a BCS bowl game) the year he took the Stanford job.
He just ended up being a ridiculously terrible fit for Stanford football to the point of wrecking morale entirely, and probably less good a coach than his recent record had indicated.
The track record David has put together is one that suggests he can manage a high-performing team of internally motivated players, but can't create that culture when it doesn't exist.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - msqueri - 10-02-2022
(10-02-2022, 02:25 PM)george Wrote:(10-02-2022, 02:09 PM)msqueri Wrote: Anybody would do better, or at least close enough to anybody if we halfway tried with a hire.Well, we ended up with Walt after we fired Teevens. At the time of Buddy's dismissal it was hard to believe that we could do worse, but we clearly could.
I was one of the people in those days saying be careful what you wish for. Eventually I came around to supporting firing Teevens but it was pretty grudgingly. 2004 Teevens was harder to replace than 2022 Shaw. When we fired Teevens we were the sixth best of ten Pac-12 teams and on the doorstep of top 40 nationally. Shaw's team is currently 10th of 12 Pac-12 teams and #61 in Sagarin, which is a big improvement (and maybe a high point going forward) compared to last year's #89. To be honest, Shaw hasn't been on Teevens' level in almost half a decade. It's easier to replace the losingest Power Five coach in the nation than to replace a somewhat sub-par Power Five coach.
Regardless, even if one holds that Shaw 2022 is similar to Teevens (which I think it's increasingly clear is an insult to Teevens), the point is that moving on from Teevens allowed us to shoot higher. We replaced him with a coach coming off a BCS bowl and rolled the dice it would be better. It wasn't, but then we had another shot at a hire and that turned out spectacularly. If we move on from Shaw and suck, the worst that's happened is we're as bad as we are now. Even say Shaw gets replaced by Pritchard or Anderson and we have 2-3 more bad seasons. That's a risk worth taking. It's not even really a gamble given how low we are now. And if it doesn't work, you get to have another coaching search to look for a better coach, but this time without Shaw's shadow. As Big John said, coaching changes for losing teams are about finding some reason for hope. We have none now. We could by turning the page. That's the bottom line.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - BostonCard - 10-02-2022
(10-02-2022, 03:03 PM)PersonalLegend Wrote: Yeah, people easily forget he was a reasonably successful coach at Pitt (with Larry Fitzgerald, but still). He consistently had Pitt in bowls and was Big East coach of the year and went to the Fiesta Bowl (a BCS bowl game) the year he took the Stanford job.
He just ended up being a ridiculously terrible fit for Stanford football to the point of wrecking morale entirely, and probably less good a coach than his recent record had indicated.
It was a bit of a warning sign that Pitt fans weren’t too broken up by his departure.
BC
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - PersonalLegend - 10-02-2022
(10-02-2022, 03:15 PM)BostonCard Wrote:(10-02-2022, 03:03 PM)PersonalLegend Wrote: Yeah, people easily forget he was a reasonably successful coach at Pitt (with Larry Fitzgerald, but still). He consistently had Pitt in bowls and was Big East coach of the year and went to the Fiesta Bowl (a BCS bowl game) the year he took the Stanford job.
He just ended up being a ridiculously terrible fit for Stanford football to the point of wrecking morale entirely, and probably less good a coach than his recent record had indicated.
It was a bit of a warning sign that Pitt fans weren’t too broken up by his departure.
BC
Agree with that BC. We had a bunch of Stanford folks who weren't really broken up that Harbaugh left, too. It's a strange dynamic.
In any event, I'm not (at all) trying to defend the Harris hire, just to offer perspective that his hiring was at least somewhat justifiable based on record.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - BostonCard - 10-02-2022
(10-02-2022, 03:33 PM)PersonalLegend Wrote: Agree with that BC. We had a bunch of Stanford folks who weren't really broken up that Harbaugh left, too. It's a strange dynamic.
In any event, I'm not (at all) trying to defend the Harris hire, just to offer perspective that his hiring was at least somewhat justifiable based on record.
Fwiw, at the time I was super excited about the hire and stoked that we were getting a BCS bowl caliber coach. I dismissed the Pitt lamentations as sour grapes, but they turned out to be right, of course. So I agree that at the time, the hiring was defensible.
BC
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - msqueri - 10-02-2022
IMHO, Harris failed at Stanford not because he couldn't coach football but because dark things were going on in his personal life and he brought darkness, insecurity, and mean-spiritedness to Stanford, which was toxic. Maybe if Harris got the team Teevens inherited from Willingham and Teevens got the team Harris inherited from Teevens they each would have done better. No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man. Teevens and Harris weren't right for Stanford when they coached there, but that doesn't mean neither could coach football. That's how I feel about Shaw now. To me failed coaches who get to Fiesta Bowls (Harris and Shaw), Rose Bowls (Willingham and Shaw), and numerous Ivy League championships at a non-power (Teevens) aren't inherently bad coaches. But for everything there's a season (and 2006 was not Harris' and 2021-2022 are not Shaw's!).
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - CowboyIndian - 10-02-2022
(10-02-2022, 02:46 PM)BostonCard Wrote: Regardless, though, Kelly was on the hot seat in his early UCLA days, but he has been steadily building since the pandemic year (8-4 last year, 5-0 so far this year). UCLA fans would be nuts to contemplate replacing Kelly.
Isn't he a major reason why the UCLA athletic dept. is something like $100 million in debt?
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - Goose - 10-02-2022
(10-02-2022, 06:13 PM)CowboyIndian Wrote:Beneficiary, not "reason". They didn't have to hire him.(10-02-2022, 02:46 PM)BostonCard Wrote: Regardless, though, Kelly was on the hot seat in his early UCLA days, but he has been steadily building since the pandemic year (8-4 last year, 5-0 so far this year). UCLA fans would be nuts to contemplate replacing Kelly.
Isn't he a major reason why the UCLA athletic dept. is something like $100 million in debt?
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - Mick - 10-03-2022
(10-02-2022, 03:07 PM)msqueri Wrote:(10-02-2022, 02:25 PM)george Wrote:(10-02-2022, 02:09 PM)msqueri Wrote: Anybody would do better, or at least close enough to anybody if we halfway tried with a hire.Well, we ended up with Walt after we fired Teevens. At the time of Buddy's dismissal it was hard to believe that we could do worse, but we clearly could.
I was one of the people in those days saying be careful what you wish for. Eventually I came around to supporting firing Teevens but it was pretty grudgingly. 2004 Teevens was harder to replace than 2022 Shaw. When we fired Teevens we were the sixth best of ten Pac-12 teams and on the doorstep of top 40 nationally. Shaw's team is currently 10th of 12 Pac-12 teams and #61 in Sagarin, which is a big improvement (and maybe a high point going forward) compared to last year's #89. To be honest, Shaw hasn't been on Teevens' level in almost half a decade. It's easier to replace the losingest Power Five coach in the nation than to replace a somewhat sub-par Power Five coach.
Regardless, even if one holds that Shaw 2022 is similar to Teevens (which I think it's increasingly clear is an insult to Teevens), the point is that moving on from Teevens allowed us to shoot higher. We replaced him with a coach coming off a BCS bowl and rolled the dice it would be better. It wasn't, but then we had another shot at a hire and that turned out spectacularly. If we move on from Shaw and suck, the worst that's happened is we're as bad as we are now. Even say Shaw gets replaced by Pritchard or Anderson and we have 2-3 more bad seasons. That's a risk worth taking. It's not even really a gamble given how low we are now. And if it doesn't work, you get to have another coaching search to look for a better coach, but this time without Shaw's shadow. As Big John said, coaching changes for losing teams are about finding some reason for hope. We have none now. We could by turning the page. That's the bottom line.
Two things about Teevens. In his last season, the Cardinal finished 4-7. They lost to #1 USC by three points. I don't see a Shaw team losing to an AP #1 team by less than fifty. Teevens also started out 4-2 that season, annihilating San Jose State and BYU, and beating Washington and WSU. Five of their seven losses were by eight points or fewer. But then they lost to Cal 41-6.
Second, at least Teevens improved. He was 2-9 his first year, went to 4-7 his next year getting killed in virtually all of his losses, but the team was actually competitive in 9 of 11 games by Teevens' last year.
Not saying I want him back. And Teevens has gone 9-1 in four of his last seven seasons at Dartmouth, including the last three in a row. He's likely happy there.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - PersonalLegend - 10-03-2022
The issue with Teevens's teams is they played very soft. The shotgun handoff was the epitome of that. I have nothing against finesse in football (indeed, it's the direction football is necessarily going) but what we are seeing today is directly similar to what people didn't like about Teevens's teams. Mushy, gusy, gashed up defense and slow, soft, non-assertive offense.
Watching EJ Smith run out of bounds against USC (something I've only seen referred to once on these boards) reminded me directly of Chris Lewis running out of bounds on 4th down so many years ago... Demonstrates a lack of heart to leave so much on the table.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - CowboyIndian - 10-03-2022
(10-02-2022, 03:33 PM)PersonalLegend Wrote: We had a bunch of Stanford folks and players who weren't really broken up that Harbaugh left, too.
That's more like it.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - Beeg_Dawg - 10-03-2022
(10-02-2022, 03:03 PM)PersonalLegend Wrote:(10-02-2022, 02:43 PM)cardcrimson Wrote:(10-02-2022, 02:25 PM)george Wrote:Hard to believe that Walt was up for the head coaching job at Alabama at one point. . . .(10-02-2022, 02:09 PM)msqueri Wrote: Anybody would do better, or at least close enough to anybody if we halfway tried with a hire.Well, we ended up with Walt after we fired Teevens. At the time of Buddy's dismissal it was hard to believe that we could do worse, but we clearly could.
Yeah, people easily forget he was a reasonably successful coach at Pitt (with Larry Fitzgerald, but still). He consistently had Pitt in bowls and was Big East coach of the year and went to the Fiesta Bowl (a BCS bowl game) the year he took the Stanford job.
He just ended up being a ridiculously terrible fit for Stanford football to the point of wrecking morale entirely, and probably less good a coach than his recent record had indicated.
The track record David has put together is one that suggests he can manage a high-performing team of internally motivated players, but can't create that culture when it doesn't exist.
He couldn't maintain the culture when it existed. Take out Christian McCaffrey and I believe 2015-16 would be more like 7 or 8 win seasons. He was 34-7 with Harbaugh's players. As EUTM faded, so did our football.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - chrisk - 10-03-2022
(10-03-2022, 07:27 AM)PersonalLegend Wrote: The issue with Teevens's teams is they played very soft. The shotgun handoff was the epitome of that. I have nothing against finesse in football (indeed, it's the direction football is necessarily going) but what we are seeing today is directly similar to what people didn't like about Teevens's teams. Mushy, gusy, gashed up defense and slow, soft, non-assertive offense.
Watching EJ Smith run out of bounds against USC (something I've only seen referred to once on these boards) reminded me directly of Chris Lewis running out of bounds on 4th down so many years ago... Demonstrates a lack of heart to leave so much on the table.
Wasn’t Smith already hurt at that point?
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - gailtate - 10-03-2022
Pending more info (AKA the Whole Story) we'll be wading through rumor, conjecture and hunch. My guess is that EJ, at the behest of dad, is positioning himself for a transfer and avoiding any possibility of further injury. Smith family surely sees Stanford as a poor showcase for EJ's talents and, indeed, a place where those talents would lie fallow under the tutelage of Shaw's crew.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - winflop - 10-03-2022
(10-02-2022, 02:45 PM)Canalejas Wrote: So how do we go about clamoring for a new AD?
I'm writing to the President, Provost, Board of Trustees, and if I can find it the Athletics Committee on the BoT
But TBH I'm more focused on getting rid of Shaw right now. I think it's going to take some pressure from the players. I hope some of them are telling Muir something along the lines of "I will be playing football for a different head coach next season. It's up to you whether that's at Stanford or somewhere else." My understanding is that this is ultimately what got IdiotFace fired.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - gailtate - 10-03-2022
(10-03-2022, 01:30 PM)winflop Wrote:(10-02-2022, 02:45 PM)Canalejas Wrote: So how do we go about clamoring for a new AD?
I'm writing to the President, Provost, Board of Trustees, and if I can find it the Athletics Committee on the BoT
But TBH I'm more focused on getting rid of Shaw right now. I think it's going to take some pressure from the players. I hope some of them are telling Muir something along the lines of "I will be playing football for a different head coach next season. It's up to you whether that's at Stanford or somewhere else." My understanding is that this is ultimately what got IdiotFace fired.
Jack Elway was let go fired after Andy Geiger's investigation of team dissent after the '88 season. He's the only confirmed case of a team insurgency
that I am aware of. I also know there was a brief parental protest in the early days of Buddy T. One dad in particular was shocked by the laid-back atmosphere of practice.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - Snorlax94 - 10-03-2022
(10-03-2022, 01:30 PM)winflop Wrote:(10-02-2022, 02:45 PM)Canalejas Wrote: So how do we go about clamoring for a new AD?
I'm writing to the President, Provost, Board of Trustees, and if I can find it the Athletics Committee on the BoT
But TBH I'm more focused on getting rid of Shaw right now. I think it's going to take some pressure from the players. I hope some of them are telling Muir something along the lines of "I will be playing football for a different head coach next season. It's up to you whether that's at Stanford or somewhere else." My understanding is that this is ultimately what got IdiotFace fired.
You do realize that if the university follows your suggested course, Muir will be picking Shaw’s replacement and negotiating the contract. And you think that will make things better? A massive, poorly thought-out, long-term contract with a poorly-chosen new coach could be disastrous for Stanford Athletics for many years, and could impact many sports.
Muir has stayed longer than most other Stanford ADs, I suspect because no one else wants him. The few times he has replaced coaches, overall, he has a track record far worse than his predecessors. His contracts appear to demonstrate poor stewardship of resources (too many games at places like UCF for money, too much money for Shaw versus insisting on more money to get top coordinators, a lack of highly-regarded staff positions like strength and conditioning trainers). Stanford’s ties to the Varsity Blues scandal alone provides cause. The overturning of his initiative to end several sports demonstrates the lack of support for his leadership and misalignment between the AD and the university/board.
The first step in fixing any problems in the football (and men’s basketball?) program requires the right leadership to oversee those changes.
I think a letter writing campaign could be the right course if someone (who is not a super donor) wants changes in staff, but at this time, I believe the focus of those efforts should be Muir.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - 81alum - 10-03-2022
(10-02-2022, 04:10 PM)msqueri Wrote: IMHO, Harris failed at Stanford not because he couldn't coach football but because dark things were going on in his personal life and he brought darkness, insecurity, and mean-spiritedness to Stanford, which was toxic. Maybe if Harris got the team Teevens inherited from Willingham and Teevens got the team Harris inherited from Teevens they each would have done better. No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man. Teevens and Harris weren't right for Stanford when they coached there, but that doesn't mean neither could coach football. That's how I feel about Shaw now. To me failed coaches who get to Fiesta Bowls (Harris and Shaw), Rose Bowls (Willingham and Shaw), and numerous Ivy League championships at a non-power (Teevens) aren't inherently bad coaches. But for everything there's a season (and 2006 was not Harris' and 2021-2022 are not Shaw's!).How do you think Harris and Teevens would have done in an alternate universe in which Robin Mamlet never becomes Director of Admissions and Rick Shaw is appointed 5 years earlier than he actually was?
Mamlet 2000-2005
Rick Shaw 2005-present
Teevens 2002-2004
Harris 2005-2006
I submit that SHAW is the single most important reason for Stanford football success since the bad old days. Of course, it is a different Shaw than most people think.
RE: Sunday morning thoughts - Oregon - sunnyside sudser - 10-03-2022
Completely agree that removing Muir is step one and hiring a new ad with some big time college football experience and connections is number 2. Sell it to the Admin that the new guy will be so much of an upgrade he can run things without them having to get bogged down with such a mundane endeavor. Let the new guy hire the next coach.
Sadly this current situation reminds me a bit of Muir staying way too long with Johnny d and torpedoing the previously wildly successful and entertaining hoops program. From packed houses to the maples morgue.