Fair point. As far as I can tell, the push for Applewhite came from a regent and few boosters who thought they knew how to pick a coach. Note: I am not talking about Tilman. Hunter was either on board, or did little to assert himself to the contrary.
Fact is, before Greg Ward, Applewhite had never coordinated a great offense. He was no genius at offensive football. To make matters worse, he had been pushed out at Texas and Alabama, was out of football before Herman hired him, and screwed a trainer at a bowl game.
Applewhite’s firing may have been a personality thing too. I’m not saying we should have kept him. After the Army debacle, he’s lucky to have made it out of town. But if he had beaten Army or at least hung tough, would he have been let go? Idk.
If a school’s major donor and chairman of the board likes someone else, your days are numbered unless you’re undefeated or maybe one or two losses to very good, i.e. ranked, teams and winning bowl games. But even Tillman can only shield CDH for so long if things don’t improve over the next couple of years.
He owns a Chic-Fil-A franchise and they are booming, even during the pandemic. There is always a line and the lines are always fast moving thanks to the most efficient ordering, delivering system in the fast food industry. As much as I like Tony and how good his recruiting is, he is entrenched in his new career.
IMO, once Briles left, you had to fire Applewhite.
He had already fired his defensive coordinator.
So, essentially, he had to hire both coordinators and those guys probably would have wanted a say in their assistants. Hence, we would have been starting with a very new staff.
Which begs the question: Who would leave their job or security and move to Houston for a job that was likely only going to last another year? Maybe some up and comer would have taken a chance–not a lot to lose. But anybody with any sort of experience wasn’t coming here.
right now, we are in the bottom out year of the rebuilding process, which is NOT FUN! Next year we will improve, hopefully to a .500 or winning record, and in 2022, better still to hopefully a contender in year 4 of the rebuilding plan. Patience must be our virtue here. CDH inherited a deceptively bad situation caused by recruiting failures for multiple years in a row.
I think we’ll be better than .500 next year . This is assuming that majority of the upperclassmen return and take advantage of the janky year we have. 2022 is scary to me because we could have very few upperclassmen because this team is top heavy. I think 2023 will be the year because his first class will all be Jrs. at least!
But you also have to give Tilman credit for the Herman hire and keeping Sampson around.
Tilman has to own the Major hire. It seemed questionable (though not terrible) at the time. Firing Major to hire Dana obviously happened because of Tilman but 95+% of Coog fans and most of the media sans Pete Thamel thought it was a great hire. I wouldn’t really say it’s at all reasonable to blame Tilman for being Jerry Jones-ish if this continues to go poorly. Like if UT fires Herman and gets Meyer or by some miracle gets Saban and the move flops, it wouldn’t be fair to say whoever in the AD and amongst the UT donors who made that happen blew it.
His first Class was not a good signing class. So why all sudden is 2023 going to significantly make things better. I think if his recruiting was doing better, then us non CDH believers would have some optimism. Just not there at moment, on the field or on recruiting grounds.
How do you know his first class was not good? Have you seen any of those players play as Jrs. or Seniors? Please stop. Again, if we’re going off of recruiting rankings only, then we need to be mindful of the 2 and lower 3 star players who are currently leading this team. Numbers don’t make a recruit.
I honestly don’t have the energy to rehash this over and over again. The good thing about Coogfans is almost everything is searchable. Especially threads refuting recruiting sites. I’ll do my best to make it short.
Overall class rank determined by recruiting services is not always indicative of talent of the cycle. Coaches are ultimately responsible for doing their evals and not relying on Joe Blow at 247 sports to show up to camps and “scout”. The process is ongoing.
With that understood, and knowing that players don’t maximize their playing ability until they are juniors or seniors, we can’t say his first recruiting class was bad until we see them at that maturity level. Some are late bloomers, others peak 1st year and regress.
The only other option is to look at needs. Did CDH address needs in his first recruiting class? For the most part…yes. Did Herman have a highy ranked recruiting class his first year? Yes? Did Herman address needs? No. Did Herman ever fill all needs? No. Did Applewhite? No.
But hey, keep thinking you’re onto something by reading some arbitrary ranking. BYU whose team talent is a fraction of ours(according to recruiting sites), and maturity level, dwarfs that of our players’, sends their regards.
It’s funny we are having very similar conversations on the WVU message boards, but instead of blaming Applewhite for our issues it’s Dana.
Dana left us in a very bad spot with the O line talent and QBs when he left. Personally I also think his reliance on JUCOs and transfers destroys depth over a period of time. You’re pretty much screwed if you miss on a transfer or the JUCO doesn’t pan out. This is especially true at QB.
Dana never developed a HS QB his entire time at WVU and used only transfers and jucos. We are currently starting a QB transfer from Bowling Green we had to scramble and get. If anything will sink you guys it will be this. Dana HAS to have a good QB to be successful.
Well hopefully that QB is Massoud or Kopp. Heck, hopefully it’s both! Lol Somebody who also relies on transfers and JUCOs is Dan Mullen but I think he’s able to make up for that being an elite offensive mind. He’s really really good and has Florida trending in the right direction rather quickly.
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, that u refuse to swallow!! 
