He was very young looking when he first entered college. Looked like Opie.
The newest Spider-Man looks like him.
I remember always feeling uneasy about our defense when Gibbs was here. The opposing offenses would move up and down the field with ease and then suddenly…boom!..a turnover. I found that to be a little bit flukey.
But to his credit, his defenses were able to force the timely turnovers. However, if we don’t force the turnovers, I wouldn’t expect different results than what you’ve seen from No D.
Fair enough. But Tech did seem to give up a lot of points. And most are pointing to the offense they ran making it difficult not to. I see similarities in the situations is all. I am onboard if they hire Gibbs and will hope for “enough improvement” to mean a better season next year.
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Did you not watch any UH defense prior to Gibbs? Like, we weren’t perfect, but it was night and day over any UH defense I’d seen the decade plus prior.
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And I do hope the school looks at other candidates beside Gibbs, as I think zeroing in immediately on 1 candidate sells us short.
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Gibbs knows HTOWN, he knows the talent and how to run a defense.
The going was tough at Tech, hard to recruit to Lubbock but their D
was the best it has been in a while. Nobody in B12 plays D.
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Remember, ANYONE would be a step up from what we just had for the last two years. No way to confirm, but I believe that we would have one at least 1-2 more games this and last season with Gibbs. Just a thought. And 1-2 more games is a game changer.
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Gibbs defense looks bad statistically at Tech because of the teams they played.
Offensive rank of opponents in 2018:
#1 Oklahoma
#7 Houston
#8 West Virginia
#9 Ole Miss
#10 Oklahoma State
#39 Baylor
#59 Texas
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I keep reading that it’s hard to recruit to Lubbock. Athletes are not selecting the city, they are selecting the school and Tech is a very nice school. Football players have very little social time. It’s classes, study, weight room, football practice, repeatedly every day. Going out into the city is not going to happen until the team has a bye week.
A lot of these colleges are in these small towns where there is nothing to do and I think they get some good recruits. I cannot believe that athletes do not want to go to Tech because it is in Lubbock, the home of tumbleweeds.
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I don’t know Ron. it is difficult to recruit to places like Lubbock because once a kid gets there and looks around, all he sees is Lubbock. There are plenty of other college towns that are a lot nicer than Lubbock that at least provide a nice environment.
I do believe that recruits 3* and above look for, not in the particular order:
The coach
Type of offense/defense
P5/P6
Decent bowl chances
TV time
Will Mom be able to watch in person/how far from home
Chance for a conference championship
Chance at a MNC
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In season, football players are busy, but they have to be at the school all year and the season is only (counting summer) about half of that. They have plenty of time, otherwise to hang out and do other things.
Some college towns are just a short drive from bigger cities. College Station isn’t much (or it didn’t used to be), but is just a short hop to Houston. Penn State is just down the road from Philly and Pittsburgh, even Waco is situated between Austin and Dallas. Lubbock is literally in the middle of nowhere; there is no short drive to anywhere, you’re basically in Lubbock. The city has gotten better recently, and Tech has always been a good-looking school, but it isn’t a large city with all the city amenities and Tech doesn’t have the academic credentials or the athletic history to pull kids for that reason.
They’d do well to get out from Horn’s shadow, but the powers that be are too afraid to do so as they saw what happened to Houston, SMU, Rice, and TCU.
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The schizophrenia on Gibbs here is a little bit mind boggling. In the event he comes back here I think there are some positives and negatives.
The first thing to consider is does he get the staff he needs to implement the philosophy that he wants. As it stands, the majority of our current staff will be back. Will that work with him?
We have a different offenses than what we did the last time he was here. Even though Leavine said we would run the same offense, we are running much faster offense and conceptionally different from what we had. As we have seen, up-tempo offenses have affected the overall numbers of his defense. I think with these types of offenses, it is going to be very hard for a defensive coordinator to keep opponents around 20 points a game. It honestly looks like 30 points a game is what you would have to hope for to be successful.
That being said, let’s think about some of the positives. He has had multiple years now working with an up-tempo team to where maybe he has learned a little more and felt like there are things that he can improve on.
He will be coming to a city where he can actually recruit better players and potentially improve things.
He can bring back turnover Tuesdays and hopefully increase the amount of turnovers and in turn help our offense.
Lastly and to me one of the biggest things that I can say about Gibbs versus Mark was that Gibbs would constantly make adjustments. We seldom if ever saw any defensive adjustments the last two years. I would rather have a guy make adjustments and it not work than have something that’s not working and keep sticking to the same thing.
I’m not saying Gibbs is our guy and he is the best person out there, but I’m also saying that he’s not the worst person for us. There’s a lot of familiarity on multiple levels that could provide some kind of benefit. Ultimately it may be a push with the positives and negatives that we’re getting. We’ll see what happens.
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Man I’d love to know the names of the the other candidates that were interviewed. That way we can easily compare!
I thought Stewart started the UH defense renaissance and it improved under Gibbs and Orlando Year 1. I thought Orlando Year 2 was closer to Gibbs. But otherwise I agree with your post
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Briles’ last two defenses at UH weren’t bad.
Sure, but I wouldn’t put them on the same level as Gibbs’ defenses.
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You really think Gibbs defenses were better than Orlando’s? I felt with Gibbs that stopping the run was a weakness. Orlando was great at that in 2015 and 2016.
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Agree with that.
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gibbs defnse was great at stopping the run…
both focused on stopping the run, the difference between the 2 is gibbs also focused on turnovers and Orlando focused on sacks
orlado tried to stop the passes by hitting the qb, even by DB…and gibbs tried to stop the pass by having db undercut routes
I dunno Gibbs doesnt pass the eye test that Orlando did for me when it came to that. Good physical running teams shredded us when we played them. From my memory BYU twice, Vanderblit, and PItt.
Good point about the sacks btw