UCF will embarrass us at their place, gonna get blown out on the road, u watch and see
1 Like
This is a rip off the band-aid season.
CBY knew how to use a redshirt program. There are players playing this year who will not next year due to graduation, but some due to redshirting.
To his credit, CDH found an unintended consequence of the redshirt rule and is exploiting it. We are getting some players this year who may not or are not ready to play Div 1 FB, but they are getting game experience and could very well sit out next year as redshirts.
What we have seen after a few years is the Levine wasn’t as bad as many thought, he could recruit. Vermin wasn’t as good as everyone thought, he didn’t recruit as well as we thought and he took a recruiting class with him as well as burning redshirts for our current team. CMA? Right now, it looks like it was bad, real bad. In two years, we will have a much better idea.
Am I happy with the season right now? No. I hope we make a bowl, if for no other reason, that we will get a couple extra weeks of practice. What CDH is trying to do is build a foundation. It’s more difficult than what the Cubs or Astros did because we have a constant rate of turnover. The redshirt program is the beginning of the foundation, but even it will take some time. This year’s redshirts are transfers and players who have a short time left before their eligibility is gone. Next year’s redshirts will be some transfers, but most are out ther playing this year.
2 Likes
No they won’t. They’ll get ran over like they allowed Pitt to do. They’re a ghost of who they used to be.
Our team was more disciplined, made better adjustments, and played harder in the 2nd half than Cincy. You tear down our coaching staff, but Fickell looked like a terrible coach yesterday with all the pre snap penalties, more wide open receivers than our bad secondary, no adjustments to our defense in the 2nd half. They knew we were going to run the ball a lot and Porter averaged 6.7 yards per carry. The TD drive to bring it down to 5 was great play calling (that TD should have tied it up or took the lead if it wasn’t for the PF call). There are still some issues (clock management, personnel), but find any staff who doesn’t have issues. Seeing the effort and buy in from players the last two games after the redshirt decision shows this staff has things under control and knows what they are doing.
11 Likes
Have to disagree with almost all of OP. Of course, we need to support our players - they’re Coogs. But, I invite you to go back and watch this year’s games and take a look at certain aspects specifically.
On thr air raid being plug and play…a tenet of the air raid is horizontal passing as a set up. King doesn’t have that skill. Observe his drop, arm strength, and location on screen passes and short passes at or outside the numbers. It is extremely poor. Our extremely talented overall starting QB did not possess the most fundamental skill in the current coach’s system.
Our safety play and coaching is absolutely atrocious, and has been since the first snap, both in the running and passing game. If I was an opposing OC, I’d just decide Monday to throw crossing route concepts at #2 all game long and take the rest of the week off with a win assured after watching that film.
I think that anyone who can’t see this our least talented team top to bottom since 0-11 is looking through extreme rose-colored glasses. We only have 1-2 players on offense and defense that would have gotten regular snaps for us over the past decade.
Sticking to what I said at the beginning of the season - it will take absolutely perfect play and coaching for us to win any d1 games this year. We just don’t have the talent.
One positive is that the defense has improved overall throughout the year. They are playing with more confidence in the system. The safeties have improved vs the run, but are still an extremely easy target for any competent OC in the passing game. See the wheel route TD from yesterday as a prime example. Both bite to nothing on the short right and leave the entire deep zone wide open from sideline to sideline. Several other instances of this yesterday - lucky that Cinci QB had trouble going through progressions.
State of the program mid season is pretty simple…Dana needs to recruit his ass off at every position on the field except nickel back and Kind needs to gain that outside throw, or it’s going to be a lot more of the same next year
1 Like
The coaches are setting the tone for the program and it has to be that way. If you don’t practice and play hard, you don’t play.
I have been impressed with the the physical play of the defense. You can see flashes of a physical, attacking defense.
I would rather have a rough year this year and rebuild the program for success going forward than have 2-3 seasons of 7-5 or 6-6.
We were in a tough game yesterday until the 4th quarter against a solid team in year 3 under Fickell. Fickell was 4-8 his first year at Cinci and then had a great second year. If you look at the games to date, most of the coaches we have played have had a few years to recruit their players and implement their scheme. We are taking our lumps now, but hopefully get to give them out going forward.
2 Likes
With all of our issues, the game was still winnable in the 4th qtr.
I liked that we were able to flush the QB from the pocket on numerous occasions…unfortunately, we had no one available to run him down when we did flush him. He killed us with his scrambles in the 4th qtr.
Reality is that Cincy is one of the better teams in the AAC this year. There are no great teams in our league this year.
3 Likes
The state of our Offense is this:
To run The Art Briles Offense you need Kolb, RG!!!, etc.
To run The Air Raid you need Case Keenum.
To operate The RPO offense you need Ward/King.
We are back to The Air Raid and have absolutely no one at even 1/2 of Keenum’s level.
Yeoman’s Veer Offense really became a consistent killer when he had Gary Mullins/D.C. Nobles/Danny Davis. Masters of The Veer.
Holgs obviously has no such QB on his roster. Recruiting, and only recruiting, can solve this issue.
I see Herman and Applewhite as amongst the biggest recruiting failures in Coog history.
3 Likes
I have said this all along with all the coaching changes and bad recruiting its a wonder it took us this long for the bottom to fall out of the team.
1 Like
We’ve been lucky to have well above average QB play, for the most part, for quite a few years. Covers up a lot of the issues.
4 Likes
Mobile athletic QB’s that made something out of nothing caused us not to realize how bad we were up front.
5 Likes
Excellent points PWRCOOG.I write it again CDH Winter comments were a precusor to this season. This is how applesauce and vhermin were damaging to our program.
vhermin never intended to stay with us. To his credit he evaluated well the talent that we had.
How did he evaluate that talent?
He did through his & applesauce State’s H.S. connections. Every good program in the Nation keeps a “library” of H.S. players. Yes friends that is scouting. That is why he jumped on the job.
Now we have to ask this fundamental question.
Why did our stellar recruiting all of a sudden stop?
I will let you interpret this question any which way you want.
You all remember why applesauce was retained.
You all remember the difficulties and terrible hires that applesauce made.
Were the last two years just a coincidence? You decide.
I will add a final point.
How was Tony Levine able to recruit so well when our last two H.C’s could not?
Which coaching candidate would have us with a better record now?
In a nutshell, David Gibbs and Zach Spavital. Dana tried to get Zach here but went to work with his brother at Texas State
Good points. When you have QB’s like Ward and King, it makes an OC look brilliant, which gave us Applewhite and he is by no means an OC. Certainly not a HC.
With all due respect—the last time we saw the available talent on the UH roster in full display under the Applewhite/Briles staff the team was getting whipped 70-14 in an embarrassing loss to Army. We were not even remotely competitive.
In 2018, the team roared out to a 7-1 record, but those wins came against Rice (2-11), Arizona (5-7), TSU (2-9), Tulsa (3-9), ECU (3-9), Navy (3-10), USF (7-6), Tulane (7-6). The team lost 4 of their last 5 games last year down the stretch when faced with a back half schedule where only one opponent had a losing record. Of our first 8 games in 2018, only two were against teams with winning records (and we split those games losing one to Tech and winning one on a prayer Hail Mary 4th down play vs USF).
Contrast that with this year. In 2019, only two of our first 6 games were against teams with losing records. Surprise! Surprise! Our two wins this year came against those two teams with losing records.
We looked significantly better last year because we played a much much softer schedule. Worse yet, over our next 6 games, only 2 have losing records.
In other words, unlike last year, there isnt an “easy” half to this years schedule. Its pretty much all difficult and challenging. We could be an improved team in 2019 and still end up with a worse record. My guess is we were not as good as our record indicated last year and we are not as bad as our record indicates this year.
6 Likes
I would submit that the bottom fell out on November 3rd of last year, when we lost to SMU by two TDs in Dallas. Since then we have beaten Tulane (last year), PVAMU, and North Texas. And lost 7 other games.
Three different head coaches in four years is the root cause of this flameout.
4 Likes
I’ve given up trying to figure out this team and its coaches for 2019. Something is off both on the field and the sidelines. That said, one guys is getting paid a lot of money to re-load for 2020, when everyone was told that he was here to win some f’ng games. He better be 14-0 in 2020 after this ‘Charlie Foxtrot’ of a season.
1 Like
The fact is, the all important QB position has been very unstable…A top line starter decides to redshirt after 4 games, and his back up cant even play one full game before getting an injury serious enough that it is going to seriously hamper him the rest of this year! Having normal expectations for this season is not realistic…If we play as hard as we can, what ever happens will satisfy me…I think NEXT season is the big turn around…
Coaches have already done a fine job getting that defense turned around…Everything will come together next year…
2 Likes
Was offered and accepted
1 Like