I'm as frustrated as you or anyone else at the abortion that this season has been. Mario wasn't exactly my first choice but since he was going to be the guy and the fact that the school finally decided that they wanted to spend the money necessary to compete I accepted it and hoped that Mario had the vision to see that his preferred bro style ways were not conducive to success.
Everything hinged on Mario understanding that in this era of college football combined with our location and our football DNA that being offense centric was the only logical place to start. Our brand should be synonymous with exciting, keep you on the edge of your seat, pedal to the metal, high octane cutting edge football both on offense and defense. The type of style that high school players excitedly talk about between classes, after school and on social media. It's who we are. We should be running the kind of offense that Tennessee fans are envious of not visa versa and miss me with the garbage takes about their offense being shut down vs UGA(The defending national champions with an elite star studded defense plus the fact that this is Huepels 2nd year at Tenn and they are 8-1).
Start with being offense centric and with elite level recruiting in time we will have the type of elite level defense that UGA uses to shut down potent offensive attacks. This was my vision for what the plan should have been when Mario was hired. Clearly I overestimated the man's intelligence. I knew that he was not a good game day coach but I was completely blindsided by how absolutely terrible he actually is.
Right after Mario was hired while everyone was still in the honeymoon swooning phase, the staff hiring began(Well sort of). It was obvious something was off when most of the offensive staff was in place well before an OC was hired. It was even stranger not having either coordinator in place for what seemed to be forever. The thing is that everytime anyone asked questions they were immediately shut up by the board edition of the Columbus Mafia. People were accused of being toxic and not being true fans etc....Imagine the irony now that the clown show on the field has been directly linked to the staff and the amateurish way that it was put together with the emphasis on big splash names at the expense of good chemistry.
So now that this season has completely gone to **** and we have had what basically boils down to a full fledged players mutiny which came to an embarrassing head on Saturday night at home vs out biggest rival where do we go from here? What's the answer? Clearly the toxic elements of this staff need to be cut out but there are also many players who need to be shown the door for obvious reasons. That's just the beginning unfortunately. Like a very wise man recently said, you don't get to this point with the team looking as awful as it has without the head coach being responsible. Mario Cristobal has a lot to answer for but he isn't going anywhere anytime soon so how do we salvage this situation and how do we make it work?
IMO, the only way this works going forward is for Rad, Zo and Mario to confront the fact that Mario cannot be the hands on micromanaging HC. The only way forward is for Mario to take on a CEO role where he is the face of the program who focuses on recruiting and building relationships and anything else related to building the programs foundation that he excels at. It is absolutely imperative that both coordinators hires are home runs. First we need to identify either a bright young OC who runs a specific system(
@Liberty City El has a great list) or a great offensive mind with HC experience(Mullen, Petrino, Sumlin). Whoever it is, we need to run an exciting uptempo spread type system(I don't care which variety) that kids will be excited to be in. Something that gets the fans excited. Something that we say "Now that is Miami football!). We need to do the same thing on the defensive side of the ball then recruit, recruit and recruit some more.
It is very important to have at least one of the coordinators have HC experience because this is what will serve as a firewall against Mario's garbage game day decisions. It's also very important to have Mario clearly understand that his preferred way of doing things is over and done and that his coordinators are to have complete autonomy. It just infuriates me to think that Mario saw what we were doing under Lashlee and how TVD looked in that system and he still had the arrogance or sheer stupidity to waste all of that time and energy to hire an OC like Gattis and install an offense that is completely contrary to what your players excel at.
