I'm asking that anyone in favor of Mario Cristobal to help me understand, in detail, how whatever perceived rewards from his hiring outweigh the potential risks.
Things I'd like to know:
What strengths did he exhibit as an FIU Head Coach?
How is he with situational football? How does he make decisions in-game, generally?
What's his history of hiring and firing?
What did he "learn" under Coach Saban?
How do Alabama fans feel about his actual football (not recruiting) contributions? What are the details in terms of productivity increase or decrease?
We can start there. We can then go on to compare him, as a risk, to alternatives. Hope to learn something.
My positives on Mario:
1) He did a decent job of bringing in rising young coaches, especially with regards to coordinators.
His first OC and DC were Coley and Galiano, respectively. Coley was there one year and his offense wasn't good.
But in fairness that was a transition year with a very bad team. His DC was Phil Galiano from Rutgers.
He sucked. After that he brought some pretty good coordinators from WVU (Bill Legg, who is now at Marshall),
Toledo (Satterfield, who is now the HC at Appalachian State) and from New Hampshire (Terry Cramsey, now
at Montana State). I thought those coordinators meshed well with the type of soFla talent he was recruiting.
On the DC side, he hired the LB coach from UCF, who eventually moved to MissSTate and is now the ghayturd's
DC, and he was followed by Todd Orlando, who is now the DC at UofHouston.
Again, good hires....and his other assistants of note who have done well is Alex Mirabal (OLine coach at Marshall)
and Frank Ponce (co-OC at Appy State).
2) Good recruiter....not much more to add to what has been already posted here and on other Cane boards.
Negatives:
Will all the good coaches he had in his staff, and with his recruiting ties to soFla, he really didn't dominate
the Sun Belt conference as one would expect. In fact, I think he got out-coached in some of the few games
I watched.
Overall: I would love him at UM, as an assistant coach. No way as HC.