Crazy to think we did this twice with Randy and Manny.
Feels like two very different situations despite both being first-time HCs. Randy was way more sensible than Manny.
Randy was the first former player hired, and first HC who grew up in the state of Florida since the early 1970s, first HC with professional playing-experience since Lou Saban, and was from the Jimmy Johnson ‘coaching tree’ just like Butch Davis. His defenses were ranked top 10; 5 outta the past 6 seasons. He was a bridge to the distant past and the more recent, more successful past.
Unlike Randy, Manny had been fired from a high-profile job. That Texas stint was completely ignored when he was hired. We saw that side of Diaz in the losses to Notre Dame, Clemson, and Wisconsin (twice). That second Wisconsin loss is important, because it was the same staff in both games whilst the second team was much worse (13-1 compared to 8-5); yet, even with the extra familiarity—we lost by 25 more points than the previous year.
One of the reasons that happened is because Diaz is only good at game planning and adjustments at halftime; cannot adjust on the fly. Manny isn’t good at making guys better day by day thru practice. He cared about media perception thinking highly of him than actually being elite at his job.
Besides the on-field football aspects, he was awful at recruiting, the rhetoric, passion, and persuasion required, and the actual evaluations too which is even more important & harder to acquire. Can only give him credit for Greg Rousseau.
We were actually in a much better shape when Richt stepped down compared to when he took the job. Once Golden’s recruits left, the inaccuracies and inattentiveness of Diaz’s recruiting/development really showed itself in year 3 with that 35 to 3 loss to Wisconsin. For us to hire the DC presiding over that beatdown was insanity.
Diaz benefitted greatly from Golden’s and Dorito’s recruiting — Sheldrick Redwine, all three of the ‘16 LBs were committed before he took the job, as was Joe Jackson, Michael Jackson, Richard McIntosh, Kendrick Norton, Jaquan Johnson, Chad Thomas, Anthony Moten, Trent Harris, and Corn Elder — they left him real guys there. Richt also brought in an elite DLine coach that covered up some of Diaz’s flaws.
Coming off our best season in over a dozen years, 2017, Diaz didn’t sign one linebacker in the class of 2018. Then less than a year later we hired him to be our head coach lmao.
With hindsight, we now know that Manny’s neglectful recruiting and awful development created an enormous amount of problems — lack of toughness, poor attention to detail, lowered standards, etc — for Mack Brown and James Franklin as well who were both effectively fired within two years of Diaz leaving. At the time, Mack Brown’s falloff might have been easier prescribed to Muschamp leaving and old age.
Both weren’t right for the job, but Diaz was way worse of a choice imo.
