Was not worse than Golden. That’s just demonstrably false.
I actually totally get your argument, and it’s fair. From my perspective tho, there’s not much difference between the two, if we only judge their time at Miami. But if you look at individual areas, in my mind Al wins.
Golden’s D was horrible, Richts O was at least as bad. But Mark was the OC and personally responsible for that disaster. Al couldn’t fire his friend, which is bad, but at least he wasn’t personally calling a prevent D on 1st and goal from the 3. For fvcks sake rosier even admitted the staff didn’t game plan!!!!!
Mark did give us some great D tho... I’ll give him that. I’m not sure who chose the defensive assistants, but they produced. But again, Marks O was far worse than Als D.
Special teams under Al was much better than under Mark. We saw 3 seasons of decline on that side of the ball. Not saying Al had All World ST, but his was better than Mark. By far.
QB development under Al was better. Kaaya went into his junior season being talked about as a potential high draft pick.... then Mark came along. Mark had 2 consensus top 10 QBs, and couldn’t get either one to complete a pass. We will see soon just how bad QB development was under richt.. I have a feeling Enos will have those guys humming. I won’t even mention that mark entrusted the most important position on the team to his very unqualified son. Oops.
OL production/development dropped each of marks seasons. Al/Kehoe gave us better, more prepared lines.
Marks best recruiting class was better than Al’s, but when mark retired he walked away from a recruiting disaster. So again... not much separates the two. That being said, Al recruited against a huge scandal his entire tenure. Would he have recruited better if his cloud wasn’t hanging over his head? Probably.
S&C was apparently a problem for both regimes. Maybe Mark gets the edge there tho? I’m not sure.
Marks D was solid, and via the insane number of turnovers it created he sat with a #2 ranking. Al I believe only got as high as #6 before it fell apart. But Mark fell apart too, losing 4 in a row and going on to post a losing record vs P5 teams after that week at #2. Mark had three 4 game losing streaks in three seasons, and lost to the same second rate teams Al would lose to. So, that nice run mark had was sandwiched by some **** poor and embarrassing football. The sad part is that had mark not been such a horrible OC, he could’ve had a nice run here. But Al might’ve also if he fired D’no.
Mark gets credit for beating FSU twice, while al never did. Of course, Al had to play elite NC level FSU teams with heisman QBing, whereas Mark went up against the worst FSU squads in memory.
Where Mark was clearly better than Al was off the field. Mark is a class guy and was a great ambassador for the U, he had some clout Al never did. Mark donated a mill, and walked away from many more. So yea, mark was a better person and better ambassador. But my statement was that he wasn’t a better coach.
So reasonable people can disagree over who the better coach was. I don’t think one was demonstrably better than the other. But the deciding factor for me was that mark was imploding after only 3 years. He had a locker room in disarray and a program free falling. Al at least held it together a little longer, and never really lost the locker room. Those players still liked Al at the end. I don’t know anyone on the team now, but it sure appears fhat he wasn’t all that popular.
@Peter Gibbons... here ya go man. Let’s hear your argument.