A lot of hedging and excuse making in this thread.
Bama and UGA taking coaches from the staff immediately after the opening on their staff. Oregon and LSU completed their staff, inclusive of NFL hires.
And with kids getting a free transfer without sitting out, allowing coaches to finish their signing classes doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe I missed the post where the “insiders” already did so … But can we just be honest and accept that the plans for the staff Cristobal had when he took the job have fallen through, and he’s figuring out a new plan?
This is cold, hard truth, but I'll put it out there. Because once you accept that Mario has missed on a bunch of top candidates then you have to ask yourself: why? And that's a question many people don't want to ask themselves because there's a number of rather obvious and rational reasons that many people simply don't want to accept, such as:
(1) Maybe
the money is not as much as we thought. Or maybe it's much more than we previously had, but still not enough to keep TRob and BMAC in Miami. Maybe it's also not enough to convince a guy like Briles to move his family for the 5 time in as many years.
(2)
Desirability of the job: posters could be overrating how desirable it is to work as a position coach or coordinator at Miami. Many coaches might perceive it as a risky job and not a job that'll propel their careers forward.
(3)
Mario's clout: Maybe Mario doesn't have the clout and reputation in the couching industry that we thought he had.
(4)
Mario's judgment: why did he spend so much time on people that eventually turned us down? Why couldn't he see the writing on the wall? Why didn't he have backups in place?
My own take is that a lot of posters on here are overrating the desirability of our open jobs. We don't have a great 15-year track record. Most of our coordinators and position coaches end up fired, not promoted. And while we have a lot of money, we probably don't have enough money to justify taking the risk and moving across the country.
Take a guy like Belk. He's a fast-riser. He crushed it in year 1 as a playcaller and his name is picking up steam publicly and in coaching circles. Now he's presented with an opportunity to go to Miami, a place where DCs have produced, on average, pedestrian defenses for the last 10 or so years. Risk it at Miami? Or stay at Houston, where he has a talent advantage relative to his peers and he's already shown he can produce an elite defense? Another elite defense at Houston will almost assuredly land him a DC job at a university with a much better history of producing good defenses over the last 15 years... and maybe even a G5 coaching job.
Then there's the money. Houston was already paying him 1M a year and is allegedly "doing everything they can" to keep him at Houston, which I assume means another pay raise. So yeah maybe we can offer for a few hundred thousands dollars more than Houston, but for a fast-riser like Belk, who's looking at both jobs as a stepping-stone..is a few hundred thousand dollars extra that important? Probably not enough to swing it in our direction.
That's why I don't blame Mario for the misses (I do blame him for the slowness). He's fighting against 15 years of mediocrity. Our reputation is battered. If he starts signing annual top-10 recruiting classes (which I think he will) and he starts consistently winning the Coastal/10+ games a year, then the next time we have a coaching search, we won't have to move down to our B-rated and C-rated candidates.
