theibisrules
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VERY INTERESTING READ...
From another site and good read:
Kevin Bell posted 1 day ago Contributor
I have no blame for Golden as far as Cook is concerned. He did everything he could to swing him. It's just a shame that we lose out on another one of the, "Legends," of the sport down in Miami. As far as Treon Harris is concerned, that is inexcusable. I'm never one to second guess the staff's evaluations, especially Coley's, but I've seen Harris's tape and he is miles better than Alin Edouard and particularly Malk Rosier. If you are going to take 2 dual -threat QB's, I don't understand passing on the QB for the best team in the country in your own backyard and is considered legend there for some nobody recruit from Alabama. After Edouard decommitted, offering Harris at QB should have been a no brainer but instead the staff decided to offer him two days ago which is perceived as an insult. It would have been a perfect jolt for local recruiting and would have helped with our perception. At this point, the fact that Florida State offered him at QB is a good enough reason for us to do so as well, even if he ends up playing a different position in college.
Another issue concerning the state of recruiting is the conclusion of the Brandon Powell confusion. I don't know how Florida can come in the 11th hour one, offer Powell, an Early Enrollee, flip his commitment, and then get him to enroll the day after that. How that can possibly occur is beyond me.
What Butch did is far worse than what Golden did, but as you have said Chris, winning cures all. The question as to whether Golden can translate to wins is up in the air while Butch is perceived as guaranteed wins and with this uncertainty and lack of visible improvement on the field, that's why the fan base is so quick to beg for Butch to return. All of his past transgressions are willing to be forgotten since we needs wins and he can allegedly provide them. While Butch literally lied his way out the door, the perception is that Golden was about to do the same thing without so much as a phone call to the school president if he had actually been offered the Penn State job. He did have a bad week, but that bad week just opened ourselves up to more negative recruiting that we had just moved on from.
Yes we did go 9-4. Yes we are an entitled fan base. But to the recruits that watched the games this year, they don't feel sold on the product being put on the field. Auburn was coming off a 2-10 record and a head coaching change. Their expectations were much lower than ours, but just as realistic in their validity. Taking a miracle to beat Georgia and another miracle to be #1 two time defending champion and hated rival Alabama on the way to the national championship game is overachieving against stellar competition and very different from our underachieving against mediocre competition and eking out wins versus Wake, North Carolina, and Georgia Tech. While Malzahn inherited outstanding talent leftover from the Chizik era, this illustrates what lengths good coaching can take a team. Furthermore, Auburn was still able to beat the teams they were supposed to beat comfortably.
As far as you, "that's football," arguments, we are going to an area of, "what if." If Duke doesn't go down, I have no reason to believe that our record is any different than what it finished as. We were not going to beat Florida State that day if Jesus lined up on defense for us. The Virginia Tech loss was tied to the special team miscues, but that did not cause the defense to give up 42 points to a team who had the very average Logan Thomas look like a legend that day while the most VT would score against another D1 team that year was 29 in triple overtime against Marshall. In the Duke game, while this Duke was not the lovable pushover that we are used, 30 total points, 23 from the offense, should have been more than enough to beat Duke. This shows what good coaching and development can reap. For all the issues the NCAA caused us, we got much better recruits than Duke did and we got embarrassed by 18 points and gave up 48. Even having our Duke would not have changed the game's final outcome.
In regards to the NCAA issue being over, I admitted in another article on this website that it did poison this class to a certain degree and that's why we are missing on the 5 star Cooks and Sonys of the world. But we are in a good enough position that this dark past problem is not bothering us with middle tier recruits. I'm not expecting the conclusion of the NCAA saga to bring all the 2014 recruits running into our arms, but when it first happened we did see massive renewed interest and we used this interest effectively. The recent performance of the team and the confusion and alleged fraud on Golden's part is what has really thrown a kink in our recruiting.
We will be playing catch up with other schools for the younger recruits, but we have seasons coming up to almost instantly close the gap. Our 2015 has only one recruit, Charles Perry, who's tape screams future stud. But one recruit at this point is a problem. We should be somewhere in the 5-7 range this late in the game. On the flip side, our 2016 class has two recruits, better than most schools at this point, in Mark Walton and Chauncey Gardner who also show immense promise. Going 10-3 and winning the Coastal, a very realistic and fair expectation, would effectively remove the NCAA stain from all future classes and render the slightly developed relationships with other schools at that point miniscule and nearly moot.
In December when we had the 30 commits, I would have fully agreed with you. We are down to 26 recruits and usually we would have heard about high level recruits we in the running for at this point. Other than J. C. Jackson, I can't think of one. Golden's lack of his usual enthusiasm scares me in that he first missed on the job he truly wanted and now recruits cooled off on him due to his perceived lying. When he has closed strong the last 3 years, he's had a vigor about him and rumors about these supposed flips had been floating around. I'm not hearing any of that at this point and that is concerning.
I've been following the Valentine story closely and according to a well respected Hurricane website, as of January 9, 2013, Golden has not contacted Valentine at all and LSU has been straight blowing up his phone. It is concerning and I don't want to act like the sky is falling, but it is definitely teetering at this point. If he does recommit, it was a whole lot of fear for nothing and we will have dodged a major bullet and gotten arguably our most important recruit and. He will be a starter from Day One and that is apparent to anyone that has watched him. He was far and away the best player at the U. S. Army Bowl two weekends ago and he absolutely dominated top notch competition.
My, "should," comment was based on what I was hearing back when the class was 30 recruits. There were was word that the class was stellar and that just one or two more 4 star pieces were going to be added. At that time, Jackson was considered a heavy Miami lean but that changed the day after the Louisville game and when Florida State was Pasadena bound. My panic meter for the class is at a 4 right now simply because we are losing commits, some of the current commits are rumored to be on flimsy ground, and I haven't heard chatter of adding any names at this point in the game and that is not a good sign.
The recruiting class may not be exclusively the assistants, but they are easily the MVPs at this point with Golden's credibility and sincerity being called into question. Coley has earned his $500,000 salary and then some based exclusively on his recruiting accomplishments this season alone. Yearby, Kaaya, Smith (one of my favorite recruits this cycle. Very underrated.), Gray, Mayes, Rosier Thomas, Brady, and Jackson are all due to Coley. Darling, Owens, Herndon, McCray, and Young are all due Barrow. Harris and is due to Brown and he has been the secondary recruiter for many of the other commits. Something that is very telling is that all of these recruits and some of the ones I didn't name here Tweeted or somehow affirmed their dedication to Miami, not Golden, when he disappeared. If I took any positive out of this fiasco, it was that these young men are committed to the school, not the coach. He is just the icing on the cake to help pull them and to convince their parents to trust him with their son. As of right now, that strength of Golden is wounded severely right now. It is not beyond repair nor will it hamper him should the team meet expectations next year, but if they disappoint and frustrate again next year, but not to the point of getting Golden fired, like they did this year, this issue will stick with him and come back to nag him as he tries to pull in the 2015 class and the cycle may continue for the foreseeable future classes. It may be one week, but it put his credibility on the line to a certain extent and we were just getting back to full strength recruiting.
Golden was and is a phenomenal recruiter. I don't think the fire has been lost, but it has dimmed a little bit. He has yet to show his typical Golden energy that I admired in him. When the dead period is over, I'll be very curious to see how much direct recruiting he performs himself and if that fire that we love in him is back. But I will say this and this is my own personal opinion. He was a great recruiter at Temple, Boston College, Virginia, and Penn State. A big reason for that is he related to and identified with the high school talent in that area. He was pulling essentially whatever top recruits from the Northeast that he wanted. I think he still has a disconnect with the city of Miami, the community of Miami, and Miami football. He has done well recruiting due to having the correct assistants in place, fostering growing relationships with high school coaches, selling himself to parents, and his relentlessness. That will only go so far when it comes to getting the highest level local recruits. It's his X's and O's that will eventually hold him back. He runs a 3-4, 2 gap defense. Miami college and high school football is 4-3, 1 gap based. He approves of an enormous cushion to wide receivers. Miami college and high school football is very aggressive bump-and-run coverage. The offense is very reminiscent of old school Miami other than the zone blocking scheme. But if Golden expects to sell defensive recruits on a system they have never played in and aren't comfortable with than he is fooling himself. Watching Louisville act and play the way Miami should was the low point of the season as far as I'm concerned. They were showcasing the tough swagger that we are lacking and the word is starting to spread that Golden and Shalala are trying to curtail that attitude. If that happens, we will be consistently shooting ourselves in the foot. We brag and he brags about the school's championships achievements in football. We brag about the swagger of the team. He doesn't and if he has, he does not translate it into the team's on field attitude. The administration is probably thrilled with this, but it will poison our recruiting base and recruits, especially elite ones, will continue to leave in droves, now heading more and more to Florida State. How often do we see players for a different school put up the 305 while playing us? The University of Miami, for better or worse, is not identified with Miami city brand football anymore and it is a problem that may become a full blown cancer if this culture change isn't reversed. Seeing the kicker for Louisville punk Artie Burns and look to have more Miami attitude in him than our players do made me genuinely physically ill. This is one area I do not have faith in Golden. He may very well return us to our championship ways, but he will do it his way with his Penn State ideals, not Miami ideals.
His handling of Penn State irritated me more than it did most and I was already having my reservations regarding Golden. James Franklin will go to the NFL the fist chance he gets. That could be in a year, two years, who knows? Will we have to deal with this again? Al Golden is the head coach of the University of Miami football program, but I don't know how committed he is to us. His last public statements were insincere and he looked and sounded like he would rather be anywhere but in Miami. I hope he finishes strong like he usually does on the recruiting trail and I hope he is the guy to bring us more championships, but the fallout from his recent actions is far from settled. In one fell swoop, the team, the recruits, the administration, and the fans lost respect for him and it could have been much worse had he actually gotten the job offer he clearly wanted.
From another site and good read:
Kevin Bell posted 1 day ago Contributor
I have no blame for Golden as far as Cook is concerned. He did everything he could to swing him. It's just a shame that we lose out on another one of the, "Legends," of the sport down in Miami. As far as Treon Harris is concerned, that is inexcusable. I'm never one to second guess the staff's evaluations, especially Coley's, but I've seen Harris's tape and he is miles better than Alin Edouard and particularly Malk Rosier. If you are going to take 2 dual -threat QB's, I don't understand passing on the QB for the best team in the country in your own backyard and is considered legend there for some nobody recruit from Alabama. After Edouard decommitted, offering Harris at QB should have been a no brainer but instead the staff decided to offer him two days ago which is perceived as an insult. It would have been a perfect jolt for local recruiting and would have helped with our perception. At this point, the fact that Florida State offered him at QB is a good enough reason for us to do so as well, even if he ends up playing a different position in college.
Another issue concerning the state of recruiting is the conclusion of the Brandon Powell confusion. I don't know how Florida can come in the 11th hour one, offer Powell, an Early Enrollee, flip his commitment, and then get him to enroll the day after that. How that can possibly occur is beyond me.
What Butch did is far worse than what Golden did, but as you have said Chris, winning cures all. The question as to whether Golden can translate to wins is up in the air while Butch is perceived as guaranteed wins and with this uncertainty and lack of visible improvement on the field, that's why the fan base is so quick to beg for Butch to return. All of his past transgressions are willing to be forgotten since we needs wins and he can allegedly provide them. While Butch literally lied his way out the door, the perception is that Golden was about to do the same thing without so much as a phone call to the school president if he had actually been offered the Penn State job. He did have a bad week, but that bad week just opened ourselves up to more negative recruiting that we had just moved on from.
Yes we did go 9-4. Yes we are an entitled fan base. But to the recruits that watched the games this year, they don't feel sold on the product being put on the field. Auburn was coming off a 2-10 record and a head coaching change. Their expectations were much lower than ours, but just as realistic in their validity. Taking a miracle to beat Georgia and another miracle to be #1 two time defending champion and hated rival Alabama on the way to the national championship game is overachieving against stellar competition and very different from our underachieving against mediocre competition and eking out wins versus Wake, North Carolina, and Georgia Tech. While Malzahn inherited outstanding talent leftover from the Chizik era, this illustrates what lengths good coaching can take a team. Furthermore, Auburn was still able to beat the teams they were supposed to beat comfortably.
As far as you, "that's football," arguments, we are going to an area of, "what if." If Duke doesn't go down, I have no reason to believe that our record is any different than what it finished as. We were not going to beat Florida State that day if Jesus lined up on defense for us. The Virginia Tech loss was tied to the special team miscues, but that did not cause the defense to give up 42 points to a team who had the very average Logan Thomas look like a legend that day while the most VT would score against another D1 team that year was 29 in triple overtime against Marshall. In the Duke game, while this Duke was not the lovable pushover that we are used, 30 total points, 23 from the offense, should have been more than enough to beat Duke. This shows what good coaching and development can reap. For all the issues the NCAA caused us, we got much better recruits than Duke did and we got embarrassed by 18 points and gave up 48. Even having our Duke would not have changed the game's final outcome.
In regards to the NCAA issue being over, I admitted in another article on this website that it did poison this class to a certain degree and that's why we are missing on the 5 star Cooks and Sonys of the world. But we are in a good enough position that this dark past problem is not bothering us with middle tier recruits. I'm not expecting the conclusion of the NCAA saga to bring all the 2014 recruits running into our arms, but when it first happened we did see massive renewed interest and we used this interest effectively. The recent performance of the team and the confusion and alleged fraud on Golden's part is what has really thrown a kink in our recruiting.
We will be playing catch up with other schools for the younger recruits, but we have seasons coming up to almost instantly close the gap. Our 2015 has only one recruit, Charles Perry, who's tape screams future stud. But one recruit at this point is a problem. We should be somewhere in the 5-7 range this late in the game. On the flip side, our 2016 class has two recruits, better than most schools at this point, in Mark Walton and Chauncey Gardner who also show immense promise. Going 10-3 and winning the Coastal, a very realistic and fair expectation, would effectively remove the NCAA stain from all future classes and render the slightly developed relationships with other schools at that point miniscule and nearly moot.
In December when we had the 30 commits, I would have fully agreed with you. We are down to 26 recruits and usually we would have heard about high level recruits we in the running for at this point. Other than J. C. Jackson, I can't think of one. Golden's lack of his usual enthusiasm scares me in that he first missed on the job he truly wanted and now recruits cooled off on him due to his perceived lying. When he has closed strong the last 3 years, he's had a vigor about him and rumors about these supposed flips had been floating around. I'm not hearing any of that at this point and that is concerning.
I've been following the Valentine story closely and according to a well respected Hurricane website, as of January 9, 2013, Golden has not contacted Valentine at all and LSU has been straight blowing up his phone. It is concerning and I don't want to act like the sky is falling, but it is definitely teetering at this point. If he does recommit, it was a whole lot of fear for nothing and we will have dodged a major bullet and gotten arguably our most important recruit and. He will be a starter from Day One and that is apparent to anyone that has watched him. He was far and away the best player at the U. S. Army Bowl two weekends ago and he absolutely dominated top notch competition.
My, "should," comment was based on what I was hearing back when the class was 30 recruits. There were was word that the class was stellar and that just one or two more 4 star pieces were going to be added. At that time, Jackson was considered a heavy Miami lean but that changed the day after the Louisville game and when Florida State was Pasadena bound. My panic meter for the class is at a 4 right now simply because we are losing commits, some of the current commits are rumored to be on flimsy ground, and I haven't heard chatter of adding any names at this point in the game and that is not a good sign.
The recruiting class may not be exclusively the assistants, but they are easily the MVPs at this point with Golden's credibility and sincerity being called into question. Coley has earned his $500,000 salary and then some based exclusively on his recruiting accomplishments this season alone. Yearby, Kaaya, Smith (one of my favorite recruits this cycle. Very underrated.), Gray, Mayes, Rosier Thomas, Brady, and Jackson are all due to Coley. Darling, Owens, Herndon, McCray, and Young are all due Barrow. Harris and is due to Brown and he has been the secondary recruiter for many of the other commits. Something that is very telling is that all of these recruits and some of the ones I didn't name here Tweeted or somehow affirmed their dedication to Miami, not Golden, when he disappeared. If I took any positive out of this fiasco, it was that these young men are committed to the school, not the coach. He is just the icing on the cake to help pull them and to convince their parents to trust him with their son. As of right now, that strength of Golden is wounded severely right now. It is not beyond repair nor will it hamper him should the team meet expectations next year, but if they disappoint and frustrate again next year, but not to the point of getting Golden fired, like they did this year, this issue will stick with him and come back to nag him as he tries to pull in the 2015 class and the cycle may continue for the foreseeable future classes. It may be one week, but it put his credibility on the line to a certain extent and we were just getting back to full strength recruiting.
Golden was and is a phenomenal recruiter. I don't think the fire has been lost, but it has dimmed a little bit. He has yet to show his typical Golden energy that I admired in him. When the dead period is over, I'll be very curious to see how much direct recruiting he performs himself and if that fire that we love in him is back. But I will say this and this is my own personal opinion. He was a great recruiter at Temple, Boston College, Virginia, and Penn State. A big reason for that is he related to and identified with the high school talent in that area. He was pulling essentially whatever top recruits from the Northeast that he wanted. I think he still has a disconnect with the city of Miami, the community of Miami, and Miami football. He has done well recruiting due to having the correct assistants in place, fostering growing relationships with high school coaches, selling himself to parents, and his relentlessness. That will only go so far when it comes to getting the highest level local recruits. It's his X's and O's that will eventually hold him back. He runs a 3-4, 2 gap defense. Miami college and high school football is 4-3, 1 gap based. He approves of an enormous cushion to wide receivers. Miami college and high school football is very aggressive bump-and-run coverage. The offense is very reminiscent of old school Miami other than the zone blocking scheme. But if Golden expects to sell defensive recruits on a system they have never played in and aren't comfortable with than he is fooling himself. Watching Louisville act and play the way Miami should was the low point of the season as far as I'm concerned. They were showcasing the tough swagger that we are lacking and the word is starting to spread that Golden and Shalala are trying to curtail that attitude. If that happens, we will be consistently shooting ourselves in the foot. We brag and he brags about the school's championships achievements in football. We brag about the swagger of the team. He doesn't and if he has, he does not translate it into the team's on field attitude. The administration is probably thrilled with this, but it will poison our recruiting base and recruits, especially elite ones, will continue to leave in droves, now heading more and more to Florida State. How often do we see players for a different school put up the 305 while playing us? The University of Miami, for better or worse, is not identified with Miami city brand football anymore and it is a problem that may become a full blown cancer if this culture change isn't reversed. Seeing the kicker for Louisville punk Artie Burns and look to have more Miami attitude in him than our players do made me genuinely physically ill. This is one area I do not have faith in Golden. He may very well return us to our championship ways, but he will do it his way with his Penn State ideals, not Miami ideals.
His handling of Penn State irritated me more than it did most and I was already having my reservations regarding Golden. James Franklin will go to the NFL the fist chance he gets. That could be in a year, two years, who knows? Will we have to deal with this again? Al Golden is the head coach of the University of Miami football program, but I don't know how committed he is to us. His last public statements were insincere and he looked and sounded like he would rather be anywhere but in Miami. I hope he finishes strong like he usually does on the recruiting trail and I hope he is the guy to bring us more championships, but the fallout from his recent actions is far from settled. In one fell swoop, the team, the recruits, the administration, and the fans lost respect for him and it could have been much worse had he actually gotten the job offer he clearly wanted.
