A post mortem discussion of the cjs era

[Ghostbuster]

23 hours ago, puc86 said:

Most of these aren’t exactly what I was looking for, 

(and no it’s absolutely not Covid and that’s a horrible answer that flies in the face of every team facing that hardship and plenty of people managing to find success in the face of a new challenge).

Well first off if you're looking for an answer you already agree with it means you suffer from confirmation bias.

Second COVID was not my *sole* answer and even as a partial explanation for the lack of on field success it is not "horrible" as you said.  Here's the facts:

- August 12 2020 TBTimes article says: Tuesday morning’s workout (in shorts, helmets and shoulder pads) was the team’s first in any kind of pads since Scott took over.

- September 12 2020 was the first game.

(Edit I can't get normal text font back after pasting from times article..ugggh)

So no practice, no seeing what the players can do until 1 month prior to your first game.  Yes everyone dealt with COVID, but only the new hires in that off-season were held back by having just a single month to evaluate their *entire team* in person.  

If you fail to acknowledge that coaches need to see their players actually practice, and all new hires for 2020 would have had less time (compared to coaches who had seen returning players before)...then that is another bias you are simply refusing to acknowledge. 

Now it's not a blank check for 3 years of terrible results.  But you asked how did it go so wrong and my entire thesis is that a first time head coach was a handicap in and of itself ; AND THEN there were multiple external factors that challenged him and his lack of experience; AND THEN there was his awful game day prep, adjustments, time management, 4th down elections, etc etc.  

You put it all together and you have 1 FBS win in 3 years.

Or you can just see the word "COVID", get triggered and say "everyone dealt with it equally" (which is wrong) and end up wondering why you can't explain the historically bad results.

Edited November 7, 2022 by Ghostbuster

[puc86]

1 hour ago, Ghostbuster said:

Well first off if you're looking for an answer you already agree with it means you suffer from confirmation bias.

Second COVID was not my *sole* answer and even as a partial explanation for the lack of on field success it is not "horrible" as you said.  Here's the facts:

- August 12 2020 TBTimes article says: Tuesday morning’s workout (in shorts, helmets and shoulder pads) was the team’s first in any kind of pads since Scott took over.

- September 12 2020 was the first game.

(Edit I can't get normal text font back after pasting from times article..ugggh)

So no practice, no seeing what the players can do until 1 month prior to your first game.  Yes everyone dealt with COVID, but only the new hires in that off-season were held back by having just a single month to evaluate their *entire team* in person.  

If you fail to acknowledge that coaches need to see their players actually practice, and all new hires for 2020 would have had less time (compared to coaches who had seen returning players before)...then that is another bias you are simply refusing to acknowledge. 

Now it's not a blank check for 3 years of terrible results.  But you asked how did it go so wrong and my entire thesis is that a first time head coach was a handicap in and of itself ; AND THEN there were multiple external factors that challenged him and his lack of experience; AND THEN there was his awful game day prep, adjustments, time management, 4th down elections, etc etc.  

You put it all together and you have 1 FBS win in 3 years.

Or you can just see the word "COVID", get triggered and say "everyone dealt with it equally" (which is wrong) and end up wondering why you can't explain the historically bad results.

 

Here is one from San Antonio where it clearly lays out that in March their new coach had zero minutes of any kind of practice and would continue to have nothing for the entire spring as all athletics were suspended 

The timeline of alleged exposure, events following Josh Primo

---

Spurs reportedly knew 10 months about Primo's actions.

All fall camps begin in August, here is where you can learn their early woes 

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/news/2020/11/06/utsa-postpones-game-due-to-covid-19.html

Here is where you can learn the coach missed the lead into the bowl game because of Covid

UTSA head football coach tests positive for COVID-19 ahead of Saturday bowl game

---

The University of Texas at San Antonio confirmed that head football coach Jeff Traylor has tested positive for COVID-19 ahead of the Roadrunner’s Saturday bowl game.

They were the same 4-8 going into this coaches first year and made a bowl game.

Here is where you can learn that CJS got as much or more spring practice than most teams

https://www.si.com/college/2020/05/08/college-football-spring-practice-coronavirus

Most importantly not more than the other Jeff that started with a 4-8 team in his first year and made a bowl game. Also UConn shut the season down replaced their coach and have now rebounded better than CJS but please continue 

[Rocky Style]

13 minutes ago, puc86 said:

Here is where you can learn the coach missed the lead into the bowl game because of Covid

The thing about the Covid excuse was that it was always real, but within a certain level of tolerance.  I was saying all along this year that all we needed to do was put down some improvement, have some optimistic outlook for next year, and he would be good.  Hell we would have been hyped.  When it was starting to not look that way, I was pretty sure MK was going to pull his card in spite of "not publicly" saying things.  

The covid excuse was not an automatic year 3 deferral, but I think we would have lowered our year 3 expectations collectively if there was some progress.

[BullyPulpit]

On 11/6/2022 at 11:41 AM, puc86 said:

If you still think there is a chance of success with more time this is not the discussion for you, the premise is he has failed and it is over ( I envy your outlook and still hope you are right but don’t want to polarize the discussion). I feel we have not been able to have an honest discussion about what has went wrong because everyone had to be too intrenched in the bigger picture of if they are overall right on whether we could or would be successful with CJS. CJS is not my kind of person so he never resonated with me like he did with many so I had a biased take on him from the beginning. 
 

I did not care for his onboarding approach, his hiring approach, most anything he said about philosophy and in the first game I felt we looked far worse than at any moment of the ccs era. Since my initial biases kept confirming themselves by my estimation, I continued to never give him a shot and to see negative in everything that occurred. This only caused mostly negative discussions of I’m right and you are wrong and since the record continued to confirm my take there really was no reason to attempt to look at anything anyone else was seeing as it never translated into anything so I felt just and vindicated. 
 

So while I do believe when things are bad and you are improving things those things do present themselves in tangible ways sooner than later, I also believe somethings are pure dumb luck and that some issues that present themselves later negatively impact positive things that could have actually been happening but then were unfortunately derailed. So my question is if you have now come to the conclusion that things aren’t going to work out, what do you think went wrong and when because it’s probably unlikely that the issue actually presented itself at the very beginning and I just got “lucky” based on my personal biases.

 

While I wouldn't say that I was an absolute CJS apologist, I did defend him getting this season to show what he could do, as I didn't think you could really hold him entirely accountable for the 2020 COVID season debacle. I think that is where things went terribly wrong right out of the gates. Not being able to build a rapport with players was a problem. Not being able to conduct normal practices was a problem. Not really hitting on any of the transfers that he brought in that season was a major problem. I don't think that many of us appreciate how bad things got under CCS. Tyre McCants and a few other former Bulls have alluded to the dysfunction with some Twitter posts, but I think things were toxically bad. CJS would have had to have 2 to 3 times the coaching chops in order to have made it work here.   

As for this season, 4-8 or 5-7 is where my expectations were set and, based upon talent, I thought we had enough parts and pieces to have achieved that. CJS was just in over his head and couldn't figure out how to win. His inability to close out games this season was what sealed his fate. If he wins @ Florida and/or Cincy, he is probably still here. If GB doesn't get knocked out of the Tulane game, who knows what happens from there. Ultimately, he lost his job because of an inability to build depth on the defensive side of the ball and to surround himself with defensive minds to help overcome his clear deficiency in coaching up that side of the ball. 

What we do now know definitively is that "Oh shucks" southern nice guys don't work at USF. We should have learned that from the Holtz New Error. I held out hope that CJS could right the ship until the bitter end. When GB went down, I knew it was over for him. We need a hardass. We need a coach with an edge. We need a dog, not a kitty cat. With that being said, we clearly have some talent on this squad. The defense needs to be revamped (burned to the ground), but he brought in some guys with talent. Things are not as bad as they seem. This squad, with better coaching and injury luck, could have been 4-5 or 3-6 at this point. We cannot afford to miss on this next hire. This is the moment that will define MK's tenure at USF. 
 

[puc86]

14 minutes ago, Rocky Style said:

The thing about the Covid excuse was that it was always real, but within a certain level of tolerance.  I was saying all along this year that all we needed to do was put down some improvement, have some optimistic outlook for next year, and he would be good.  Hell we would have been hyped.  When it was starting to not look that way, I was pretty sure MK was going to pull his card in spite of "not publicly" saying things.  

The covid excuse was not an automatic year 3 deferral, but I think we would have lowered our year 3 expectations collectively if there was some progress.

Oh for sure but to argue “welp I didn’t get the full season to give me an unfair advantage over every single other team in the entirety of college football and I only got more than most so that’s not fair and there is no reason to expect me to accomplish a single thing in the time I did get but I promise that the practices that mattered were the ones that were missed same with the games not a thing improved but with a few more just imagine how much more we could not improve?” Is insane. To accept Covid as an excuse for what happened is to pretend that CJS was uniquely impacted (he actually was in the mildness of it) and to ignore florida was one of the least shutdown states, the aac was one of the least caring conferences and that everyone faces at the very least as many issues with Covid as CJS. Every team predicted to play in the playoffs did, most everyone that were expected to suck did and plenty of teams managed to actually make some improvements to something in the games they played and yet by not playing less of having fewer games or practices we didn’t. CJS and Covid is only an excuse in a vacuum focusing only on us and ignoring everyone else. 

[Bulls On Parade]

4 hours ago, DELdaBull said:

We suck at hiring. 

 

I have no idea who we should hire next, but I am 100% sure who should NOT be in charge of that decision.  

Yep...this has me concerned we do suck at hiring. 

Scott had no business being a HC. OC should been his next move. 

It's nearly impossible to hire worse...but USF would be the school to do it. 

[puc86]

21 minutes ago, BullyPulpit said:

While I wouldn't say that I was an absolute CJS apologist, I did defend him getting this season to show what he could do, as I didn't think you could really hold him entirely accountable for the 2020 COVID season debacle. I think that is where things went terribly wrong right out of the gates. Not being able to build a rapport with players was a problem. Not being able to conduct normal practices was a problem. Not really hitting on any of the transfers that he brought in that season was a major problem. I don't think that many of us appreciate how bad things got under CCS. Tyre McCants and a few other former Bulls have alluded to the dysfunction with some Twitter posts, but I think things were toxically bad. CJS would have had to have 2 to 3 times the coaching chops in order to have made it work here.   

As for this season, 4-8 or 5-7 is where my expectations were set and, based upon talent, I thought we had enough parts and pieces to have achieved that. CJS was just in over his head and couldn't figure out how to win. His inability to close out games this season was what sealed his fate. If he wins @ Florida and/or Cincy, he is probably still here. If GB doesn't get knocked out of the Tulane game, who knows what happens from there. Ultimately, he lost his job because of an inability to build depth on the defensive side of the ball and to surround himself with defensive minds to help overcome his clear deficiency in coaching up that side of the ball. 

What we do now know definitively is that "Oh shucks" southern nice guys don't work at USF. We should have learned that from the Holtz New Error. I held out hope that CJS could right the ship until the bitter end. When GB went down, I knew it was over for him. We need a hardass. We need a coach with an edge. We need a dog, not a kitty cat. With that being said, we clearly have some talent on this squad. The defense needs to be revamped (burned to the ground), but he brought in some guys with talent. Things are not as bad as they seem. This squad, with better coaching and injury luck, could have been 4-5 or 3-6 at this point. We cannot afford to miss on this next hire. This is the moment that will define MK's tenure at USF. 
 

Oh for sure it wasn’t helpful but I don’t exactly think anyone was extremely helped by it. It would be unreasonable to have expected drastic improvement, improving was maybe unlikely, staying still perfectly fine, a little regression can be understood that we raced backwards has nothing to do with Covid but it may have helped in some way.

[Triple B]

30 minutes ago, Bulls On Parade said:

Yep...this has me concerned we do suck at hiring. 

Scott had no business being a HC. OC should been his next move. 

It's nearly impossible to hire worse...but USF would be the school to do it. 

Kinda like CJL's next move at KSU should have been DC ..... Hindsight is always 20/20 and sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. I'm not sure there were many in the college football world that thought CJS was a bad here.

[Ghostbuster]

1 hour ago, puc86 said:

Oh for sure but to argue “welp I didn’t get the full season to give me an unfair advantage over every single other team in the entirety of college football and I only got more than most so that’s not fair and there is no reason to expect me to accomplish a single thing in the time I did get but I promise that the practices that mattered were the ones that were missed same with the games not a thing improved but with a few more just imagine how much more we could not improve?” Is insane. 

It is insane.  Thankfully you are the only one to mention that strawman.  I'm glad you didn't fall for the argument you made up.

I specifically said better coaches could have handled COVID and other obstacles better.  The fact that you found someone who has since won 'coach of the year' and succeeded during COVID doesn't disprove my original point the way you think...

It is possible for both of these to be true:

'first time coaches were impacted more by COVID and had a tougher time'

'great coaches can succeed despite adversity'

Which again WAS MY ENTIRE POINT...you are getting sooooo hung up on just one of the pieces of adversity I mentioned.  Scott was not a great coach so he could not overcome the adversity. QED.  

[Bulls On Parade]

1 hour ago, Triple B said:

Kinda like CJL's next move at KSU should have been DC ..... Hindsight is always 20/20 and sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. I'm not sure there were many in the college football world that thought CJS was a bad here.

That's true...but I do think not the actual OC was a possible crack in armor. 

Oh well its over now.