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Akron has fired every single coach in its Division 1-A football existence. Joe Moorhead is the most accomplished head coach they have hired since Faust, and that was marginal accomplishment at best. Every time you fire a coach, especially a well-accomplished coach with a good track record, the fewer quality candidates you will find who are interested in the job. Look at Joe’s comments regarding the Brookhart firing. Most coaches worth a damn would have no interest in the Akron job if we just dumped Moorhead before he has time to actually build something. Anyone calling for his firing is someone who has no connections in the college football world or knowledge of how anything in college football works. Luke Getsy interviewed for this job in 2018. He said the AD at the time was a jackass and had no interest in ever speaking with him again. Relationships and reputations matter. Fortunately Williams isn’t here anymore, but that doesn’t mean Guthrie and Co. are immune to making their own mistakes and burned bridges. The coach-speak is old to me too, but coach-speak is coach-speak. Moorhead has won a MAC title, B1G title, coached vs. Nick Saban and Ed Orgeron. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that NIU shouldn’t be out-gaining you by 7,000 yards on homecoming. 10 years ago, in year 2, Akron lost to Ohio 43-3 on homecoming, only to rally to win 4 of their last 5 to finish 5-7. Granted, they laid an egg in 2014, but still finished strong even after a 1-6 start in ‘13 (2-17 thru 19 games with that staff). All is not lost in 2023 yet, but we are close. For 6 straight seasons, we have dealt with horrid football. In 2018, I was furious. 2019 thru 2021, pretty apathetic. 2022, optimistic, 2023, angry and disappointed. Zero happiness. Akron football isn’t for everybody.

This is JoeMo's program now. Period. He had the Arth shield last year, but not anymore. The incompetent football we're witnessing is solely on the coaches. The job of a coach is to put their player(s) in positions to succeed. These coaches aren't doing that. You have talent at WR, but they're getting the ball going towards the sideline. You have QBs that are struggling, but are being asked to make the toughest throws in football - deep sideline throws, either in the out-route capacity or up the field. They're also being asked to do this behind a porous offensive line, and very little run game help simply due to a lack of volume (coaching). If there are easier reads that are being missed, it is your job as a coach to reign the QB in, and simplify the game for him. You give them 2 reads. If the first read isn't there, they go to the second read. Keep the reads short and easy so the QB can get the ball in the hands of his playmakers. I'm not going to say much about the defense today. They've been the reason we've had any type of optimism this year. I call him Joe Arth now because the talent is clearly upgraded, but the schemes and execution are dog 💩. Honestly, maybe worse than Arth given the talent Moorehead has vs. Arth. This is unwatchable football on the offensive side of the ball, and we have a head coach that is supposed to be an offensive wizard. Don't do interviews and say, "I could've gone elsewhere - NFL, P5, etc. - but I chose Akron," like we're some sort of charity you're volunteering for, then not deliver a lick on Saturdays. It's awesome if you deliver; doesn't sit well if you don't. For the record, I'm not on the fire JoeMo bandwagon. Reality is he is our coach through the end of his contract. All I'm asking for is competent, competitive football on Saturdays. Please deliever, JoeMo.

All teams have played 4 games...in a 8 game schedule Today's Results Georgetown 3 UConn 0 Zips 3 DePaul 0 Seton Hall 3 Villanova 3 Xavier 2 Marquette 1 ....game was at Marquette...big win for Xavier Butler 2 Creighton 2 Providence 0 St. Johns 0 you can see below....that Georgetown leads the east 2ith 12 points... 2nd place in the east is at 6 points Zips next 2 big east games are on the road at Xavier On the 14th ....and at Creighton. Looking at the Midwest standings 1. Xavier 9 points 2. Akron 8 points 3. Creighton 7 points If next Saturday's Akron at Xavier game does not end in a tie, the winner of next Saturday game....will be in first place..... great opportunity for the Zips next Saturday.....Go, Zips https://www.bigeast.com/standings.aspx?path=msoc

Not sure at whose expense this will come, but it is tough to see Stefan Dobrijevic coming off the bench much longer. He is really pressing to be in the first 11.

Like all Zips fans I'm demoralized. Deeply. Demoralized. And I have been since the 2nd half of the Temple game and only beating a 1-4 FCS (🤮🤮🤮) Morgan State by a stroke of luck and the skin of our teeth. But I still have faith in JoeMo. He's undoubtedly improved the talent level on the team & I still feel we're only a legit QB away from being 4-2 on the year. But we're not. And I'm still confused how JoeMo & Co. could have possibly thought a gimpy, injury-prone, post-surgery DJ Irons, Undercuffler, and/or Tahj were the QB's we needed to turn this ship around? So I put this season's debacle on the coaching staff for not brining in the plug-in-and-play transfer QB we so obviously and desperately needed. JoeMo's recruiting is light years better than his predecessor.. so how on earth is the product on the field still essentially the same?! My giving credit to JoeMo for his recruiting cuts both ways when the on-the-field product is still so poor. Idk, I'm frustrated, confused, disappointed, and even downright angry.... not a good time for me to be posting. Frustrated, confused, disappointed, angry. The annual experience of every Zips football fan. [sigh]

Miami and Toledo are currently the class of the MAC. Martin won 2 and 3 games his first two years at Miami. He took over a better program than Akron. Akron is a massive turnaround that can happen with the transfer portal. Martin went 6-6 his third year. All the fire the coach clowns need to get control of their Nihilism.

Keep a list of all the quitters and give them the URL for the Transfer Portal at the end of the year.

The environment was the best I’ve seen out of my handful of trips to Akron games and it’s a shame the performance on the field did not match. From what I could see, it was a solid crowd and in general people seemed excited about the matchup. The band was great too, but that’s about where the positives end. NIU’s off balance sets and motions gave the defense major issues in both alignment and pursuit angles. McCoy was put in a tough spot on the counter runs to the boundary and found it difficult to make the tackle. The MIKE LB usually took on the lead blocker, which left either the safety or WILL LB to make the play. NIU often used a WR or TE to seal the safety inside. Not that it made much of a difference, but Gathings’ body language was poor in the first half and gave away whether it was a run or pass pre-snap. The OL struggled in one on one pass protection. In-particular the right side of the OL had a rough day in pass pro. OL in general had a tough time maintaining their blocks in the run game. The offense has felt like it was forcing round pegs into squares holes the entire season. Tonight, I thought the run heavy approach was the right idea, but once the game was out of hand that idea was basically tossed out the window. Bullock certainly has the arm strength to send the ball anywhere he wants. However, accuracy leaves something to be desired. Hopefully that improves as he receives more reps. Also, he needs to be careful about scrambling to his left. Rarely do good things happen for right handed QBs when scrambling to their left. Freshman OL Delvin Morris may not have a clue what he’s doing out there yet, but he’s extremely athletic, aggressive, and is going to be really good. A lot of young guys got some PT in garbage time tonight. Curious to see how the team responds after this performance. I did not see DT Kyle Thomas out there and noticed he is no longer listed on the official roster. QB - Bullock RB - Lingard (D. Anderson) (Kellom) WR - Gathings (Norton) WR - George (Anderson) WR - Golden (Walker) TE - Banks (Ognenovic) LT - Chambers (Morris) LG - Frank (Kilbane) C - T. Williams (Georges) RG - Davis (Kilbane) (Lyons) RT - Williams (James) DE - Nunnally (Smith) DT - Jones (Robinson) (Carter) DT - Lavea (Murphy) DT - Adler (Moore) (Richards) DE - Jackson (Adler) (Cheatom) LB - Fish (Griffin) LB - McCoy (Cooper) (Harris) (NB) - Lewis CB - Durant (Hunter) S - C. Thomas (Martin) S - Martin (Thompson) CB - Tallandier (Golden-Nelson) (Threatt)

1 month to SD St.

Just a gentle correction @TennZip, Nano's PK wasn't missed, it was saved by their keeper. It actually was hit pretty well, low and right, but the keeper guessed or read it right. But it was a missed opportunity indeed.

I was watching one of the collegiate eSports events earlier this year. They highlighted one of Akron's players and did a full montage of him for his last event. They talk about Akron in the collegiate eSports world like Bama in football or Duke in basketball. It's pretty wild. Also, it's just natural for the Soccer Kings to be good at virtual car soccer, too.

Preseason Mid Major Top 10 (Akron at #8) from the Athletic One quote from the article: Groce says this is the deepest team he’s had in his seven years at Akron, and it’s certainly the oldest he will ever coach. The best part, he says, is that the veterans only care about each other and about winning. Can this last dance lead to a spot in the Big Dance? Groce is simply trying to enjoy each step. “We’ve got a culture that’s unbelievable right now,” he says. “We think we have a special team and a special chance to do something significant with our group.”

I don't know what this means but it seems good

This team sucks. I'm not in the Joe Moorhead firing camp by any means, but goodness he gets a lot of excuses. People still want to bring up Arth to blame, come on now. Reality is everyone here put so much stock into Moorehead that it just seems like people have a hard time calling him out and admitting maybe he isnt the guy we all thought he was coming here. Him and this staff said during camp that this team was different, their mindset and skills. Well, they are absolutely pathetic on the field. I know he took over a horrible program, but with his supposed reputation as an offensive genius, he deserves criticism. Sorry, we cant blame Arth for everything from here on out. JoeMo will get a lot of credit if/when he can turn things around, but he deserves blame along the way with a performance like this. We just got our asses kicked by a 1-4 team. We didnt keep it competitive even though we have the same record going into the game. They looked like an SEC team out there with how badly they embarrassed Akron today.

Or what we did to them last year. I'm sure they hadn't forgotten.

This is one reason I'm upset & worried about how this season is playing out. Last year it was easy for the new staff to place blame on the previous staff for the lack of success & tell the recruits "We're building something from scratch here. Come be a part of it." This year it's more difficult to do that... maybe impossible with the TP (how many of Arth's recruits are even still on the team?). JoeMo had better get this thing running smoothly next year or it might be too late.

Horror genre?

If it was a publicity stunt, it worked short term. The university got a lot of publicity. The Acme-Zip game in 1987 against Kent was the third largest crowd to ever see a football game at the Rubber Bowl. Publicity stunts can work if there is a longer term plan around it and there is where it all fall apart. The problem was there were a few issues working against Akron. First, there were no adults asking questions about the future of the program. By adults, I mean the board of trustees. Questions would be: What makes a successful D1 program and do we have any of that? Can our personnel in the athletic department get this done? If we want a D1 program, are either Faust or Dennison the right person for the job? If we waited 4-5 years and built a foundation, could we pull this off? Why is the NCAA basically begging us not to jump to D1? Almost any questions leads to a "no". Looking back it was so obvious. I feel free to say this as a Catholic, but not a person who grew up in NE Ohio. Around Akron, there was and probably still is an overblown opinion of people who went/go to the local Catholic schools. Where I grew up, the religious private schools were neither as good at sports or educating kids as well as my public school. I know they are better than APS, but are Hoban, St. V and Walsh, but are they really any better at educating kids than Copley, Hudson, Medina or Stow? Add all of that to ND being a much more important part of college football than it is today, it makes influential people already predisposed to a certain belief that Faust's connection to Moeller and Notre Dame would be enough for success. To me, this is an under explored part of the beginning of the ongoing disaster that is the football program. I'd love to know who was on the BofT at the time and what their personal backgrounds were? We're there influential people around the City/University that has this background and maybe created a predisposition leading to bad decisions? There is a fantastic book to be written around the Akron football since 1986.

And Good Captain, there was one glaring similarity to all 4 TDs and almost every single yard...it was the left side of our defense, every single time, where he gained the yards and TD. Every. Single. Time. Where the heck was the D Coordinating adjusting to that? We called it every time...#1 - right side- TD.

I still go back to the Dennison situation. Faust was a publicity stunt. There was also this guy by the name of Lee Owens. Remember him? Recruited NFL caliber talent. Got fired after a winning season. Brookhart and Moorehead won for 2 seasons with a lot of Owens' recruits especially on the offensive side. Charley Frye, Dom Hixon, good O-linemen. JD got Getsy from Pitt to replace Charley. Moorehead was given some talent to work with. Like JD said after the 2005 season, 'we got lucky before we got good'. Moorehead is not going anywhere unless he steps away. He has got to decide on which QB he has on the roster that he is going to go with and play him!

That’s probably my biggest frustration of the season. The talent level is much improved everywhere, but the offense has been incredibly inefficient due to poor QB play. The one game QB play was good enough (Indiana) it still wasn’t great due to the turnovers. Moorhead’s past offenses have been able to adjust to the strengths of the quarterbacks. Seems we are finally to the point to where the staff is willing to lean on the RBs and the legs of Bullock, then the defense decides to take a hiatus. I’m still 100% certain Moorhead will turn this ship around, but it’s incredibly frustrating the results have not shown up in the win column. I doubt we see anything like we saw last night again in Moorhead’s tenure.

less coachspeak, more bluntness..

I see all these deep thoughts for a 1-5 football team. a football team that should be 0-6 and the only reason they are is because of a miracle forced fumble and score in the waning seconds. I won’t even count the 32yd FG attempt at IU as there’s % tied to making them. I’m not one to say fire the coach but this team is so bad. They need people to ignore them. They need people to tell them to win and more importantly win convincingly. this team sucks. Pure and simple. They will suck until they win. Nobody respects them! why should they! bring on basketball!!

Formation against DePaul was 4-2-3-1, a return to our normal system employed for the past decade. Why we went away from our “new” formation of 3-2-4-1 is anyone’s guess. Perhaps coaches saw something on film. Perhaps it was dictated by personnel. Perhaps it was situational according to our opponent. I did not notice anything special about DePaul. Rui Reis immediately changed the match upon entering. But he entered in “the hole” or the #10 position, or the central attacking midfielder. Not as an extra forward; we did not change formation. I believe this is where Reis is most effective, rather than subbing in for Shook at the #9 up top. Reis is a very offensive minded playmaker who is always looking for two passes and a shot (so to speak). Shook is Check. Reis is two moves before Check. Credit our coaches for shrewd in-game personnel decisions.

💯💯 (Out of Likes but wanted to acknowledge your post.)

I'm far from a futbol strategist, but the way DePaul was playing with 5 in the back and little pushing forward seemed to lend itself to our loading the box and sending the ball in as much as possible. They didn't seem to be much of a threat at counter attacking most of the game. Their best chance was on a horrible decision by our defender who found himself back on the bench...lesson learned, I hope, because he's been playing well for the most part.

Surely, that head coach would never disappoint during a high expectation season with a 1-4 team coming to town, right?!?! https://www.espn.com/college-football/game/_/gameId/401020812

A good reminder that, no matter how bad things get, there’s always someone worse off than you.

I'm a glass half full guy. At least he didn't run for 22.0 yards per carry.

Agree. However, Sanders produced more than a talent shift. He produced a cultural shift within an organization. The first thing he did was get the players who were complicit in the failure to leave without having to give them the boot. Basically , almost all of them. I don't use this word lightly, but what Sanders has done is truly brilliant. Organizational scholars should be lining up to study what he has done at Colorado and JSU.

Yes, this game was atrocious. Yes, this season has been disappointing, but firing the coach isn’t going to magically turn the team around instantly. Especially at the MAC level. *bowden goes 4-8* fired here comes arth, 0-12, 1-5, 2-6 *fired* here comes Moorhead, who was handed a terrible roster and the reputation of a terrible program. It’s obviously going to be hard for anyone to turn around this program. But it isn’t going to help to start over again

I think we can blame him some for driving the program so far into the dirt that it required a full rebuild (even obviously a multi-year rebuild).

The fire the coach crowd is very NE Ohio. Morehead has been here 1.5 years. To fire him now is Browns fans level stupidity.

They lost by 6 touchdowns to a one win MAC team. A little tough to be optimistic today. He took on an awful team but I think we were all hoping for more improvement a season and a half in.

Get use to it. This school is in no position to eat another contract. All we can do is settle in and pray that something finally clicks.

I truly have never been this discouraged by a game in my life. I have lost total faith in Morehead and his band of morons he calls coaches. Bums. All of them, and the players. Bums.

its cool i can handle it

I wish you and your son well, but online forums tend not to be fun places for the parents of players or their children.

Only Tim Tyrrell can fix this. Tired of dumb coaching hires and Homers in here defending this trash.

I said "find a Sean Lewis," meaning we need to find a young person with the offensive brain power that succeeds at the D1 level to use us as a stepping stone. Barring a complete 180 in the offensive scheme, JoeMo is proving to be a fraud in the "offensive genius" department that our fan base was sold on. Maybe the talent he was able to utilize covered for his flaws at PSU, Miss St., and Oregon - who the hell knows. This is so damn disappointing because it's no longer about talent (maybe at the QB level - maybe); our flaws are entirely coaching/scheme related.

Did DePaul play with their entire team, bench, and coaching staff in the box the entire game?

I’ve actually heard some rumblings that Tahj might get the start, don’t quote me on it unless it happens!

I don't think it would hurt the MAC at all if the whole league went to FCS.

Ticket...........$19 Soda..............$5 Popcorn.........$5 Game Day experience.........joyless

This is where I'm at, plus a little more. We have Irons, Undercuffler, Bullock, Jennings, and Wasel on the staff. Irons isn't moving the offense. Fine. Undercuffler isn't moving the offense. Fine. Why not run with Bullock/Jennings/Wasel? Joe likes Irons (may be his demise). Fine. How can we make Irons more effective? An offensive genius has to be able to scheme guys open and fit the play calling to his personnel. Irons has a big arm, so why not take a few more deep shots, especially with post patterns? On shorter throws, why not more over the middle throws with shorter quicker crossing routes? Irons can run, but defenses know that. Why not get the RBs going in space outside of the tackles to help open the game up? Do we have speed on this roster? Where is it and why aren't we using it? Can't attract talent now? Fine. But what's going to change if this is what we are getting with the "offensive genius"? This offense is a 100 year old machine that has sat out in the elements and never been maintained. Everything is grinding and difficult to move; nothing is smooth. With the transfer portal opening up college athletics, the talent we have may not even stay. Might as well figure out what we have and try to benefit from it while we have it. If Joe doesn't like certain things as a Head Coach, he needs to find someone to handle those things properly or not be a Head Coach in the first place. This is complete garbage and inexcusable.

Fantastic job by Akron on being the ones to host this. There is so much money flowing in the eSports world, and it would be very beneficial to become one of the hotspots.

Fun Circle of Suck has developed UMiami beats Miami U 38-3 Bowling Green beats Ga. Tech 38-27 Miami U beats BGSU 27-0 Ga. Tech beats UMiami 23-20

I'm going to be honest here: How on Earth can we adequately evaluate Moorehead when the team he was given was a D-III team at best? Folks, hiring and firing coaches is never going to solve the problems, it's 2023. That's never going to happen at a school like Akron. We're in it for the long haul with Moorehead, and he's better than the last guy we had here.