Chattanooga Mocs fan here. Reading this thread reminds me of our conversations on our message board the past two years. Arth's teams struggled to run the football, had terrible play on the offensive line, and an overall terrible offense. When Arth was hired in Chattanooga we had just come off of three top 10 seasons (and the one before in the top 25) Arth's hire certainly came out of left field for us, as he was a D3 head coach and some of the finalists were seemingly much more qualified, or at least experienced at the D1 FCS Level - One had built a meddling Big South team into a perennial top 25 program and his wife was from the Chattanooga area so they had ties here. All I can say is Arth must give one heck of an interview.
While Arth was not an expected hire, or the one most Moc fans would have picked, I got behind his hire noting his record at John Carroll and that the X's and O's would largely be the same. My concerns were if he could recruit well and how he would adjust to the D1 game. We started the 2017 ranked in top 15 and things tanked from there giving us our worst season since 2009 finishing 3-8. We did finish the season strong beating #9 Samford, then losing to #8 Wofford in double OT, and finishing up the season with a win over in state rival ETSU. Success continued in early 2018 starting off 4-0 before collapsing and finishing 6-5. Poor clock management by the staff lost some of those games.
Arth's tenure was plagued by a complete lack of a running game, terrible offensive line play, and an overall inept offense. Defense, which was a Chattanooga trademark under previous HC Russ Huessman, remained very good under Arth, particularly with the inability of our offense to sustain drives and give the defense a rest. One thing Chattanooga fans never could quite understand is that we had been running a spread run/pass option offense and a solid 4-3 defense and Arth changed us to a pro style offense and a 3-4 defense. You wouldn't think you would change things up that much taking over an already successful team.
Arth did seem to recruit fairly well so there may be hope for the Zips, the biggest problem is that his most prized recruits never saw the field and most are no longer with the program. Arth did fire his OC and Offensive Line coach after the 2018 season so the OC you have there is not the same one we had in Chattanooga, but it looks like you're seeing the same results. I hope Arth is successful as he seems like a nice guy. We didn't have the cash to buy him out and were shocked that someone hired him away. We had been hoping that an NFL team would hire him away for something as he seems to have connections there. Good luck Zips fans, Chattanooga fans feel your pain.
