Dave in Green

What caught my eye in the list of 2011 fullback prospects is that Grice is graded only 1 point lower (72 vs. 73) than Hunter Joyer, who was recruited by Urban Meyer at Florida. If Ianello can recruit more players of this caliber and get them to perform up to their potential, the Zips might actually start winning some games.

Just to avoid confusion, the quote is about Zeke and not Nitro, though he had good things to say about both improving.

Zips stats are way too icky for anyone to want to spend any time studying. The deepest I want to dig into this year's stats is to note that if you take away the first 8 games, the Zips don't look like such a bad team.

Even DiG doesn't need to look at the stats to know how badly this team has performed so far this season.

You'll need to be more original than that to gain traction on ZN.O. I'll stand by it. Every one of Dave in Green's posts defends the coach/program. Strange. Wait until you read some of his basketball posts. He is a valued member of ZNO. I was going to say the same thing. Defending ICC so vehemently is not normal "Dave" . Usually we agree on things! Your explanation above is alright though, i just dont see anything in this coach and I dont believe it's worth wasting multiple years on something that we can pretty much see has failed already. The key point is that I'm not vehemently defending Ianello. I'm merely stating the other side of the argument for consideration. There are already many people posting the "off with his head" side of the argument, often multiple times per day in multiple threads. Some of those posts might be considered vehement, or maybe even venomous. I thought my posts on the subject were pretty laid back. I certainly didn't feel vehement (or venomous) while writing them.

Obviously everyone who follows Zips basketball would like to see better facilities. It just needs to be understood that the more money that's invested in upgrading the JAR, the further a new arena gets pushed into the future. It would be economically difficult to justify building a new arena anytime soon after investing millions to upgrade the old facility.

You'll need to be more original than that to gain traction on ZN.O. I'll stand by it. Every one of Dave in Green's posts defends the coach/program. Strange. You're obviously misinterpreting my position on the coaching staff, which is consistent with my position on the QB situation. Last year when some fans began advocating that Rodgers be replaced by Nicely, I expressed the position that while it might be the best move at some point, Rodgers should be given a reasonable opportunity to prove himself. That debate ended when Rodgers' season ended with the leg injury. This year when some fans began advocating that Nicely be replaced by Rodgers, I initially expressed the same position. I've expressed exactly the same position on Ianello. He may or may not be capable of turning the Zips into consistent winners. But we'll never know for sure unless he's given a reasonable opportunity to prove himself. This consistent position does not fit the label of "apologist" for Rodgers, Nicely or Ianello, and it won't for anyone else I may take the same position on in the future.

You'll need to be more original than that to gain traction on ZN.O.

Using 2004 as the base year, let's look at it on a year-to-year basis by winning percentage with a plus for every year where the winning percentage improved and a minus where it fell: 2004 6-5 .545 2005 7-6 .538 - 2006 5-7 .417 - 2007 4-8 .333 - 2008 5-7 .417 + 2009 3-9 .250 - In only one of five seasons was there an improvement in winning percentage over the previous season, and that one was immediately followed by the lowest winning percentage of the JD era in his final season. Although not perfectly linear, I think that "slow downward spiral" is a reasonably accurate description if you allow for the occasional updraft in a general descent. Maybe slow downward trend would be a more accurate way to describe it.

By that logic, those who predicted Ianello would fail before he coached his first game also don't want to be proven wrong and do want the guy to fail. They will rip on him whatever way they can. Then there are those who never took a hard pro or con position, but only hoped that Ianello would become a good head coach and turn the Zips around from their downward spiral of the last few years if given a fair opportunity to do so. Reasonable people can disagree on how much time a new head coach should be given to stop a losing team's slide. But most reasonable people will agree that one year or less is not adequate. Whether the Ianello lovers or the Ianello haters eventually prove to be correct in their assessment of his ability to succeed, the most important thing is for the Zips to start winning, whether under Ianello or whoever might ultimately replace him. Who really cares who "wins" a stupid sports forum debate?

Confirmation in the story that Rodgers is suffering from a concussion and will be unavailable again this week.

2004 6-5 2005 7-6 2006 5-7 2007 4-8 2008 5-7 2009 3-9 The record indicates that the Zips under Brookhart were on a slow downward spiral. That's likely due to some combination of inadequate recruiting and coaching. Is it realistic to believe that the Zips would have improved last year's 3-9 record if Brookhart were still coaching this group of players with all of its known shortcomings? Is it realistic to believe that a rookie head coach, subject to the same kind of freshman mistakes made by freshman players, would instantly produce better results than Brookhart? We know the new head coach has made plenty of rookie mistakes. We really don't know how successfull Ianello will ultimately be as a head coach at UA and beyond. Nobody likes losing, and the more losses the less we fans like it. The important question is what is a fair length of time to give a rookie head coach the opportunity to prove whether or not he can turn around a program that was going nowhere but down long before he arrived?

Sounds like the ultimate challenge for a coach who has built his reputation on recruiting.

If I had to choose, I guess I'd take the tOSU assistant. However, why would the top assistant at tOSU leave there to coach at an 0-12 school? And please don't tell me the facilities. We were supposed to be good because of facilities and look where we are now. No one believes new facilities automatically make a team better. New facilities certainly make a better recruiting tool than dumpy facilities, but they're just one of many recruiting tools that may make one school more attractive than another to recruits. With new facilities and a coach renowned for his recruiting abilities, UA could reasonably be expected to attract higher potential recruits than in the past. That takes more than 1 year to evaluate. Then there's the matter of coaching higher potential players into a cohesive team that plays at a higher level than previous Zips teams, which takes even longer to evaluate. Are you saying we are still in our never ending "building process"? I think I've seen this play before. I have no problem at all with a never ending building process as long as it produces real growth and success.

If I had to choose, I guess I'd take the tOSU assistant. However, why would the top assistant at tOSU leave there to coach at an 0-12 school? And please don't tell me the facilities. We were supposed to be good because of facilities and look where we are now. No one believes new facilities automatically make a team better. New facilities certainly make a better recruiting tool than dumpy facilities, but they're just one of many recruiting tools that may make one school more attractive than another to recruits. With new facilities and a coach renowned for his recruiting abilities, UA could reasonably be expected to attract higher potential recruits than in the past. That takes more than 1 year to evaluate. Then there's the matter of coaching higher potential players into a cohesive team that plays at a higher level than previous Zips teams, which takes even longer to evaluate.

If you definitely saw Rodgers on the sideline during the first, I guess those in our section just somehow missed spotting his #5 from where we were sitting. We wondered where he was the whole first half, and then clearly saw him on the sideline the whole second half.

Hewas dressed and on the Bench the entire game. I was sitting right behind him Several people in our section scanned the Zips sideline the whole first half looking for Rodgers, and the only #5 jersey we saw was on defense. If Rodgers was there the whole first half, he must have had his number covered because not a single person in our section could find him.

It's getting really difficult to keep up with all the wild football rumors these days. One person posts a rumor as if it's fact, and others take it as gospel and run with it. Maybe ZN.O needs a BreakTheChain.org type fact checker forum to help separate fact from fantasy.

If it's true that Rodgers really has had two concussions in extremely limited PT this year, I can understand why Potts' redshirt was burned. Brain injury is the one thing that you absolutely cannot take lightly in football. Concussions have cumulative effects, and a third concussion in a short time span could be devastating. It would be criminal to expose Rodgers to longterm permanent brain injury no matter how badly anyone wants to see anyone other than Nicely at QB.

Zero tolerance for umbrellas in football stadiums is a positive for me.

This is all starting to make sense to me. Each year the D1 football team that hits rock bottom and is rated worst in the country should drop out of D1. After about 120 years there will be only 2 D1 football teams left. They will play in the Best/Worst Bowl, and the loser will be forced to drop out of D1. The winning team will become the all-time D1 champion and have no one left to play. Then D1 will be disbanded and the process will start all over under a new classification.

We looked for Rodgers on the sideline in the first half, and he wasn't to be seen. He showed up on the sideline in the second half, but he may have been ill as it appeared he was given some kind of medication to take. Someone in our section said he heard that Rodgers was in fact ill. In that respect, Rodgers had a lot in common with all the fans who became ill at the embarassment on the field.

Redshirting both Egner and Green would leave the Zips with 12 players eligible to play in games. Last season, 15 Zips got PT, though Petersen, Sullivan and Swiech got only a few minutes in a few games. 1. Abreu 2. Bardo 3. Cvetinovic 4. Diggs 5. Egner 6. Euton 7. Green 8. Marshall 9. McClanahan 10. McKnight 11. McNees 12. Oldham 13. Petersen 14. Roberts

Most of what KD had to say fits right in with the discussions we've had on ZN.O about the backgrounds of these recruits. One comment that caught my eye was the one about Euton needing to focus more on defense. From everything I've read about Euton, he was primarily an offensive threat during his early playing days. But his HS coach at Scott County has a big reputation in Kentucky for focusing on defense, and he praised Euton for working really hard and improving his defensive game during his HS career. I guess he'll have to pick it up even more in the transition to college, especially under KD's style of really focusing on defense. There's no doubt that KD will reward the recruits who play the toughest defense with more PT. Hopefully, some of the recruits with the best offensive games will quickly adapt to KD's sytem and earn more PT. We all know how painful it has been to watch the Zips go through long scoring droughts due to the lack of players who could consistently put the ball in the hole. I'm really hoping that one or more of the recruits can take some of the scoring pressure off of B McKnight, who has been too inconsistent to do it all by himself.

There was much discussion on this forum about the lack of player discipline under JD and its negative effect on team performance. I suppose that's part of what makes some people remember JD as such a personable coach. Nice guys often have a hard time adminstering the proper level of discipline that's required to create a winning team. Students grumble about tough college professors, but later in life often come to realize that they learned more from the professors who challenged them the most. There's no question that when a college team goes from a lax coach to a more disciplined one, players grumble, some rebel and some leave the program. In other words, team turmoil should be no surprise, at least during the transition period. More importantly, what will be the longterm effect of the type of discipline being instilled by iCoach? Will team morale improve as players slowly and sometimes grudgingly adapt to the new system? Will new recruits be better prepared for iCoach's coaching style? Will iCoach get a better feel from experience as head coach for the precise level of discipline that will work best to create a winning team at UA? This is all part of the equation that will ultimately determine whether or not iCoach was a good hire for UA.