InTheZone

Or maybe he made the mistake of saying exactly what he is planning to do.....In the history of Zips athletics, no "Mr. Football/Mr. Basketball/"Super-Duper All-Star" has ever made a meaningful contribution. In fact, all have been HUGE busts, often barely seeing the playing field or court.Marcus Sanders, Christian Morgan, Nate Robinson, Ryan Bain, John Carson, Emmanuel Smith, Derrick Tarver, etc etc etc.You left our current Super-Duper All Star off the list... Mr. Massillon himself.

The kid looks very impressive in this video because he's good at annihilating 185 pound defensive lineman. Looking more closely, he has horrible knee bend, his feet stop on contact before restarting, he's slow off the ball even in comparison to the other HS linemen around him, and his punch is rather slow as well....That's what college coaches are seeing, and that's why he doesn't have any offers. That being said, I like his nastiness, and if he doesn't recieve any offers I think he'd be a great preferred walk-on candidate and a project for one of the best offensive line coaches in the country, which we happen to have recently hired. He can work on his knee bend, explosiveness off the ball, and punch, but you can't coach desire and nastiness. I like him as a walk-on.

Morefield is on schedule to graduate in August with a degree in business organizational communication. He is thinking about medical schoolWith all due respect, Business Organizational Communications isn't the best lead in to medical school. Maybe he should think about a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering.Yeeeaaahh.... if he's motivated to do something on par with medical school, maybe he should think about law school, as that's more fitting with his undergraduate major. Still, great story though. The life of a walk-on is tough in college football. While there's always the temptation to treat those guys like your second class bitch when you're playing (until you run across a guy like Ryan Myers), I came out of my career having more respect for some of those guys than anyone else I played with.

Thats a travesty of society in my opinion. If I'd ever been asked to line up across from a woman and get violent with her, I would've walked off the field and refused to play. If my son is ever asked to do that, he will not play in the game.

Interesting original post on this topic. I always like to read posts written late Friday and Saturday nights. Now we know Kellen "The Soldier" Winslow is ITZ.The feminization of the American male is a huge problem in this country. I agree totally.I still get a kick out of the fact that Adam James calls his father to complain about things. He is a college football player and an adult for crying out loud. He would have been laughed off the team in the Faust Era.Maybe you were scarred by your high school coach. After all, you think football and war are nearly the same thing. Perhaps it left a mental scar. Football has nothing to do with war. Football is a game where everyone gets to go home after the game and bang their girlfriends. War is not a game and people get killed doing it. War is a game where young men come home at the age of 20 and are so mentally harmed from the horrors they can no longer function in normal socitey. Any Drill Instructor that would put a hand on a new recruit would get fired. The following things are more like war than football.1. A police officer working east Cleveland.2. A good high school kid walking home from school in east Cleveland.3. A pizza deliveryman in east Cleveland delivering a pizza.4. Tiger Woods being struck by a 9-iron after admitting to his absolutely hot wife that he was banging every Las Vegas skank he could stick his pecker into.GP, I definitely did not mean to come across as comparing the horrors and and significance of War to that of football. I was more using the analogy to show the nature of the game in that it is the closest thing to SIMULATED War that our society has. Sports, after all, were developed to prepare men for war. Football is especially close to this model as no other game requires the teamwork, togetherness, and physical and mental preparation that football does. As for your assertation that no hands are laid on men being trained for service in our military, as a close friend to multiple ex-Marines and a NAVY Seal whose heard a few stories about what they went through in training, I respectfully disagree. As for basic military training (Army enlistment), I have heard from a few guys I used to play with that that's pretty light, and anyone who's ever made it through an August football camp can breeze through boot camp.

uh, yeah. That's an abusive coach.Growing up to be a woman isn't such a bad thing either. Sweetheart you don't understand the inside world of football and never will, nor a boy's development into a man, and that's not your fault, but it was the furthest thing from abuse. Abuse is something that leaves an individual scarred. I was far from scarred from that experience, in fact, it inspired me to one of the greatest moments in my athletic career. Far from being scarred, I'm thankful to my coach for what he did.

These wimps and their parents are just a byproduct of the culture we've seen develop in the last twenty years. We've raised a generation of pussies because during their childhood it was no longer PC to teach a boy what it meant to be a man. They grew up thinking boys and girls are all the same and what do you know, they grow up to act like girls. Were any of these kids physically damaged?? I don't see anything wrong with a coach grabbing your facemask from time to time or getting a little physical with his players. Football is a violent, passionate, and TOUGH game, the closest simulation in our society to WAR, and coaches getting physical with their players has been a part of the game forever, just like sergents who get physical with the men they're training for war, and if you can't handle the nature of the game then by all means please don't play. And if you do play, don't go crying to daddy because a coach grabbed your facemask. My senior year of high school as the team captain I played absolutely horrible in the first half of an important game and I was letting my team down by not playing with a sense of urgency and not being mentally locked into the game. My coach came in the lockerroom, ripped me a new one in front of the entire team, and shoved me...no... LAUNCHED ME.... into a locker with both hands. Did it hurt me? Hell no it didn't, I had pads on. Did I go cry to my daddy about it? Hell no, my dad would've said "Is that all he did?" after the way I played that half. How did I respond? I got PISSED AS HELL and went out and had one of the best halfs of football I ever had in my playing career and helped my team win the game. Was that coach abusive? No he wasn't, he saw how I wasn't playing anywhere close to my potential, that I was letting my team down, and he got my attention in the most sure way he could. The man is still very close to me and like a 2nd father.

If a spot opens up in the Big East in all of this it's going to Memphis. National powerhouse basketball program (the Big East is a basketball conference after all) that reguarly fills up a 20+ thousand seat arena, a huge untapped media Market, a huge corporate backing from FedEx... Are we really dumb enough to think we have something to offer in comparison to that? We're in the MAC to stay and that's a pretty good thing since we can't even win where we're at, much less in a BCS conference. And that won't be changing for a while since we went small time, typical, boring, and completely predictable on our head coaching hire again.

Huge disappointment. I'm officially checking out on my alma mater. Cancel my season tickets and you will no longer see me posting on ZipsNation. We've been given everthing to go big time and once again we go small time on our head coach. I'm done. Look forward to six more seasons of mediocrity until the school can afford to fire this guy and start the process all over again. I'm done. I guess I'll just pick a BCS school that I like and go with them. It's a shame Tom when you can't even keep the guys who donned the GOD DAMN UNIFORM with the stupidity you display.

They better hurry up. They need to be out there recruiting and meeting with the existing players to keep them at Akron.Exactly! The longer we wait, the more I think we're going after a BCS coordinator who might be able to bring along some recruits. If we wait too long and hire a lower-level coach he won't have the time to build a recruiting class. That's why I'm getting impatient.Maybe TW wants/needs to wait until after the D-2 Championship game this Saturday before he makes a final selection?That would be nice.Those of you high on Chuck Martin need to scour some message boards and see what Grand Valley fans themselves think of him. Basically he wins because of an insane amount of talent that inevitably flows through his system, yet has routinely lost to some highly inferior teams in his tenure. A very simple offense and a complete inability to make adjustments is the main gripe I'm seeing. Sound familiar?? Basically, GV's talent level is equivalent to the bottom dwellers of FBS, and they should be winning NC's every year at the D2 level whether they have Urban Meyer or John Knownothing for a coach. They're a 30,000 student school with facilites that rival most 1-A schools (complete indoor facility, the whole nine yards), and he's got every advantage to win at GV, in large thanks to the work of Brian Kelley. He won't have those advantages here. Count me firmly out on Chuck Martin.

I doubt that's a reason at all. Honestly I think TW would be more concerned with getting a coach in as quickly as possible to get to work on his recruiting class than he would be in taking away attention from a secondary sport like soccer.

Count me for "ABSOLUTELY NOT" on Larry Kehres.... D3 and D1 are very different beasts... which is a moot point, being that he wouldn't want the job anyways.

Winters needs a few more years at Wayne State and more success before he's a good candidate in my opinion. He's certainly done a marvelous job turning that program from a cellar dweller to a consistent winner, but I think a right of passage in making the jump from D2 to D1 is at least a little playoff success (Brian Kelly won national championshipS before making the jump from Grand Valley to CMU) and Winters hasn't taken a team to the playoffs yet.

Not that you're biased by your personal relationship with the guy or anything.......I'm very biased by my personal relationship, which means that unlike anyone else (that I know of) commenting on this forum, I actually know first hand what kind of strength coach the guy is. The Zips problems were not a result of Dan Bailey. In fact, any amount of success that the Zips have had through the years can largely be credited to the man. The number of "nobody recruits" to NFL players we've had has been uncommonly high during Bailey's time at UA (mostly through the Owens years) and that is a large credit to him and how he was able to develop players physically.

Good. He may be the most amazing football strength and conditioning coach, but my only experience with him has been from the stand point that I am a lowly and unimportant athlete from one of those "non-revenue" sports and I should feel privileged that I was even allowed to set foot in his weight room. His staff did more harm than good to me.Well... you were privileged to be using that facility. Believe me those who donated to get that thing built didn't do it for the rifle team. The bottom line is the strength and conditioning staff's primary responsibilities are to the football, basketball, baseball and softball, Track and Field, and soccer teams. When I was at Akron, Dan Bailey handled the football and baseball teams and another coach was responsible for basketball with Bailey overseeing it. If you can find ONE football player who has trained under Bailey that didn't think he did an outstanding job, any of you might have a point. I guarantee you Dan Bailey was not the problem this year. One thing I heard from some of my teammates who were still around for the early Brookhart years was that JD came in and made Bailey change a lot of what he was doing, and the result was not positive. Guys in the Brookhart era were smaller and more easily injured, and that was a direct result of changes JD ordered. The Owens years might not have had the most talented guys, but do you remember those offensive lines we used to have that would absolutely MAUL you? Guys like Piccirillo, Jud Cummins, Mike Brake, and the like? Those were a direct result of Dan Bailey Stength Conditioning back when he was allowed to do it his way. Walk-ons like Ryan Myers were developed into NFL players. Guys like Chase Blackburn came into the program at 200 pounds and left looking like the incredible hulk, and they would all credit that to Dan Bailey. We never saw guys develop like that under JD, and its because he made Bailey tone down a lot of what he was doing and changed a lot of the summer program and schedules, which really put a clamp on what Bailey could do. He's as much a victim of JD's incompetence as his players were.

Dan Bailey is a great guy and an even better strength coach. I've always felt the University was lucky to have him, his qualifications and skill as a strength coach are excellent, and I know this first hand as an athlete that was developed under him. That man did more for my abilities as a football player and physical development as a football player than any position coach ever did or could have. If Tom took the step of removing him that shows me a lot about the stupidity of the man and I've lost a lot of confidence in his ability to hire a successful football coach. I'm hoping this isn't true.

I think this guy might have something to say about that.Jimbo FisherRight. So FSU passed on Terry Bowden when they likely could have had him lined up to replace his dad instead of Fisher. That 11-0 season at Auburn doesn't seem to carry much weight with any of the bigger football powers.Jimbo Fisher has been the head coach in waiting at FSU for a while. Terry Bowden has never had anything to do with FSU. Your point carries no weight. If UA could get Terry Bowden, it would be the biggest hire in school history. That's a big IF though, and it's not IF he'd be a good candidate to coach here, because he'd obviously be a great candidate, but it's IF we could get him to come here.

I found some references to schools that turned him down, but not to schools that he turned down. Do you have any specifics on that?In any case, if we are talking the amount of money it would take to get him to UA, that opens a whole new world of potential coaches who would consider UA for the big bucks. But why even consider a big bucks coach if UA doesn't have big bucks to offer?Is this discussion realistic or pie in the sky?That's the conundrum. Either you spend the big bucks and upgrade the candidate pool, or hope you find a diamond n the rough that doesn't mind being payed peanuts for a few years.You want to tell the MAC that you're ready to leapfrog them permanently, you spend the money like Temple and Ohio are doing. You want to stay in the MAC and risk everything that the stadium is supposed to bring just to save a few bucks in the near term, then put away the wallets.I'm all for upgrading our pool of candidates, but let's get this soccer team hooked up first. Spend what you can to get the best coach for that money, but get the soccer team and Porter a new stadium. However, if you have enough money for both, then by all means use it. Let's just keep the soccer team happy while getting this football team back on track at a reasonable price.Love the soccer team, but soccer is never going to put 30,000 butts in the seats and give this University national exposure... it's a secondary sport. We gain more national mentions winning the MAC and a secondary bowl game in football than a national championship in soccer, and it gets the community talking about the University a lot more. The athletic department has got to stay focused on football and basketball, and if it's a choice between bringing in a great football coach and paying him or building a soccer stadium we bring in the football coach.

Bowden is very realistic for UA. He's coaching at a D2 school, has no 1-A offers as of this minute, and would be walking into a great situation in UA to build his D1 resume back up. I'm telling you, make the commitment and throw 700-900k at the guy and he'll be here, and the national press UA receives not to mention the suite and ticket sales will cover that salary in YEAR ONE.

And if we want to get a coach who we need money to get, we have to get people with money involved. What Akronites do we know of that have money and have shown support for the Zips in the past? LBJ is the first name that comes to mind. Contact him and give him a seat at the table in this coaching search.

The man has had offers, he turned them down. He chose to step into a good situation at UNA to get his feet wet again. If you look at his record at every school he's been at, there's been a quick turnaround and success. Sure he left Auburn at 1-5, but the season before that he was in the SEC Championship for craps sake!! If you can find me another coach out there with more wins as a head coach, as much name recognition, and the motivational abilities of Bowden, that would even be willing to look at Akron, I'll concede the point. He's our best possible option and is head and shoulders above anyone else we could possibly think about in terms of experience as a head coach and the excitement he would bring to the program. If we're gonna get this community off their couch to support this program, we don't need another "Who's that?" hire.

Good choice.But can The University of Akron:" Go get him, and pay him."Does this link indicate the "real" price?http://collegefootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2...-somebodys-job/A school like Memphis was paying Tommy West close to 1 million a year. Granted they have a pretty big time booster in Fred Smith of FedEx to finance that, but the way I look at it is what is paying a coach 1 million a year to fill up a 65 million dollar facility every game? We get Bowden in here and we sell 15,000 season tickets within two months, guaranteed. Bowden throws 2 million out there but he'll come for a million. We've invested money to improve every other aspect of life on this campus, why not invest in a coach who can do more to promote the U of A brand than any new building or academic program ever could? Pay the man and get him here... tomorrow.

http://www.terrybowden.com/Home.htmlGo get him Luis. Not only is he a "wow" hire, he's tremendously succesful as a head coach, a high energy guy, a great recruiter, is a former assistant coach at Akron, and is a great motivator. Also, and most importantly to me, he has a history of quick turnarounds for programs. Want to get the Akron community excited about Zips football again?? Go get him, and pay him.BOWDEN'S RECORD AS A HEAD COACH: 120-53-2

Fired for 47-51 in 8 3/4 seasons. Although they went to bowl games in five of the last six years.I don't think that's the case about five of the last six years. They haven't been to a Bowl game since our meeting in the Motor City Bowl I don't think. He did go to a Bowl game in 3 of his first 4 years however.Since you sparked my curiosity:2003: Tigers end 32-year bowl drought, beating North Texas in the New Orleans Bowl to finish 9-4.2004: Tigers finish 8-4, including a loss to Bowling Green in the GMAC Bowl.2005: Tigers finish 7-5, including a Motor City Bowl victory over Akron. All-American Williams rushes for 233 yards and three touchdowns to win bowl MVP honors.2007: Tigers finish 7-6 and return to postseason with a New Orleans Bowl loss to Florida Atlantic.2008: Tigers finish 6-7, including St. Petersburg Bowl loss to South Florida.Tommy West TimelineHmm I guess you were right. Still not too impressive though looking at the records.

One thing that will make us very attractive to anyone is that we now have some of the best if not the best Mid-Major facilities in the country. Who would've ever imagined saying that 7 years ago!