GP1

I'd love to have a job with the Plain Dealer writing about the Browns. Every two years, I could just pull up my old QB articles, change the names and dates, then republish. Browns fans have become so desensitized to the stupidity of their favorite team, they don't even know or care about the articles at this point. I could condense eight hours of work into eight minutes writing about Browns QBs. Come to think of it, maybe that's why Terry Pluto had so much time to watch porn and develop a porn addiction....makes sense if you think about it. That "new" car the Browns just bought has a lot of miles on it already. The guy has not played a down or proven a thing yet and he is less than two years from being on the wrong side of 30. By the time he gets into his "prime", his prime will be over. I know it sounds harsh, but the NFL is a harsh business for young guys in their 20s. Keep all of those PD and ABJ articles written about him in the next two weeks and see what they are writing about in two years. The answer for the Browns was to keep McCoy and let his body get destroyed over the next three years while they try to turn that franchise into a real NFL franchise (And I don't just mean the guys on the field either). Use him up then cut him. After using up McCoy, you find a franchise QB once there are decent pieces around him. Take it from a Steelers fan...Never get emotional about the players on the field. If there is good, proven leadership in the franchise, the players become replaceable.

I posted the form for this outing not long ago and I'll never be able to find it. If someone could be kind enough to bump it up so Matt has some help, I think it would help the cause.

I respectfully disagree. Can't State IS an endless joke of a university and alumni base.

I love your posts on this issue. Especially the relation of the Roman fans to modern football fans. The Romans didn't have products like NFL Films showing them, and glorifying, major violent plays. ESPN is even more guilty than NFL Films. Roman fans had a certain maturity that our society is not capable of grasping. The Roman Gladiators were fighting to the death in reality and the fans understood exactly what was going on in the arena. ESPN and NFL films lead us to believe football players are modern day gladiators and the coaches are great philosophical leaders. They aren't. An alternate reality is created and our immature society is more than eager to embrace that false reality. The other major difference is the gladiators were killed immediately. Football players are being killed by the game well into their retirement. There came a point in Rome when enough was enough with the killing and the gladiators went away. It is taking us a while, but we are now seeing our modern day gladiators go away in a pathetic manner and we are starting to not like it. Will the NFL go away like the gladiators did in time?

If Pohl is better, he should start and they should stick with him all of next season come Hell or high water (see my post on Tanner Price). There is no need to go Cleveland Browns on a young Zips QB if they believe he is the future. One other thing. Manning, Aikan and 19 win Charlie never had to walk into the disaster of a program this program is in (until they prove otherwise). There is still a lot of work to be done and winning doesn't come easy. Especially at Akron.

I could watch a frosh start on a lousy team as long as the lousy team was competitive and the QB showed the ability to take the experience of his first season and take a huge leap in results his second season. I know people don't like my Wake Forest comparisons, but I use them because they do so many things right with very little compared to other ACC schools. We do so little with so much compared to even MAC schools, but that is going to change soon. Tanner Price is Wake's QB. He will be a junior this coming season. Since I go to all of their games, I've seen him play a lot. His frosh year he was a true frosh on a lousy team. Very hard to go to the games and watch them go 3-8. If you read his bio though, he had an excellent season for a Wake frosh QB. Better individual stats than Riley Skinner (rhymes with winner) who was one of the best college QBs I've ever seen play. If we play a frosh QB next season, he has to perform well like Price did his frosh season. If the wins aren't there, but we are competitive AND the potential is there to improve a great deal between his frosh and soph seasons, then play him. A player should improve the most between those two seasons. Look at Price. He goes from a 3-8 QB to a 6-6 bowl season QB at a school like Wake that isn't known for football. If we started a frosh QB next season and he went 3-9 and then 6-6 his second season, we would all be jumping for joy. It would be what we should expect out of a good coaching staff. Going from 3-9 to 4-8 wouldn't do anything for me and a waste of that QBs frosh season. This program needs to make a huge leap after next year. One game improvements are nothing but "building process" nonsense.

I would agree with one big IF that I don't think will happen, but who knows... Anyhow, if the coaching staff thinks we could still be pretty bad and uncompetitive next year (only 1 or 2 wins), don't start a frosh. A guy who loses a lot only learns to lose. If they are still a year away, don't destroy a young QB. Other than that, if the competition is close, play the frosh. I think we can score enough points next year that there will be at least 3 MAC schools that poop their pants trying to keep up. Four wins shouldn't be out of the question.

I saw that too. Maybe we need to do some dot connecting. I guess what I'm looking for is who was taking most of the snaps with the first team offense. Maybe GT could shed some light. TB brought up that 13 gets rid of the ball quickly and doesn't take sacks. Was one QB more prone to sacks this spring than another? Sacks absolutely kill. Not as much as a fumble or INT, but they put teams in very bad situations that can lead to turnovers. Is 13 throwing some ints in order to prevent a sack? Is 8 getting sacked because he isn't getting rid of the ball quick enough? I don't know the answer to any of this, but sacks can be an important measurement of QB performance as it realates to his understanding of the offense. I'd also like to know TBs thoughts on the performance of the offense in the red zone. Lastly, I like that TB said, "I know what we have to do." Not..."We'll take a close look and try to figure out what to do." I just have a lot of confidence in the guy.

I just watched the video on GoZips and liked what I saw. Lots of points and lots of big plays. Wide open football the way it is played in the 21st Century. 13 had a couple of passes intercepted, but hard to tell if it was him or the WR (those are things fans neve really know). Moore had a nice run, which I like to see because a QB with an ability to run at least some in the spread opens everything up. Moore also didn't have any batted passes...It's amazing how those go away when the passing game consists of more than the five yard slant. Who is the #1 QB coming out of spring practice?

Because they didn't know any better. Who has sat on the last two football coaching hiring committees?

I don't know if the deserve it or not, but if the ACC is a BCS AQ, then so is the Big East. Maybe not with the exit of WVU, Pitt and Syracuse, but up until this coming year there were better than the ACC. VA Tech (former Big East) has won the ACC football championship four of eight times since joining the league. It isn't a very good football conference and VA Tech is not the program it was eight years ago. Some say WVU was not let in the ACC because of academics. That's nonsense. WVU (Big East) wasn't allowed in the ACC because realignment is happening for football reasons and WVU would immediately be the best team in the ACC. The other schools don't want them in because they don't want a repeat of VA Tech. They made Clemson look like a I-AA team last bowl season when they beat them 70-33. Imagine what their offense would do on a weekly basis against the teams that don't win the conference.

The Great GP1 did when I saw the words "pro style offense".

This is a good start for me. I need winning as well, but until that comes, I need some entertainment for my three and a half hours.

Dennison frequently came a game away from finishing under .500. He was a fine enough coach, but not a guy to be a D1A coach. His promotion would have been exactly the small time thinking that has given us losing season, one after another, for many years. I'm not sure what the people who defend Dennison want. He was a DII coach with DII ideas. He had zero experience coaching D1A football and was not the guy for the job so he was promoted into a position he was also not suited for for SEVEN YEARS (only in the government). Is that being poorly treated? The knock on Faust is he was a terrible coach because he finished at Akron with a losing record. Fair enough. Given the circumstances, who could have done better? The weight room Faust's first two years was two combined classrooms in the JAR. Faust coached at a school that didn't have a President, anyone on the Board of Trustees or an AD who knew how to support what he was trying to do. Faust knew what to do and there wasn't anyone else at the University who could support him. Faust winning as many games as he did was almost a miracle. He did pray a lot.... There is no doubt Akron has paid a price over the past 20+ years. We live in an "either/or" world so the discussion comes down to Dennison vs. Faust. That was never the contest and it is a childish argument to make. If it has to be either/or, I would argue the biggest problem we have had over the past 20+ years has been the "Building Process" vs. the "Winning Process". We've spent too much time building and not enough time winning because the University had almost nobody, until Mike Thomas came along, who had a clue as to what to do so they tried to mask their cluelessness in the "building process". They were nothing but a bunch of tricksters. The feelings people have about Dennison getting fired are an extremely small portion of the price. Our endless losing has been FAR worse for this program than Dennison getting passed over. 15,000 people went to Detroit for a bowl game and I doubt many of them mentioned the word Dennison while there. My guess is anyone harboring resentment about this issue to this day are the same people who have a thousand reasons not to go to Akron games in order to stay at home and watch Ohio State play.

I don't know if I buy your whole story either. Some of your story makes Dennison look even worse than I described. If Dennison took the AD job, the money and the retirement without doing anything, I think even less of him. Basically, anyone who would do that has no character and isn't the person people describe. I believe Dennison was part of a larger group of people who didn't really know what to do so they all floundered together. To pretend Dennison had NOTHING to do with any of the problems in those years is not being open minded about how bad it was and how many people were really at fault. In fact, the worst thing the school did was keep him around to be the boss of the guy he was fired to hire. If he was sitting on his butt while the football program floundered, shame on him and shame on the administration for not showing him the door years before. This link will take anyone to the Jim Dennison Wiki page. I don't see the magic of a "proven winner". Certainly not the guy to take Akron from I-AA to D1A. In six years, he never won the OVC and made the playoffs once. He was dismissed from the playoffs after one game. He had a career as a high school coach before being an assistant at Akron during the DII Era and then became head coach. There is no way on God's green Earth he should have been the guy to lead Akron into D1A. Faust had more experience at a real D1A school than Dennison, which is why he got the job. Faust was a good hire at the time...the problem was the rest, and the rest includes a lot of people including Dennison. Please don't take this as criticism of your post Class of 82. A lot of people have been told of the greatness of Dennison AND have been told to believe it without even doing any research to find out if everything everyone is saying is true. I've never really talked to the guy and I played football when he was the AD. All I know is what he did as a coach, which is overblown, and what he did as an AD, which resulted in seven lost years for the University. My guess is everyone else in college football thought the same way about him as I do as he never sniffed even a I-AA job again.

Best line in the article..."Regardless, they handled the transition so badly that the program has yet to recover." At first, I was a little upset about the last paragraph. After putting some thought into it, I don't blame the old guy for thinking that way on some level. Thus far, the stadium has been a complete waste of money. That is going to turn around, but probably a true statement depending how you look at it and the time you put around it. Lastly, Jim "The Victim" Dennison always likes to get a word in framed as if nothing was his fault. He was just the poor football coach who got the boot from a horrible system....complete bull-youknowwhat. The guy was AD for seven years (28% of the time) we were in D1 and showed absolutely nothing while doing the job. One might even say hiring Dennison as the AD was the worst mistake Akron made during the D1 Era. His small Terry Plutolike thinking kept us back for years and his hiring MAY even be worse than the TW hiring. He really has no room to comment and I wish a better researched reporter would follow up with him about that in stories around this topic.

Question: How do you know it's springtime in NE Ohio? Answer: The girls in the senior class at Barberton start to show their pregnancy.

Having Mike Holmgren's job is like being named captain of the Titanic AFTER the ship hit the ice. That franchise was doomed from the start.

Couldn't agree more...

Question: How do you know it's springtime in NE Ohio? Answer: The residence of Barberton plant flowers in the toilets in their front yards.

A little slow right now on the board. Let's have some fun. One of my favorite memories of living in NE Ohio was making fun of Barberton. Bring out your best Barberton joke(s). Here is mine for the day: Barberton...Where baby strollers are high school graduation gifts.

It's high school football. The fate of the free world does not hang in the balance with high school playoffs. My advice is to not feel anything about it.

In order to make failures feel better about themselves by giving them a venue where they don't have to compete against the best, which will ultimately provide them with a false sense of success. It's about feelings and not accomplishment...a horrible lesson for high school kids. To quote the great, 16 time World Champion, Nature Boy Rick Flair, "To be the man, you've go to beat the man."

“It’s real simple, whoever gets the best players wins. It’s all wrapped up in their recruiting. The whole key to winning is getting the best players. That’s just as simple as it is,” he said. Best quote from GT's article. I've been telling everyone for years...You don't win with Xs and Os. You win with Jimmies and Joes. Remember, most every coach knows the same as the next coach. It's a matter of getting talent then turning that talent into something. If you don't get the talent, you can't make anything out of it (You can't make chicken salad out of chicken poop).

It is an expanded playoff system/joke. Last year, the first round had a game between two giants of football well deserving of being in the playoffs. One team was 2-8 and the other was 3-7. For those two teams, the playoffs are punishment for having a bad season. For one of them, it is even more punishment for winning a meaningless game (sort of like going deep into the CBI Tournament). Think of the pep talk: Coach: "Men...It's a new season." National Honor Society student on the team thinks to himself: "Ya, and we still stink." I know this is hard for people to understand, but if there were no high school playoffs, the world wouldn't come to an end. There was nothing wrong with what the state was doing already. This is a money grab for the OHSAA because people don't go to the championship games like they used to (because Massillon and Canton are horrible places to visit when the weather is cold) and they need to make up the money. Justice is secondary.