GP1
-
Posts
10,738 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
83
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Gallery
Blogs
Posts posted by GP1
-
-
Coach Bowden addresses as much as can be expected at this time of year in this interview about halfway through.
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.
-
7. Love the style of play on both sides of the ball and there was a lot of hope in the air at the big dialer yesterday
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?
-
My bad, I should have said anyone on the search committee.
Because they didn't know any better.
Who has sat on the last two football coaching hiring committees?
-
The Big East is a basketball conference that has football BCS AQ status (deserved or not)
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.
-
Why did no one raise a red flag with Ianello?
The Great GP1 did when I saw the words "pro style offense".
-
2. The team will be fun to watch, if nothing else. The offensive pace and focus on big plays will be entertaining, and the defense looked aggressive.
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.
-
Okay. So Gerry had three winning seasons... out of nine. His record at Akron was a sorry 43-53-3. Gerry is a really nice and likeable guy, but he couldn't carry Jim Dennison's jock strap as a college coach, imo.
Dennison was 80-62-2 in his 13 years as Zips head coach. He had only two losing seasons. His teams were 30-22-1 in the OVC, finishing second in the conference three out of six seasons. His last season, the Zips went 8-4 (5-2) and made the I-AA playoffs. People can diss him all they like, but Dennison's record speaks for itself. He was a fine coach, and he was well-liked and well-respected by virtually everyone who knew him. The treatment he received from Bill Muse and the Board was an unconscionable and damned-near career-destroying kick in the nuts to a loyal, long-serving and high-performing employee. And whether anyone wants to acknowledge it or not, Akron paid a pretty steep price for that mistreatment. Jim had, and still has, a lot of very close friends in this area. Any way you slice it, the way that whole affair went down was shameful and an absolute embarassment. Treating people the way he was treated ain't good karma. We can only hope Akron's done paying for that bad karma.
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.
-
With lots of respect sent your way, I think you have a rather distorted view of history here, GP.
While Dennison was given the title and salary of AD, he was never really in charge of athletics. Our carpet-bagger president at the time, Bill Muse, and his office were running the whole athletics show. Dennison being given the AD title and salary was simply a way for Muse to get what he wanted and look a little less cruel than he would have by kicking Jim to the curb entirely. But Dennison was no more "directing" athletics at the university than you or I were. I don't blame Jim for keeping the title and salary and credits toward his STRS retirement before gracefully bowing out and getting back into coaching at Walsh. And I certainly don't blame Jim for the shambles left in Bill Muse's wake.
I don't see how anyone can argue that the way we jumped out of the OVC served us well in the short OR long term. Bill Muse's self-serving desire to be big-time so he could land a bigger job for himself cost us the continued services one of the best young coaches in college basketball, AND we replaced a proven winner as our football coach with a guy who...nice and personable as he was... had already shown that he was clearly ill-suited to be a college football coach. The time to go D-1 was when we received the MAC invitation that was pretty much inevitable down the road. And we still have not fully recovered from that bone-headed decision. I see that as the context for Jim Dennison's comments, and in my opinion he is dead-center, right on the money.
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.
-
Well I'm a Browns fan, but not a Holmgren fan so much.
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.
-
whatever holmgren says.....do the opposite
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.
-
My D4 school made the playoffs once in their history, and wound up playing Cardinal Moody in the first round. The following year Mooney was kicked up two divisions. Now how are we suppose to feel about that BS?
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.
-
Maybe I am naive, or maybe Im biased since I went to a private high school... but exactly what is the point of separating them?
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).
-
GP1 doesn't South Carolina have expanded playoffs too? I thought when my friend was down there trying to educate the youth he mentioned almost every team down there made the "playoffs".
Until Ohio realizes that Cardinal Mooney and Manchester (despite similar student body counts) are not exactly at the samvel and starts making all the parochial schools play in the same divisions, I won't pay attention to their "changes".
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.
-
Back in the 70's and 80's, McDonald High School had plenty of 10-0 teams that sat home come playoff time. I guarantee several would have won state titles.
McDonald or Massillon? How did McDonald get so good with everyone wearing those big red shoes?
Revamp the playoffs, don't make them bigger.
-
The OHSAA rewards mediocrity with this decision. Do 1/3 of all high school teams really deserve to make the playoffs? I hate to say, "When I was growing up", but when I was growing up, a high school team had to actually be good to make the playoffs. In three years of high school football, I only lost in four regular season games and played in the playoffs only once. Now, teams can lose four games in a season and make the playoffs. Something doesn't smell right.
Must be some kind of crisis to cause this decision to be made...Maybe the OHSAA is running out of money, because it can't be because too many teams aren't making the playoffs...Too many teams are ALREADY making the playoffs.
-
I don't think the cupboard is going to be nearly as bare as it was last year. If we are getting the right information, TB will have some additions at the end of the year. It can only get better.
-
No. If he goes to Fordham, he will be playing for the QB coach that originally recruited him.
You also ignored about 93% of my post where I further explained the situation. Saving you the reading - The Zips have bigger needs than a mediocre senior QB. By showing the mediocre QB the door, they can get a 5th year senior linebacker or JUCO offensive lineman that will fill a much bigger need.
And to be clear - While BigZip said I "loved" Nicely, those were his words. I never said anything else other than Moore was horrible, and Nicely was the better QB. Nicely was no threat to be even 3rd team All-MAC, but he was better than Moore.
I read the whole thing. Just answering the question. If he doesn't go to Fordham, he is in the same situation he was in at Akron.
There are other QBs they could have shown the door. The first one out is the first one beat out. If he didn't get beat out by the others and was a casualty of the numbers game game, TB could have had that conversation with him long before spring football started. I'm not a fan of either Moore or Nicely, but I trust the coaching staff to make talent decisions as it relates to the offense they will be running. Moore won the tallest midget contest over Nicely. I guess a congratulatory single clap is in order...clap...
-
Why did Nicely leave?
I also doubt Nicely was all that keen on staying in Akron to play for a 3rd coach in 4 seasons. He had options to play elsewhere.
Nicely left because he was getting beat out. If he was higher on the depth chart or even #1, he would have never left.
Because he didn't want to play for a 3rd coach in 4 seasons? Doesn't relocating do the same thing?
-
I like this part best: Of the quarterbacks, Kyle Pohl masterminded the best drive of the day – cool methodical and it culminated in a touchdown.
I would like to make a recommendation to Mr. Thomas. Please let us know who the players are playing against when they do the things they do. It is an important part of the evaluation process in spring practice. I'm impressed if Pohl drives the field against the first or second team defenses. I'm not impressed if he does it against the #3s.
I'd also like to know what type of plays were called on goal line. Ration of run:pass. If Moore goes 1-4 scoring and doesnt' throw a pass, it doesn't matter who the QB was. If they score on all for with no passes, it doesn't matter who the QB was.
I would also like to ask Mr. Thomas to talk to TB about his thoughts on the red zone offense. Red zone execution is key to winning football games. How are we doing?
Todays spring game
in Akron Zips Football
Posted
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.