Gaffney: Akron's inability to compete a mystery

[ZachTheZip]

Too early to blame Ianello

This was posted in the soccer forum, but I think it belongs here and deserves a discussion of its own.

Depth was a big problem, but who's fault is that? Who drove away walk-ons and scholarship players in droves?

Gaffney mentions that this recruiting class will have lots of JUCO players. I wish the recruiting services reported JUCO recruiting as well as they do high school. We don't have any JUCO verbals yet, but they don't usually get reported until late. We have offered 6 JUCOs according to Rivals.

[Dr Z]

Nice article Tom.

The secondary, though, made opposing quarterbacks look like All-Americans every week.

Please fix this iCoach. If you can't with the current coaching staff, please hire a secondary coach.

[Wally B]

Dear Tom,

The Congrove poll preidcted the Zips would go 1-11 in the PRE-SEASON! They had us barely beating GardnerWebb (Who beat ApSt during one of their championship runs btw (was also mentioned on ZN prior to the game )) and barely losing to Buffalo.

Well, we barely lost to GW in ot, and beat Buffalo by a small margin. Other than that they nailed it! Apparently it wasn't a mystery to them, and to those who follow ZN closely, it think many of us saw it too, even if we prefer to wear our glasses of denial!

The only mystery to me is why you treat the ZN as a seperate entity from the Akron community. Why didn't the Beacon report the realities of the Zips season? Why wasn't this information used to write an interesting series of articles on the fb teams progress and setbacks? Where's the discussion regarding players that were redshirted and how they might be used to start filling the holes? And given all this, why are we surprised there is a disconnect between the team and the community? This is why the Beacon is faltering, and ZN is flourishing.... we fill the void!

Other than that... Great job

[Quickzips]

I don't see what the big mystery is. Combine years of poor coaching hires, questionable recruiting strategies, seemingly yearly changes to offensive and/or defensive schemes that leave players trying to fill in in positions that don't necessarily suit their strengths, puzzling in-game decision making and utterly terrible special teams play and what do you get? A non-competitive football team. Doesn't take a brain surgeon and a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Beautiful new facilities will only carry you so far.

[Lee Adams]

Unfortunately in this day and age in order to get access,reporters have to kiss a lot of behind. So if they start calling a rear end a rear end they get no access.. Of course if you go to the games you don't really need to read the paper. You can see it for yourself. I dare say Gaffney knows how bad it is but unlike on this site he has to keep it somewhat civil.

[Wally B]

I would expect nothing less from a beacon reporter ........

That said, there's nothing wrong with pointing out the teams weakness' and realities early in the season, and noting that a lot of it stemmed from JD's lack or recruiting knowledge. From there it is easy to write "positive" articles on the development of position players, or the team coming together through adversity. It's not hard....

Slamming iCoach and calling for his head obviously isn't going to get you very far with him or the University. Waiting until after the season to say everything was a "mystery" is simply ignorant.

[ZipRoo]

The question is: Why did UA hire Brookhart in the first place, and what took them so long to realize, a) this guy recruits non-D1 players, and b ) this guy is not a good coach. ??

Any success that guy had was done with smoke-and-mirrors and talent brought here by the previous coach. Can we all agree on that?

The mystifying thing is, after breaking free of a horrid hire in Brookhart (kept around too long, in part, because of his daddy-in-law's large $ contributions)....how does the school turn right around and jump down the exact same hole? That's the question Gaffney needs to be asking Proenza and carpetbagger Worstcill.