This year has really proven this out. The brutal sec West has all of 3 teams with a winning record. However, if you allowed them their annual 3 gimme ooc games, 5 of the 7 teams in the west would have winning records. I look at unranked 6-4 auburn, 4-4 ole miss, and 4-5 lsu, and think that in most years those teams would have 3 more guaranteed wins built in to their schedules and all 3 would be ranked. It's objectively a terrible thing for the sport, but as long as it's clear that this behavior will be rewarded with higher rankings, all conferences should adopt similar schedules. Before any sec homers bring up alabama's ooc scheduling, yes, they at least take on one real ooc contender each year. Everyone knows Alabama is for real. The fact that bama wins most of those games doesn't make auburn any less average. Alabama wins nearly all of their sec games, too.
Two things that I'm inclined to believe will happen to top off this shitfest of a season: ou is going to win another big 12 title with the worst team they'll likely have for the next 10 years, and Clemson is going to destroy nd, all but guaranteeing aggy's playoff spot due to them receiving this year's annual sec bias rankings bump. Maybe to top it off, after both of those are done, we'll announce we're extending Herman or spending a stupid amount to hire someone like Sonny Dykes. Fuck it all. At this point I genuinely expect the worst imaginable outcome is the most likely outcome. 2020 has trained me well.
Sadly, I just don't see it. Tennessee is worthless this year. My realistic hope is that, after aggy wins and believes they have a shot, they then watch Clemson beat nd on a last second field goal and realize they're not headed for the playoffs bc the only good team they played this season handed them an epic beatdown.
This is actually quite true. You can rationalize Tom keeping his job, but no way in hell can you rationalize hand keeping his. So why isn't he fired? Nsd is done, so if we were afraid of losing his recruits (haha!) that window has closed. This is actually one of the more compelling indicators that Tom is gone no matter what. If he wasn't, Hand should already be fired. Very interesting.
This is what makes me think it might be coordinated to get Briles. If you're going to keep Wells but replace coordinators, this move makes little sense. Offense wasn't the problem.
If Matt Wells hires Briles as OC, I would go out on a limb and say he was told he could keep his job on the condition of making this move. There's enough smoke around Briles to tech to conclude they vetted it, and possibly decided it was too politically costly to make that move. On the other hand, hiring him as a coordinator is different in that he's not the face of the program. It's a win/win for the people who want him there. Either he does enough as OC to make Wells look good, or if Wells fails, they fire him and promote Art on an "interim basis," only to keep permanently him based on his interim performance. If Briles appears on that staff in any way, it's a long play to promote him to hc if Wells fails.
I'm still choosing to remain hopeful that there's more going on behind the scenes than what's obvious. If cdc lands the coaching search well, a lot will be forgotten. That said, when most of us were thrilled to be getting cdc, there were a few people pointing out that he's mainly built his reputation on facilities and fundraising. He never had to do much of anything with Patterson at tcu. He might have been responsible for pushing him to hire better offensive coaches, but that's it, and that's a change anyone on this board could've told you they needed to make. He has made good hires in other sports, where as someone else mentioned we can just pay a lot more vs most schools. Football and men's bb are where he'll make his legacy from a coaching perspective. So far, not so good. Let's see how he lands this, though. If it lands as poorly as the ride has gone, this should be the last coaching search in a revenue sport cdc leads for us.
Why not just say "Tom Herman will be our coach for the 2021 season"? You think 5 people didn't have to read that statement before it went out? You think no one noticed it was vague? Honestly considering the scrutiny that statement was probably under, the more likely interpretation is that the statement is intentionally vague. To think that this went through the approval process to go out without anyone saying "uh, this isn't super clear" is just unbelievable.
Some of you folks shouldn't go into politics. "Tom Herman is our coach" = currently, right now, and subject to change. "Bringing Herman back in 2021" = Tom Herman will remain our coach at least until January, so no changes until the season is fully completed. "Herman is our coach moving forward into next season" = with each passing moment we are moving forward towards next season and Herman is currently our coach in that process. It is not hard to say "Tom Herman will be our football coach for the 2021 season." The fact that this statement has not been made is not accidental. Maybe Herman comes back and maybe he doesn't, but cdc has intentionally avoided saying anything definitive on the matter today. Pretending he has made a definitive statement is almost bending over backwards to read words into what he's said that he's gone to great lengths not to say. Chill.
Say what you will about Larry, he does have a really oddly accurate track record. He called Ewers decommitting before it happened and said he'd go to osu. He said without question that Tom would not give his Monday press conference and that Kansas would be cancelled. He didn't say maybe like a 9.95er, he said all of these things would happen and they did. His most notable miss was that Herman would be fired and Drayton named interim following osu, but he did say that information was assuming we would lose the game like everyone expected us to. Maybe he's just incredibly lucky, but I'm inclined to think he actually has a source. Only question is if his source is just wrong on Meyer.
If this is true, of course Fuck Mack for the thousandth time, but also fuck cdc for not anticipating negative stories from that era coming out and getting out ahead of them to convince Urban that adults are running the show now.
If he is, they're much better at keeping it under wraps. Not that the bar is super high. We did better this go around than we did with Saban, but the entire world still knows we tried to hire him.
The accounts were created at the same time and started bouncing tweets back and forth at the same time. Yes. They're together trolling. They only deleted the bevo blvd account with the trolling reveal in order to try and keep it running. They're on this board, too. Ignore these accounts.
I heard Jeff Bezos is retiring, and they're pushing to replace him with John Doe. Haven't heard of him? He started one of the most successful storefronts on ebay, and recently started selling through Amazon as well and is having great success so far. His peers from eBay all love him and rave about how he managed his storefront there. He's a little raw, but we're sure he'll adjust to the new responsibilities just fine. In all seriousness, I think there's a way you could structure a deal with Traylor where it might work, I just don't trust our program to do that. You need to find a way to delegate the additional responsibilities of being Texas coach to a very strong and experienced team around him, and let him primarily recruit and coach. That requires both us to structure that and his ego to allow that. Is Traylor going to know we need the kind of facilities upgrades and elite support staff that Urban was demanding in order to compete with Bama and Clemson? If not, he needs to hire people who do know that and have them manage those things. I know nothing about Traylor, but it seems like ego and failure to hire and lean on the right supporting staff are points on which our last two coaches have failed. The main reason I posted my scenario above is that, even if a candidate like that was Bezos 2.0, you could never sell it to investors because the risk is just too high. I believe the same is true here. Traylor might be a star in the making, but he needs to go run the cfb version of zappos successfully for a few years before we give him the keys.
The line between actual believers and those sarcastically playing along is too blurred for me to interpret at this point. Or maybe I'm just hoping a lot of the outrageous stuff getting posted right now is sarcastic.