Grey: I honestly find your defense of DD as or more tiring than you find my posts. Yow delivered you a Christmas gift of 3+ more years of DD. I don’t really care one way or another because the inputs of our football program add up to about 7-5 to 9-3, and that’s what we’re getting. I care much more about men’s basketball where we do have the inputs to do something far more than we have over the past 20 years.
I am willing to admit that some things are good and some things are bad. In the spirit of continuous improvement, given we’ve got more time I would hope we seek to get better. To hear you talk, we didn’t even need to hire that 10th coach. DD has it all covered. We just need some better players. Shrugs.
I like the Roof hire. I’m in a minority that I have no real issue with Hux. I don’t love our version of 4-2-5, but hopefully Roof can shore the passing defense up like he did at GT this year. I do wonder if this signals something about Hux and I’m not the only person asking that.
As for Special teams, there have been interactions on another site with a former kicker of ours. He has outlined many issues with coaching relative to how the place kicking is being instructed (multiple kickers doing the same incorrect things, holders, etc.). Maybe a better place kicker solves it because maybe he just ignores what is coached, so maybe Jimmy does fix it. My gut says when multiple players make the same mistakes, you may want to look at who is telling them to do that. For a team that isn’t going to “out talent” the opposition, Special teams is a way to make a difference. It looks to me like we under invest there.
And yes, for some of us who thought that if DD were relieved of his duties (and I fully believe the last two years came down to week 12), we felt that Kitchings would be a good hire. We’ve heard from a lot of places that Kitchings is a great recruiter and really connects with people. That line of thinking is an acknowledgment that many things are going well, but if a change had to be made not to throw the good out with the bad. As you say none of us really know the exact decisions made by which coach, but we do know that DD is responsible for the sum of them, and is the one who tells the refs what time outs to call, whether to challenge, etc.. So I cannot tell you if Des or Drink or the phantom sports analytics person is the source, but I can tell you that DD is the responsible party, and then is the one that often blames the players, refs, laptops, etc. when they don’t work out.
