Aggies: A question about Dennis Franchione's tenure at Texas A&M vs. Alabama.

what was his public excuse for leaving again?

what were his contracts comparitively

i've heard many times from a buddy of mine that his daughter was making quite a name for herself in tuscaloosa. idk. prob just bullshite type of banter, but that's all i got.

but always wondered why he didn't do better at A&M as well.

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What gives?

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He was a failure of epic proportions who single-handedly destroyed our program for years (thanks, in part, to the most head-scratching contract extension of all time). "Abysmal" is an understatement. To be honest, I think his success at Bama was a fluke. Can't explain it otherwise. He was a horrible fit for us--on the field, off the field, on campus, with students, among fans, in HS coaches' offices, in players' homes, etc. I don't think it helped that he never actually played the game. He and his minion/ghost writer, Mr. "Be of Good Cheer" McKenzie made Aggie Football all but unbearable to watch.

I can't be objective, so I probably shouldn't even comment. If I never hear his name again, it'll be too soon.

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Pretty ironic.

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He left Miami, not LSU, for Alabama.

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i've heard many times from a buddy of mine that his daughter was making quite a name for herself in tuscaloosa. idk. prob just bullshite type of banter, but that's all i got.

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I was a sophomore at Alabama when he left. I can remember his daughter, and her boyfriend, trying to go around to all the Greek houses and asking them to pull down the "hate signs".

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He fielded solid offenses and suffocating defenses in the two years he was in Tuscaloosa. Yet, he was abysmal at Texas A&M. His recruiting was decent at Alabama, as he left the core of what was a fabulous 2005 defense. I think most of his classes at A&M were pretty good.

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He walked into a tough situation to start. People don't want to recognize it but what RC left was scraps. We were in terrible shape and had almost no defensive talent. I think in the end, my opinion of Fran is that he is a little man. He does well when things are going well for him. But when things tank, he's petty and blames others. And he had no idea how to right the ship.

His first year was a catastrophe. That hurt recruiting. This combined with the fact that Brown and Stoops were in ascendency and were taking all the top recruits and negative recruiting us hard about running an "option scheme" on offense and we had a terrible defense. Both were true so it's pretty hard to spin.

Fran's classes looked good on paper but we had a ton of non-qualifiers and character dropouts among them. The fact is he took major risks when signing kids and we ended up playing walk-ons at multiple positions all through his tenure. The last few years were just awful recruiting wise. I once looked at our 07 and 08* classes and they probably each had fewer than 5 contributors. It's almost hard to do but those two classes alone hamstrung our program considerably. RC left holes. Fran left a goddamn grave.

* Sherman added about 5 guys to the 08 class. Virtually all became contributors but the rest of the class was atrocious

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I think in the end, my opinion of Fran is that he is a little man. He does well when things are going well for him. But when things tank, he's petty and blames others. And he had no idea how to right the ship.

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This is probably a very accurate observation. When you get right down to the heart, it probably describes why he left Alabama too.

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When you get right down to the heart, it probably describes why he left Alabama too.

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He was supposed to put out a tell-all book on his experience at Alabama. I guess that never materialized.