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

Fran signed an obscenely low number of O linemen. Can't do shite without linemen

Fran was also the victim of not properly adjusting to the changing times of spread offenses, we got left behind by Tech and oSu offensively. It took Sherman a while to build and recruit what we needed talent wise because Fran missed badly. Alabama recruits itself to a certain extent, A&M had to outrecruit and find some hidden 3 stars that were really 4 stars in the Fran/Sherman years because LSU, OU, and tu were snatching up all the prime talent in Texas. Combined with his attitude towards HS coaches, we had some really crappy recruiting in his time.

He could be an excellent one game coach. We beat tu two straight when we fired him. But that was a great example of Fran not understanding how things work at A&M. He thought mistakenly that's all he needed to do. While longhorns think that our world revolves around them, Fran found out first hand that wasn't the case.

link?! must see. lolol.

I can associate with Utah... rofl.

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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.

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This hit the nail on the head

Interesting.

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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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But the crazy thing is that in his coaching stops before Bama, he had earned a reputation as a turnaround guru. From the Southwestern Moundbuilders (NAIA) to Pittsburgh St. (Div II) to Southwest Texas State to New Mexico to TCU, he always came in and made the program better than he found it. For example, TCU went 1-10 the year before he got there. Three years later, Fran was leaving after a 10-1 mark (Patterson coached TCU in their loss to Southern Miss in the Mobile Alabama bowl).

I don't think any one theory fits all the data.

Whelp when you don't recruit certain positions.
never mind already discussed

At TCU? All of that success is due to one pretty good RB named LT.

He'll, I could have coachedTCU to a successful team with that guy on the field.

Serious post: I'm not sure if this thread is a flame or if it was an honest question. But there are Rant-esque troll attempts (gay jokes, little brother, etc), and then there's ripping open a wound that no amount of national championships will ever heal: The Fran Era.