re: If B.H. Doesn’t Make It, Would Deion Sanders Excite the Fan Base?

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You can't coach unbelievable athletic ability.

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Your mistake is that you believe everything that made Deion successful was just because of his unbelievable athletic ability. Can he coach someone to be as good as he was? Most likely not. Can he coach someone to be a championship level player? I think so.

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DING DING DING.

Harsin inherited a roster built on finesse. It was the way the team was coached. It is the way the team was weight trained. Hell, look at the 225 lb bench numbers for our OL. A HC is coming in and trying to change the entire culture of the program. That doesn't just happen in a short period of time.

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Bro. Harsin begged those finesse players to stick around. I feel sorry for any beef and potatoes HC that has to clean up after Harsin’s shite.

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so your answer is to fire the HC, and pay yet another buyout for the entire staff, with the third highest winning percentage in the nation to bring in a HC that is unproven as a HC? Brilliant!

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Harsin no longer has the third highest winning percentage in the nation. Are you nuts?

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All of my arguments are facts.

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I bet you also think Harshkin has the 3rd best winning percentage in all of football

Do you honestly think Harsin will be successful if he continues to recruit around 20th in the country and bottom half of the SEC?

8 commitments in mid September isn't building a roster is it?

Deion is intriguing.


Clearly the man can recruit, as evidenced by the fact that he pulled the #1 kid in the country last year. But, their schedule is basically just them playing other HBCUs, which for a variety of reasons, have a major talent disadvantaged even compared to other FCS teams. So if Deion has a major talent advantage against other schools, it's easy to expect that they'll win the majority of their games, which in turn makes him look amazing.

BUT, Jackson St won't be playing in the FCS Playoffs. So you won't get to his teams go up against the upper echelon of that division (No Dakota schools, Eastern Washingtons, Jax St, etc.), which would be where you could see just how he's doing.

I've also heard that Deion is quietly trying to position himself for the Georgia Tech job, mostly as a "frick you" to FSU because they didn't consider him for their HC job when they hired Norvell, which, considering at the time Deion had ZERO FBS coaching experience as even a position coach, yeah, don't really blame them for that one.


Long story short, it's clear to win at this level, not only do you have to be able to recruit, but you also need to be able to scheme effectively. We know Deion can do one of those things, but it's unclear if he can do the 2nd.


I think there are plenty of candidates out there who can recruit at a high level, but also have proven experience scheming and evolving said schemes, and any one of them would be a better candidate than Deion AT THIS POINT IN TIME.

I can't believe I haven't thought of this yet, but does Bryan Harsin not remind anyone else of the Bret Bielema experiment at Arkansas?

1) Both guys had "stellar" coaching records at their previous jobs which seemed to imply that they'd be able to translate to the SEC. Bielema had four 10+ win seasons at Wisconsin, with three of those being 11+ win seasons. Ironically, both guys more or less just continued the success of coaches that built those programs before them.

2) Both guys struggled HEAVILY with recruiting in the SEC. But not just that, they struggled (or are struggling in the case of Harsin) because they were hard-headed and thought they knew better than everyone else. Bielema made an arse of himself by going into Texas (an important recruiting ground for Arky) and tried to play off some bravado about how they play too soft, which alienated the HS coaches. Harsin came here and blundered significantly with his handling of HS coaches and relationships. The similarities here are really eerie, and Bielema essentially failed because of his recruiting.

3) Both guys are trying to live and die by seemingly fitting square pegs into round holes and being obtusely rigid in their approaches. For Bielema, this was believing that he could "out-tough" and "out-muscle" SEC opponents which was the typical Wisconsin mantra. Harsin actually shares similarities here with the approach - his offense is less one-dimensional, but the whole "we're going to lift weights and maul people and compete hard" thing is similar.


The main similarity seems to revolve around a lack of humility for both in respect to the competition level that they were walking into. They were both outsiders who won a lot at their previous jobs and this gave them the impression that they need not adapt to what they were walking into in this conference. Both guys have shown zero ability/interest in terms of changing or adapting their approaches - they are both very block-headed in terms of "this works, don't ask questions".

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Last years class wasn’t impacted by Harsin’s attempted firing.

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so you honestly expected a HC with no ties to the south to come in and kill it in nine months? The top guys had been recruiting those players for several years, minimum. Those programs have stability.

Chiz's first year was not a strong class.

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The Tigers earned some national respect with the 2009 group. The Tigers were ranked the No. 19 class by Rivals.com, the No. 25 class according to ESPN.com and the No. 16 class according to Scout.com.

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It takes time to build relationships with HS coaches when moving into a new region.


ETA and Chiz had been at Auburn previously so he already had relationships with HS coaches in the south.