quote:
I remember when Golding was hired and two things come to mind. One, he produced an excellent defense at UTSA. I forget the numbers but it was good. And two, he was supposed to be the golden boy post Lupoi.

Well we saw how all that tuned out.

There are some similarities between the Wommack and Golding hire for sure and folks looking at this with skepticism are right to do it.

and yet people wanted Travaris Robinson, the quintessential Golding type coach. Great recruiter, average at best coach. Wommack has been a P5 DC before (which Golding had not) and was a finalist for the broyles award. Look through his defensive coordinator and head coaching career stats. His teams improved in scoring defense ppg year over year every time, often very substantially. Indiana was 81st in scoring defense before he became DC. Year 1 he improved that to #45 and year 2 he improved that to #19. Indiana was at a perpetual talent disadvantage to pretty much every other team in their league.

For comparison, Robinson has only been a DC once, for South Carolina when muschamp was HC, and they were a joke. I know they were a joke because we all laughed at them. He only produced a single decent scoring defense in 4.5 seasons there (fired halfway through the 5th). 2016 #51, 2017 #25, 2018 #67, 2019 #53, 2020 #105 (fired after 7 games). South Carolina under Robinson had way more defensive talent than Indiana under Wommack. At least Golding had produced some consistently good lower division defenses when he was hired. Robinson was an abject failure as a DC, and I wasn't overly impressed with what he did as a DB coach at Bama, considering the talent he had to work with and the pass rush we generated while he was here

This post was edited on 1/16/24 at 10:56 am