phrodaddy

If we set on not going after Freeze, and it appears we are, and I can understand it (even if I disagree with it), Beamer is the obvious next choice. People keep talking about how he’s never had coordinator experience. But he’s the Assistant HC for a blue blood football program, has coached both sides of the ball in his career, has been a special teams coordinator, and is most respected for his recruiting coordinating. In other words, he’s actually more prepared to coach an entire team than most coordinators are. He also has ties everywhere and has left a slew of people who respect him wherever he’s been. He’s stated a few times that the HC job at USC is his dream job. Pretty much every player that was here while he was here (and he was the recruiting coordinator for the classes that gave us three straight 11-win seasons) have advocated for him getting the job. Oh, yeah, and he’s seen how his legendary father did it for all of those years, too, so it’s not like he’ll be walking in uninformed as to how to do it. That’s he’s never been an HC is a bit scary, but the last time around, the guys who were out there for us to look at were Herman (a HC), Fuente (a HC), Muschamp (a former HC), RichRod (a HC)...and Smart - the only one to have never been a HC before, and the only one who’s been seen as successful. Just being a HC previously doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a successful HC somewhere else.

He’s not wrong completely. Look, the UGA/ND choice made sense at the time, two top 10 teams, and a built in national audience of ND fans. In reality, waiting until November for your prime time game always gives the chance at a more relevant game, but it also leaves the chance that you’re forced to use it on a meaningless game. The game was actually pretty good, too, so overall it wasn’t the worst decision. It’s just hindsight that says they may have missed the opportunity to air the #1 vs. #2 team in primetime by not waiting out a bit. Which stinks for them. But this week, now this is a head scratcher. Not just of who they picked, but why they used a 6-day pass for it, when apparently the outcomes of the games this past week meant next to nothing. Only, Finebaum’s ESPN comes out looking just as idiotic in the process as well. Mississippi State loses to lowly Tennessee, but that didn’t affect CBS’s choice of putting them in their first choice spot. They’ll be playing LSU, who brings national attention to the game as the #2 ranked team, but also means the game appears headed to a blowout status. Of the three games that they could’ve chosen from, this feels like it will be the most lopsided. Then ESPN was left choosing between UGA/UK and USC/UF for their primetime slot versus their noon slot, and they chose the imminently more interesting game, the USC/UF game, for their noon slot. It may be a ratings thing, it may be a thing that was a gift to UGA and UF (allowing UGA to not have to have back-to-back home conference games at noon, while at the same time allowing UF to not have back-to-back road conference games at night), it may be any number of things. But the one thing that’s clear is that none of it appears based on the outcomes of last week’s games. If we were purely looking at last week’s outcomes to determine these slots, then they may really odd choices. So in the same way that hindsight is telling us that CBS may have wasted their primetime opportunity, it looks very much like they wasted their 6-day scheduling pass - and ESPN seemingly followed suit. If the outcomes of games aren’t gonna really matter for your next week’s schedule, then why use a 6-day pass on it? Weird.

He's right about Ward being a great recruiter, though. If Ward stays, and that seems to me to be a long-shot now, that will tell us how invaluable Spurrier believes him to be on the recruiting trail.

I honestly don't understand the complete dismissal of USC in this conversation. I haven't been around Auburn or College Station, but in Columbia, the rumors of Muschamp being the next DC have been flying around since the Kentucky game, and in my experience, when rumors in Columbia are this rampant, they should not be so easily dismissed. The idea that Spurrier may keep Ward around seems far-fetched. How Spurrier coached the offense in the Auburn game may just be the biggest indictment of a DC I've ever seen. Even after the Florida game when the defense probably had it's best outing, in some ways it accentuated why Ward needs to go. He bases his entire scheme, it seems, on the hope that singular talents are good enough to cover for bad fundamentals. Skai Moore was finally at 100% (or near it), and he played above his head Saturday. The team has struggled for a few years now at fundamentals (tackling, shedding blockers) on defense and have had simply enough singular talent to overcome it, and that seemed to be the case Saturday. The same is true for the secondary. This team under Ward, even with the NFL talent mentioned in this article, always has struggled to cover anyone in a zone scheme. Against Florida they abandoned the zone almost entirely, asked the young but talented secondary to man up Florida's receivers, and they did. The problems with USC's defense this year have been almost entirely coaching issues, not talent ones. Yeah, they're young, but they're talented enough too, and if they were coached right, they could compete. Instead, what everyone has suspected here in Columbia the past few years, that talent the likes of JD Clowney, DJ Swearinger, Melvin Ingram, etc. have masked coaching issues, seems to be coming to unfortunate fruition this year. Spurrier, you can tell, does not want to have to be this worried about coaching defense ever again. And he's got enough clout to get the athletic offense to roll out the armored car to get his good friend Muschamp here, and Ray Tanner's got enough clout at the school to be able to provide the armored car. I'm not saying it's a done deal, by any stretch. But I actually think the chances are pretty good that Muschamp is more than just nice window shopping in Columbia.

I'd actually expect South Carolina would look to hire Muschamp as the D coordinator (assuming Ward doesn't keep his job). Spurrier and he are friends, and Spurrier knows some of his best offensive coaching has happened this year. Match that up with Muschamp's defensive coaching abilities, and the fact that those two are apparently pretty close friends, that's the rumor flying around Columbia.

So, I keep reading how UGA has the easiest schedule. They have a 5-week stretch where they play 4 games away from Athens (with a bye week mixed in). Starting with back-to-back weeks at Mizzou and then at Arkansas, two really long road trips against two pretty good teams. All I know is that when a team full of college players has a home game on the first week of October and not another one until mid-November, playing all conference games in that stretch, rare is the team that survives that type of gauntlet. (South Carolina fans remember that last year all too well.) So I'm not buying the notion that UGA has the easiest schedule. Sorry.

So you argument is based on USC's really tough road game at Florida and Mizzou's rather winnable road game at Florida. Am I correctly understanding that?