VTTW Board Index

As it turns out, he must be a pretty good coach. He just got to UT at a bad time.

I think he is. I've said it over and over...he got way too much blame for what happened with the offense in '08.

Clawson was a scapegoat.

I'd better shut up now. 

Cause the last 5 years have really been a breath of fresh air.   :rolleyes:

He was never allowed autonomy to run the offense. You could see it then and you can see it with the offense success he has had at BG.

So, what do Dooley and Kiffin's tenures have to do with Dave Clawson? He wasn't here.  

Is it just coincidental that Clawson was successful at Boling Green?  

Clawson couldn't move while he was at UT because Fulmer was sitting on top of him. 

That's a lot of weight sitting on top of you for a year

I know, so does everyone else, what your stance is on Fulmer.  My point is UT couldn't have been fired soon enough for the anti-Fulmer crowd.  "Kick him to the curb, wee can do better than this!", we were told.  Well?  We're still hoping that 3 years from now we might actually be competitive.  I realize Dooley and Kiffin have nothing to do with Fulmer, and that the real problem is the hires that were made after Fulmer was gone.  But what if Fulmer was given another year, and then fired?  My bet is we wouldn't have ended up with Kiffin and Dooley then.  But those of us on the fence about Fulmer were wary of this.  I knew it wasn't like it was in the 90's anymore, but firing Fulmer did not guarantee things would be better.  Of course, no one could've predicted Kiffin and Dooley.. but in hindsight right now it looks to me like we could've avoided all these losing seasons potentially by handling the Fulmer situation differently.

And yes, I realize we're beating a dead horse here but you started it.   :kiss2:

Fulmer had 2 losing seasons in his last 4 years, and probably not coincidentally, he had Cut those 2 years he won.  He was not recruiting well, and he was making bad hires. I knew we'd start getting worse in the late 2000's when I was looking at the recruiting classes. He was getting lazy and entitled, and needed to go. There are no guarantees in life, you certainly can't predict what would have happened if we kept Fulmer another year and then fired him, it could have been a better hire, but likely Hamilton would have bungled that one as well - he was a terrible AD in hindsight. Who knows? You can't predict what happens had we not fired him at all....based on what happened at Bama, FL, etc it's likely we'd be in similar shape...but that's all speculation.

You can't play that game. The decision to fire Fulmer was just and the right thing to do. The decision to hire Kiffin was bad, and obviously now we can say Dooley was worse because he did not improve the talent. It happens. bama took a while before they hired the right guy as well.

Ditto!

and btw the same thing is happening with Cuonzo. We'll have a good year this year - not as good as we can be, and then start regressing next year. Look at the class coming in. Very little offense.

Nope. Firing Fulmer at the time wasn't the wrong thing to do.  Hiring Kiffin and then Dooley were the wrong things to do. 

Fulmer put himself in the situation by being lazy in recruiting and failing to make coaching changes when they needed to be made because he let personal relationships get in the way and refused to do what needed to be done professionally.  Keeping him another year wasn't going to change the direction of the program.  There's just nothing to indicate he would have made necessary changes. 

Clawson was a scapegoat - plainly and simply. 

This conversation gives me a headache. Have you ever noticed that we all say the same things every time it comes up?

And, yet, I read it anyway.  :laugh:

Our situation is really similar to Bama's situation before.  They suffered through 4 coaches before finally getting it right and had some fairly awful seasons.  Funny how it happens everywhere.

And the Fulmeristas will never admit that Fulmer had gotten lazy and was not the same coach the last 5-6 years of his UT tenure that he was the first 10. 

I don't hesitate to admit that, he wasn't the same.  I just wonder in hindsight what would've been if we would've waited a year.  But I know, I know.. hindsight's 20/20.

Hey, this thread sounds interesting.  What are you guys talking about in here?

Oh.  Nevermind. :inughout:

(http://mgoblog.com/sites/mgoblog.com/files/beating-a-dead-horse.png)

SSDD

What was Clawson supposed to do in one year with a whole new system?  Plus he had that silly o line rotation thing going...which we were supposed to accept because...get this....high school teams do it! Seriously that was an argument offered to defend Clawson.

He was a good coach stuck in a bad position.

We should have waited to fire Fulmer petiod.  The FSU model is much better thsn the michigsn UT model . Just look at the results.

Yeah, it was such a silly thing that Phillip Fulmer his frickin' self did the same damned thing part of the time he was the offensive line coach and OC at UT. 

Believe it or not, a lot of college teams, and even some NFL teams flip their offensive linemen in some situations.  It's not that unusual, and it's really not that hard to comprehend. 

FSU is in FL. A little easier to rebuild there.

Not on every single play....

And Clawson's offense didn't do it on every single play, either.

That whole argument was so discombobulated it was pathetic.  99.9% of those blaming Clawson and his offensive line philosophy had no clue of what the OL was actually doing.  It wasn't rocket science. 

Nonsense.  They often looked confused.

We flipped OL some this year under Butch...Not unusual to do it.

Really we did it only when we had 6 OL in the game in short yardage situations.  We would sometimes flip the opposite OT to gain leverage on one side of the formation.  I mostly remember Tiny swapping sides on occasion.

In the cases where we had 6 OL in the game usually Crowder came in at C and Stone moved over to LG.  We did better IMO when we had Bullard out as a "TE" which is something he did last year on a semi-regular basis (swapping jerseys when he did it)

Interesting.  Clawson's Boling Green offenses didn't look confused.  

Fact: Clawson was a scapegoat for the Fulmeristas. 

It's not rocket science.  

Yes, he has had four years to install his system.  He didn't take an existing line and totally change what they were doing.

As for him being a scapegoat, I have never gone there.  It's Fulmer's fault for hiring him in the first place.  Another hire, maybe we do better.  This can easily be supported by pointing out that Lane, or whomever his QB coach was, quickly recognized that Crompton was more comfortable rolling out while throwing because this is what he did in HS.   Adjustment made, Crompton was a good QB his final year.   Someone else besides Clawson should have or could have spotted that.  The mistake Fulmer made, IMO, was to try and change horses in midstream and go with the "trendy" spread offense without having the horses for it.  That's entirely on Fulmer, and unfortunatley it cost him his job.

So my position is that we would be much better off had Fulmer hired an OC that was pro style and thus minimize the amount of change.   And you are correct...that is not rocket science at all, it's pretty obvious.   :naughty:

Right.  And doing it occasionally...I have no problem with that.  But I do recall an article in the KNS circa early November 2008 that said we were doing it on every down that year, and although the OL was very PC, you could tell it bothered them from the "it has been quite an adjustment" comments.

I think trying to radically overhaul an offense while also losing a senior QB did in fact cost Fulmer his job, but water under the bridge now.

It will be interesting to see who Texas hires now that Satan is off the table.    I have a friend who thinks they will have to wait 7 years to be any good again.  Who knows...they might get lucky.

Folks can hee and haw and point blame......Fulmer got canned the day Bama hired Saban, he just didn't know it yet. Along with the record below.

0-4 against Meyer
 1-4 against Saban
 3-5 against Richt
 1-4 against Tuberville at Auburn
 2-11 against anybody not named Zook at Florida
 4-9 against Spurrier
 1-2 against Miles

Yep, I never blamed Clawson solely either.

How can he be 2-11 vs Florida and 4-9 vs Spurrier?  And fwiw thats the best record against sos while soz was at uf.


No doubt his record against meyer and saban suxes...but then again those two did win 5 of the last 7 ncs!  A fact often overlooked by the anti fulmer crowd.

Easy....He beat SOS at So. Carolina in 2006 & 2007. Lost to SOS at So. Carolina in 2005 & 2008.