I hope that if we pursue a new head coach, somehow ZA can be retained as DC. That guy was a great DC. I hope that it could be worked out where he would continue.
Arnett- good guy
- Thread starter 60sdog
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There's just no way that happens. It would be a recipe for all kinds of conflict. But he'll land on his feet somewhere.
No way that can happen, agree he seems to be a good guy but just in over his head bad coordinator decisions sealed his fate. I for the life of me can't figure out why he didn't retain one of the Leach offensive guys to keep the air raid this year and possible mold it going forward? I would love to know if someone has Intel into why Spurrier or one of the other coaches didn't stay and take an OC job if offered. I have to assume they just weren't offered. If one of the reasons for keeping CZA was to keep a recruiting class together that was recruited to run the Air Raid I will never understand the decision?
He’ll do a great job at LSU next year.
He was not a "great" DC. He pretty good at best. I do like the 335 just because it reminds me of JLD. But undoubtedly there is a reason nobody runs it. You need shutdown corners to make it work for one
We were nothing to write home about with him as DC finishing 6th, 7th and 9th in the SEC. We were 6th, 1st and 12th the 3 years before he came. As someone pointed out on here or ED about this years defense, as bad as it looks, it's not performing much worse than last years. This year we are allowing 2.6 pts/game more than last year but the yardage is about the same. 134.2 (2022) vs. 132.1 (2023) rushing and 210.3 (2022) vs. 229.9 (2023) passing. The dink and dunk and ball control Leach played masked a lot of things the past couple of years that are now fully exposed when you don't extend drives and burn clock.
Arnett is way overrated as a DC by our fanbase. Our defenses were pretty good but nothing that made you say wow. As has been stated, the “boring” ball control AR offense helped out a lot. We owned time of possession in just about every game last season, so the defense wasn’t on the field nearly as much as it is this year.
You can’t tell a coach you expect him to win and then tell him who to hire. It doesn’t work like that.
He’s a young guy with plenty of time to recover from this. He may learn from it and make a great HC one day, but wrong time and wrong place right now.
I would love to know the inside scoop on this myself. I would bet at least some of the old staff seriously questioned his ability to be a HC and jumped ship.
First mistake was not allowing Mason Miller to be the offensive coordinator to bring in a guy who is "gonna pick out the best 11 and adapt his offense" and it nowhere near happened. If only for a year, this was the year to keep the Air Raid going.
Yea and the key in 3–3-5 is the 5. So we reloaded with D Backs in the portal didn’t we, no we didn’t. we were out looking for tight ends. keystone cops.
Absolutely untrue. Arnett in the head coaching spot is the sole problem.Arnett would probably make it if he had the right coaches under him.
I think people may be surprised at where he ends up as a DC. Mountain West or Big Sky would be my guess.
No. He is trying to be a CEO and therefore he meddles too much in the offense when he actually should be the DC. He should have trained Brock over time. He should have allowed Barbay to do whatever he wanted.
What Barbay is doing is the exact opposite of what he said he would do. That leads me to believe Arnett has a ton of input on the offense.
The coordinators are fine, but Arnett's dysfunction is killing everything. And firing the coordinators will do nothing to solve this problem. He could start to fix this problem TODAY by taking over the defense and leaving Barbay alone, but he would rather sit there and cross his arms.
Don't take this personally because while I'm replying to you, I don't mean this to be directed at you. That said, a couple things come to mind
1) All the coaching "good guy" talk irritated the living hell out of me with Croom, and it continues to do so today. This is a multi-billion dollar industry with coaches making generational wealth in a year that most of us can't dream of making in a lifetime. Some of which continue to do so even after being fired. I don't give a flying 17 about whether our head coach is a good guy or not because he's paid to win. Period. I'll even go farther than that by saying that genuine good guys cannot and will not survive in college football. Successful coaches are either doing the dirty work themselves or else they're paying someone to do it for them, but there are no good guys in the Top 10 of the polls.
2) I gave ZA the benefit of the doubt on recruiting for the last 3 years because I always assumed that it was really difficult to land elite defensive guys with Leach at the helm. However, I think we're clearly seeing that Leach was not the reason for ZA's recruiting woes. His '24 class is quickly reaching Croom level, and never in a million years did I think we'd return to those depths. Not with this age of SEC money, TV, and notoriety. It's an inexcusable embarrassment
I think he gets credit for dialing up a lot of pressure without having the individuals to create pressure by consistently beating their guy.
I'm not sure he's doing much worse this year. Definitely been some times where we look like we're not accomplishing anything on D, but there also seem to be plenty of times where we look like the last two years but we're just a tad slower getting to the ball and our DBs are worse, and that's enough of a difference to go from creating havoc to giving up big plays.
I'd say he's a lot like Manny Diaz. Definitely a solid DC. Mixes up looks and brings pressure from different places. Can cause some trouble when he has the talent but isn't some miracle worker.
In that case we should just try to hire Rocky Long, he was pretty much running the defense at SDS when Arnett was there. The 3-3-5 is his defense, he taught it to Arnett. Personally I think we need to go ahead and switch back to a 3-4 or 4-3.
He proved himself last year in the EB when he totally shut down the Mississippi offense, especially the supposedly dominant run game they had. They got 78 yards in that game
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