We got what they evidently wanted

[CEO2044]

I had high expectations before I realized Arnett was going to make his job hard as hell.

He's a good coordinator and I still think he can probably be a good head coach in the future but I don't know wtf he was thinking tearing down the offense with so many players coming back. Unbelievable to me the arrogance of being a first year head coach and thinking it'd be fine to have an inexperienced offensive coordinator completely changing the offense while also hiring an inexperienced DC.

Yes- I felt better about it if they were going to keep the same staff and try to make it with the old game plan.

Way too much was changed in too short of time by a guy with no head coaching experience figuring out what he was doing on the fly.

As much as I think he’s a great DC and wish the best for him, I really don’t get that thinking. I can’t imagine many other coaches wanted to commit to us either knowing this was basically an experiment with a high chance of failure and they could be out of a job within a year.

 

[drexeldog23]

On paper... these were all winnable:
SELA
Arizona
South Carolina
Western Michigan
Arkansas
Auburn
Kentucky
Texas A&M
Southern Miss
Plus you add in the randomness of the Egg Bowl and you could easily talk yourself into believing there were 10 winnable games until about halftime on September 9 and totally out of it during the 4th quarter on September 23.

basically what i was thinking... i did have us beating ole miss at home and actually had the South Carolina game on the road as a toss up... now this was before a down was played... only had South Carolina ranked as a toss up because of the way they finished the season. we both s # # t the bed.

On paper... these were all winnable:
SELA
Arizona
South Carolina
Western Michigan
Arkansas
Auburn
Kentucky
Texas A&M
Southern Miss
Plus you add in the randomness of the Egg Bowl and you could easily talk yourself into believing there were 10 winnable games until about halftime on September 9 and totally out of it during the 4th quarter on September 23.

 

[Dawgg]

Here's what I'll own up to:
1. I think Will is a good quarterback. I don't think Will is a great quarterback.

2. I think Will's unwillingness/inability to scramble or take a hit without crumpling and/or losing the ball is a liability and it has been amplified tenfold in this offense.

3. I think Will has been unfairly compared to the Mullen/Moorhead era tough mobile QBs that would put their heads down and their bodies on the line to scramble for a first down without coughing up the ball. That's not who he is and not what he was recruited to do, but after a decade of Relf, Dak, Fitz, and Schrader, it's hard not to compare.

4. I thought Will should have left after last season so Barbay could implement his offense and believed keeping Will would delay that transition and we'd be stuck with a square peg/round hole situation.

5. That being said, I believed Barbay when he said he would fit his system to the players.

6. I wanted to give Wright and maybe Parsons some full series early in the season, not because Will was bad, but because we were asking Will to do things he wasn't equipped for and I assumed they were recruited to run Barbay's offense, so it seemed natural to give them a shot.

7. I think Parsons could be a good quarterback if he stays and finds himself under the right offensive coordinator.

8. I think we still end up losing these last two games with Will at QB.

9. I thought Wright would be better than he is.

 

[johnson86-1]

Yes- I felt better about it if they were going to keep the same staff and try to make it with the old game plan.

Way too much was changed in too short of time by a guy with no head coaching experience figuring out what he was doing on the fly.

As much as I think he’s a great DC and wish the best for him, I really don’t get that thinking. I can’t imagine many other coaches wanted to commit to us either knowing this was basically an experiment with a high chance of failure and they could be out of a job within a year.

It really is perplexing. Whatever criticisms people may have of Leach, he ran a good program. He wasn't an offensive genius who's failures outside of designing and calling plays stopped his team from achieving. His teams generally looked like they were well coached. Strength and conditioning seemed to be good. Discipline seemed to be good. Granted special teams didn't look great at MSU, but generally, it was a time to tweak things, not tear down and start from scratch.

I honestly assumed the plan he pitched to Keenum was something along the lines of:
1) Go interview OC's running air raid concepts and see what they think about utilizing Will and how they will coach to his strengths while also planning to move to a more modern air raid offense.
2) Work with the new OC to try to keep some of the offensive coaching staff on board to continue Leach's legacy.
3) Hire some assistant, ideally as the DC, that has experience as a head coach so that they can both help Arnett with the transition and also shown they can run the defensive side of practice for him (or even manage practice overall at times to let him focus on implementing defense).

That seems like a plan that could have worked. If the pitch is, "I don't really like the air raid long term, so I'm going to go ahead and move away from it, even if we don't have a QB to do that.", it seems like it should have been really easy to say "if we're starting over anyway, we're going to have a full coaching search."