Can't argue there are some on here with less than a high football IQ. However, your comment about not knowing anything about football struck me the wrong way. The pat answer for the all problems is roster turn-over - they need to get their players, yadda yadda. So tell me how in the world can it be that ALL of the players both Bo and Riley recruited are terrible and can't be salvaged? The odds of that are slim and none. So everyone single O lineman is terrible because Frost & Co. didn't recruit them, save for a center that was moved from TE. Or an entire D line that is senior heavy who are all rotten to the core but the coaches still play them. Or maybe you can explain the continued lack of technique for tackling and coverage? It must just be terrible players and they are not fixable. I have coached, spent hours in film rooms with coaches, talked to small college coaches about philosophy, etc and I am wondering if you aren't the one lacking in a full understanding of what is going on.
First and foremost THANK YOU... and I really mean it thank you for actually trying to back up your stance and trying to have an actual debate and not use the whole fire everyone because, I don’t like what I see, or the keep everyone because it’s all the players fault...
Now to get to the guts of your post here... I for one can not speak for the majority the whole it’s the players fault crowd... And I’d have to refer you to my posting history as evidence, but I actually do not think it’s all the players fault nor is it all the coaches fault... I’m not sitting in their team meetings and I’d venture to guess almost no one on this board is sitting through the team meetings so I don’t know what the coaches are teaching for technique... Now with that said, sine you are a coach I’d have to assume you’d make the same assumptions that I would make and that’s that the coaches don’t teach how to take horrible pursuit angles, or how to put your hands on a player and then stop because we don’t want to drive through tackles. Those two simple things goes against common sense of what a coach would teach just on a football level alone... that leads me to believe that is a player skill set issue or not willing to listen to what the coach is teaching...
Now like I’ve mentioned before as well, the issues we sit here and complain about are the same issues with the same group of juniors and seniors that we have seen their entire career. So is this where you put the blame on the coaches, or is it where you blame the players, again you’d have to assume the coaches are at least trying to coach up the basics, at least during the off season when they can, so are the coaches teaching methods jacked up? Or are the kids just ignoring it thinking they know more? Again I don’t know that answer but I’d have to assume that the coaches are at least trying to give the basics when they can, it’s hard focus on the fundamentals during the season since you film study, game plan study, practice game plan, walk through game plan, play game, rinse and repeat... you start going back to teaching the guys the aspects they should already know then you’re taking from one of the other aspects, you’re in a lose lose situation, you don’t work on fundamentals you look like how we do, you don’t work on game plan, you look lost when the opponent lines up...
Now to answer what I think is your best question regarding the previous recruits... the likely hood of every single kid the previous staff recruited being a wash out is highly unlikely, that just doesn’t pass the common sense test, to swing and miss on soo many kids, how can that be? So I’d have to say the answer there is no, all those kids are not that bad... but what I’d say is that none of those kids progressed, I do not think the previous regime spent time on refining technique, or adjusting and even building on to a kids technique, so those kids that cane in has freshmen with high potential, may be juniors, but have the skill set of a freshmen with potential that was wasted. This is where I’d place blame on the current staff, they should have/ needed to recognize those kids that had/ have that potential and really work to refine their skill set, they did it with Jackson, he progressed a lot, to the point of where he has been mentioned as a possible 1st round selection, now this year Jackson I think has hurt that projection due to taking plays off or not hustling till the whistle, so is that something to hold the coaches accountable for? I say partially because no you can’t teach hustle, you can’t teach desire, but you can motivate someone to achieve, you can hold them accountable for their actions...
So at the end of my long winded rambling hopefully you’ll see that I’m fairly rational, I think that with what HCSF inherited just on a mindset basis alone he inherited a crap shoot, kids that did not develop
Kids that have had a miserable experience at UNL and have lost all their gives a f••ks... I think HCSF and his staff do need a few more years to honestly see how he is progressing this program as a whole because right now I can’t tell you how much of this is on the coaches, and how much of it is on the players... because a rational mind set tells you we couldn’t have missed on so many players, but at the same time it tells you that the coaches are teaching the fundamentals but don’t have as much time during the season to hit it as hard as we need to hit it...