Honestly, I think this post is freaking crazy.
His first class was perfectly fine. One guy didn't work out from a personality perspective; sometimes that is hard to evaluate from a distance when recruiting.
The DUI mistake was on him but I don't see any direct evidence that it had an affect on anything - coaching or recruiting.
Way under expectations? Westy, Moore, and BR all played with injuries the entire year. DPE has never established himself as a WR. Not even before his strong of injuries. And Tommy (cough, cough, completion percentage) Armstrong was our QB.
He had nothing to do with the start of that Twitter feud and continuously downplayed it on twitter when Zone6 would talk shit to him. He also specifically asked Nebraska fans to stop tweeting about it as well. Not to mention I think it's a good thing a position coach at the best program is the conference is taking note that a rivals position coach is recruiting/coaching at a high level. He poked Williams because he is intimidated by him.
He has two extremely strong commits, and yes, he deserves some of the credit for KJJr as well. KJSr publicly talked about Wideouts throughout the entire recruiting process. I think it's very hard to make the argument you are making. It was a dual-coach effort on him. Yes, we need to finish with a couple solid commits, but if we don't land a 5* (that nobody has given us a chance to land outside of our own bubble), I'm not going to lose my shit over it. The kid has been talked about as a USC lock for about two years and you label him a must get? Damn man. Those are expectations that a couple coaches in the history of our program have been able to reach. If he pulls it off he's one of the best in the country. Lest we forget that players like Lewis are traditionally being offered cash money to sign; not an easy thing to combat with phone calls and DMs.
One final thing: I feel extremely confident that if we would have fired Williams after the DUI he would have been picked up by a Saban/Meyer type immediately, imaged would have been worked on, and he would be landing studs for them in no time. Just like Lane Kiffin. Williams is a serious talent in terms of both recruiting and coaching. I don't see any way of getting around that.
Of course that's your thought, I know where you get the group think from.
His first [partial] class is Lavan Alston, someone that is heavily rumored to not be here in 2017. I hope that's not the case, but there's enough talk about it. His second class is Spielman and Grim, one redshirted and one left. His third class, which he has a lot riding on, is TBD. As I said, I hope he hits it out of the park.
If you truly believe a coach that missed 2 weeks of fall camp, and 4 games during the season isn't direct evidence that his DUI didn't impact his group/team/program then we can stop the responses now. It most definitely had an impact; we lost 1 player [Grim] during that time frame and we had a recruit [Calvin] publicly speak about it. Not only that, he was set to announce his commitment shortly after that but instead, pushed it back to January 7. Keith may have overcome it with Calvin, which I believe he will commit to us in a couple weeks, but it did put us at risk.
Keith has publicly said to blame him for the performances, not the players. That is a coach that knows his position group has under performed. Injuries, bad QB play, people can make all the excuses they want the fact remains, they under performed.
KJJ is here because of Mike Riley, not Keith Williams. Mike could be coaching at Nebraska, Keith at Alabama and KJJ is coming to Lincoln, not Tuscaloosa. Mike is the only reason we had a shot at KJJ, not the other way around. How you even deny this is beyond me, but expected.
Nowhere did I say he should've been fired. I like Keith, but it doesn't mean there isn't concern with him. There's a lot riding on that first Wednesday in February. For me, that'll answer a lot of questions that I have.
