Peterson's "vision" was to completely dismantle a legendary program and build it in his image. Problem was that his approach was fatally flawed for a number of reasons:
1. He didn't take into account that you have a real problem when you fire a coach that won 10 games a year on the heals of a 10 win season. A coach who took us to the title game with mostly his players just 2 years before. Was Frank the answer long term? That debate has raged for 20 years and still rages, but there is no question that there hasn't been a time since that the program was in better shape than it was at the end of the 2003 season, until maybe now.
2. Peterson made the assumption that all he needed to do was fire the coach, put out an advertisement, and the great coaches would come a calling. If he wanted to make a structural change like he was intending, he needed to keep Solich for longer while he was making his case to the money people that they need to pay more than anyone else for a head coach, for staff, and for recruiting and then secure that "Nick Saban" kind of coach after that.
3. Instead, Peterson fired Solich on the fly, pissing off his players, and then had to go through 7-8 NO's before he found a coach who's players were threatening to kill him the year before, a coach that had no business being a coach at the big time college level, someone who tried to coach the team like an NFL team, void of development, despite his recruiting success.
After Peterson:
4. Then the downward spiral was on, and the only choice at rock bottom was to try to go back to something from the past, albeit different, to try to salvage things. It kind of worked, but by 2008 we were worse off than at the end of 2003, we had made no progress.
5. Then for a bunch of reasons, we made another choice of firing the coach that was structurally going to win 9-10 a year (no more and no less) not necessarily because he was a bad coach or that he didn't restore us to 1990s form, but rather because of PC and the true fact that Pelini was and is a total ass hole.
6. Then, again on the heals of throwing out a 9-10 win a season coach, we bring in basically all we could get, a less than mediocre coach with very little history of success. When that predictably flops, we fire him and bring in the golden boy who fooled everyone, so there's no blame to go around except that we should have jettisoned him after the 2021 season because it was obvious after that point that things weren't going to get any better.
Now we seem to have a good thing going and for the first time in years we seem to be on the upswing. But it's kind of laughable the notion that this is Peterson's vision, as we are still quite a bit different culture wise than USC circa 2005, which is what he was going for. Having a QB fall into our lap doesn't change that other than maybe it might be the cause for us to convince the next DR to come here.
