Loeffler Presser: Transfers Coming?

Normally, Coach Loeffler's pressers are not that interesting.  He mostly just rolls with coachspeak and rarely reveals anything happening with the team other than general platitudes...the main exception being the one or two times he completely lost his shit.

Anyway, today he had something more interesting to say.

"We need to get bigger and we need to get stronger.  We need to fill our holes with some guys to make our team better.  We made a decision to not go down the 14-15 players transfer portal like a lot of teams did.  We did that for a reason.  We needed to make sure we had a foundation of local football players on our team to establish some kind of culture, but we've got a good locker room now and now it's to time to fill our holes, get big and strong and to compete for championships."

He says this has been "the formula from the git-go" and that he is following the Clawson model.  He checked himself about the championships and said "it's time."

Coach Clawson certainly did use transfers.  David Kekuewa, Kamar Jorden, Paul Senn...he did fill holes selectively with transfer players.

I'm guessing we're doing to be a little less selective than that, if we are going this route.  And that's what I read into what he is saying.  My count has us with 8 players who have verbally committed, and I think we might bring in a much larger number of transfers who can play right away.

We saw the impact it made on the defense.  Imagine the impact a couple of o-line transfers might have made--though there were only 1-2 incoming OL transfers in our conference.

He knows we need to compete next year.  If this is a five-year plan we can't be 3-9 next year.  Plenty of people don't trust the process, but we can all agree that the process was to eventually win and I think he realizes it needs to happen at some level next year.  If it doesn't get turned around, we're going to end up just starting over again.

In fairness, he has always said he wanted to build a real culture before he started to bring in transfers.  He says the culture in the locker room is good now. Fair enough...he's going to live or die on that, so he better be right.

I also don't honestly believe he ever thought he was going to need to bring in a larger influx of transfers for year 4...but if it wasn't clear before the UT game it is now.  As he said after the game, that's how good we need to get.  Or better, since UT won't be playing in the MAC title game.

Also, the transfer game is much different than it was when he started.  The fact is, it's a much bigger part of the game now.  And they aren't all problem players, which was true back when no one transferred.

I have nothing against Matt McDonald, but I do hope one of the transfers is a QB who can push McDonald...that QB apparently is not on the roster right now.

It will be interesting to see, but that's something I didn't expect him to be so direct about.  We will all keep our eyes on the news to see if players are coming to BG via transfer who can "fill holes."

One last thing.  Let's not skip the stronger.  I recall after the 2011 season Clawson said a similar thing.  We needed to get stronger.  And we did.  You could see it.  The guys who do have will need to have epic work in the weight room.  Problem is, Loeffler said we needed to get stronger last year, and we're still talking about it.

Stay tuned.