I finally got the time to listen to Coach Clawson's season-ending presser. I strongly recommend that anyone who is interested in our football program listen to what I think was a wide-ranging and candid appraisal of where we are what we need to be winners. Of course, I've got some of my own ideas, but the most important one is to invest 40 minutes listening to an experienced coach and proven winner talk about what he is doing.
The first thing you will come away with is that Coach Clawson has the right objective. He wants to build a program that can win consistently in the MAC. That's no small objective. No one has done it in the MAC since Marshall. I strongly applaud this goal.
The theme was that sometimes you take a step back before you go two steps forward. Apparently, the AD told Coach Clawson that he had a chance in 2009 and that 2010 was going to be a "challenge."
The reason? Simple numbers. We played most of this season with 44 scholarship players, which is a pretty shockingly low number. I think we see all those guys on the sideline and we think that there are tons of players, but we played with a pretty small number. There were even road games when we travelled below the maximum.
It works like this....we had 76 players on scholarship. We decided to redshirt 19 of them. We had 5 season-ending injuries, and 8 "recruiting mistakes." (Falcon fans across the nation go scurrying to their roster to try and figure out who he is talking about. I've got at least 2 ideas, but just a hint...where a player has been passed by walk-ons and JUCO transfers and players who switched positions, you can assume that's who Coach is talking about).
The good news is we are fixing this. Attrition in the program has slowed down. Among the players who should have been 3rd, 4th and 5th year players, 31 of them left the program prior to Coach getting here.
He said that he faced similar situations at Fordham and Richmond, and went on to build winners. There is "no excuse not to win at BG and win big."
Amen, brutha. I like the sound of that...win big.
He said that the staff considered patching holes with a lot of JUCO players, but decided to build a sustainable foundation rather than a one-year fix. (My note: Temple used to try and patch holes with JUCO players and they didn't get better until they started to get HS players.)
He said we have changed the culture. Attrition is down, and the APR is up. He tells the players to stay off of lists...the lists of guys who miss class, lifting, conditioning, etc. The lists are getting shorter.
We played 23 true or redshirt freshmen on our 2-deep, at some times. Those players got some experience. He did make one point that I think Falcon fans forget, which is that this team will continue to be young next season, just not as young.
We played last year with 48 scholarship players, but we got lucky. We had a little more experience and stayed relatively healthy.
One thing that I thought as I was listening was that the APR penalty is a lot more deadly than you expect. At the time, it sounded like something that was less serious, but football is a game with delayed impacts, and you the shortages of players actually don't appear until down the road.
As I listened to this, I began to think about Coach Brandon. When he was fired a lot of people decried the culture of college football when a guy with a "winning" record could have been fired. Some of these people were professional journalists. These issues--the attrition, the APR issues--are examples of exactly the kind of coaching malpractice that was going on. The program was being run into the ground in slow motion. Thank god we didn't wait until actually crashed and went 2-10 to make the change.
We should expect to be better next year with better numbers and more experience. But we need more good players. He said that only 2 teams have fewer all-conference players over the past few years than we have. You need 3-5 difference makers on both sides of the ball, and we just don't have the talented playmakers.
He reviewed the defense. He said the front was improved. We did not cover or tackle in the "back end." What we are lacking is (and this was something he talked at length about) is internal competition. Until that player in the secondary knows that someone will take his job if he does not bring it everyday, you don't get better as a team.
He has some other nice tidbits. He said that DJ Lynch, a true FR D-lineman who was injured in an all-star game was looking very good in late practices and was someone they could have played. Similarly, Gabe Martin had gotten onto the 2-deep but broke his hand. Anyway, the point is that guys like this create internal competition that makes everyone better.
On the offensive line, we need to add through recruiting. We will be better next year, and hopefully healthier, but we need to continue to add guys through the recruiting process.
He said Alex Bayer has the chance to be a really good player, and his backups Tyler Beck, Kendall Montgomery and Clay Rolf all either played or look good in scout play.
He wants to run the ball. He noted that we can't be worse at running the ball, because we were last in the country. Having a good TE who can hold the edge is vital to getting an outside running game.
He also talked about WRs. (I will note that the WRs seemed to be a disappointment to me. We had guys who got a lot of catches the year before who we did not get much out of this year---Ray Hutson and Justus Jones, specifically.)
Now, we lose Pronty and Wiley, but they were injured and we didn't get a full year out of them anyway.
We lose Geter at RB, but Hopgood got some reps, and FR Jamal Martin looked good in practices.
And QB...he is "very excited" here, with Schilz and then Trent Hurley, a redshirt who won the backup job over the course of the season.
The last two years we have recruited the maximum. This year, it sounds like he is expecting to be in the teens, maybe the low 20s. In the past two years we needed guys in bulk, so we concentrated in this area and took every good player we could get our hands on. Now, our needs are more specific and he says that we will expand "the state of Bowling Green" and go wherever we have to find the right guy.
We will have senior dominated WRs next year, so we have some downstream depth issues. Also, we are on the lookout for some pass rushing d-ends.
We want to get a QB every year. (And our verbal at QB is having a huge run in PA, stay tuned for an update early in the week).
He talked with strong candor about the kicking game. He said punting and kickoffs improved with Bryan Wright, but of course he is gone now. And, he said that our inbility to make a field goal has been "embarrassing," worse than some high school teams.
He plans no coaching changes and hopes they don't get offered other positions. A couple of players could transfer for playing time, though that is far from certain. (Just something in the expectation thing. We had a bunch of QBs redshirt this year, and with Schilz and Hurley emerging, these guys are prime candidates to seek playing time elsewhere, in my opinion only).
Interesting note: we release players only to teams we don't play. It is apparently difficult to transfer within the MAC based on some rule the MAC has.
He said that the Miami story gives us hope, and the CMU story does too, in a different way. This is a very competitive conference and no team has sustained success over a 5-year horizon.
Jack Carle asked about the players huddling around the heater during the WMU game, which I did not notice myself. They asked if Coach Clawson would have preferred them to be on the sideline supporting their teammates, and he said that he did, but that it wasn't something you fixed during a game. That spawned a long and interesting description of how you need your senior players--those who have put their sweat and blood into the program--to police those issues. In his best seasons, the players have managed the team.
Finally, in discussing the numbers issues, he said this....he reminds his assistants that if those 31 players were still here, Coach Clawson wouldn't be. This is the problem they were brought in to fix. You wouldn't have one without the other.
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