zoogies said:
You are talking about firing a pretty dang good OC (not sure if he is supposed to be as good as OU's but nonetheless), who has been in this system for a long time, to replace him with some hotshot top name to come in here with his own philosophy. Sometimes change can be good, but how long you think a guy like that would stay, anyway?
Yes, changes this big can be a little scary, no question. But if it is Holgorsen, he's not just some young hotshot. He's had great offenses at Tech and U of H and then at Okie State -- they were picked to finish last in the division by a lot of people because they lost so many weapons on offense and they don't have a defense. Instead, they almost won the division and had one of the most explosive offenses in the nation in his first year. A good coordinator doesn't need long to get things turned around: Muschamp and Pelini did it and Holgorsen has shown he can too.
The thing about Greg Davis is that you'd have to watch all of our games to get it. Yes, his numbers overall are excellent -- we scored more points in the 00's than every other team in the nation. While that sounds impressive, if you look at the box scores you'll notice that we had a tendency to drop 52 on every cupcake and then we turtled in the big games. Davis is so afraid of someone making a mistake against good defenses that he handcuffs his players. I remember us scoring 14, 3, 13, and 0 against OU. A bad A&M team held us to 7 points in '06. Plenty of other decent/good teams held our top 5 offense to fewer than 24 points. And this year he was completely exposed -- Nebraska is the only good defense we played, and OU and A&M are pretty average -- the other 9 were B-A-D. 23 points a game against that schedule, and a lot of it in the fourth quarter after the other team had put us away, is ridiculous. Kansas State and Iowa State were two of the worst defenses in the nation and they both held us to 3 points through 3 quarters. When the offensive talent goes from A+ to B (this team is loaded with four-stars, they're not hacks) and the offensive production goes from A+ to D, that's coaching.
With all the offensive talent we've put in the NFL the past decade, we were only a truly elite team four times -- Vince's last two years and Colt's last two years. And how many times did those two make something out of a busted play where most QB's have to take a sack? All of the other years we lost two or three games even though we had as much talent as anyone.
I'm not saying Davis is an awful coordinator. He's just mediocre. Holgorsen doesn't need once-in-a-generation quarterbacks to put up X-Box numbers and he's shown that he can implement his offense immediately at U of H and Okie Lite. If he's our coordinator next year and Malcolm Brown is as good as he looks, we're scoring 40+ a game, guaranteed. There was really no excuse not to this year when literally half of the conference ranks worse than 80th in the nation in total defense and our non-conf opponents were all dogs. 23 a game makes me want to punch a wall.