COACHES HOT SEAT BLOG

It has always been slightly surreal in recent years for the college football season to begin on a Thursday, and on the West Coast, it is a very early Thursday afternoon kickoff for us.  Several of us gathered at Coaches Hot Seat Central just after lunch yesterday after sneaking away from work, and we got a chance to discuss the day’s games before they kicked-off.  After watching all the games we could see on TV, and a few games on ESPN 360, the biggest surprise to us was the way Vanderbilt handled Miami of Ohio.  Yes, Steve Spurrier’s offense came to life after his first-string QB (Beecher) got knocked out, but Ellis Johnson’s defense was the real story for South Carolina in the eventual blowout of NC State.  The way Johnson had the USC defense playing, the 3 points that the Gamecocks scored before the half would have won that game.  A second coach that we watched a good bit of yesterday was Paul Johnson and his option-spread offense at Georgia Tech, and that looked exactly like the offense that Johnson ran at Georgia-Southern and Navy, except with bigger and faster football players.  From watching Paul Johnson’s first outing with the Yellow Jackets, it looks like he is going to be quite a thorn in the side of other ACC teams, even in his first year at Georgia Tech.  We can’t wait to see Johnson run that offense against a pretty good defense at Boston College a week from this Saturday.  The last coach that had his team cooking on Day 1 was Turner Gill at Buffalo, as they put a serious beat down on Mike Price and UTEP.  We watched a couple of tapes of Gill’s Buffalo team over the summer, and they are a very well coached football team, and it will be interesting to see how they do in the MAC this year. 

 

Overall, there were a number of coaches that had their teams roaring out of the blocks yesterday, even if they were against I-AA or “cupcake” opponents.  As always, there is the flip-side of coaches that were tripped-up on Day 1, and then there is Art Briles who has a long way to go to get the Baylor Bears back to the level of very good football teams like Wake Forest.

 

Coaches Roaring Out of the Blocks on Day 1

 

Jim Grobe, Wake Forest

Turner Gill, Buffalo

Jeff Genyk, Eastern Michigan

Paul Johnson, Georgia Tech

Brian Kelly, Cincinnati

Larry Blakeney, Troy

Steve Spurrier, South Carolina

Brady Hoke, Ball State

Butch Jones, Central Michigan

Randy Edsall, UConn

Randy Shannon, Miami

Gene Chizik, Iowa State

Jim Harbaugh, Stanford

 

Coaches That Were Tripped-Up on Day 1

 

Mike Price, UTEP

Tom O’Brien, NC State

Shane Montgomery, Miami of Ohio

Mike Riley, Oregon State

 

A Coach That Has a Lot of Rebuilding to Do

 

Art Briles, Baylor

Tags: Uncategorized // 12 Comments »