(01-25-2014 01:01 AM)TulsaEye Wrote: The latest coaching moves comes down to one thing a lack of money to spend. Tulsa admin is not willing to invest much in the team or the coaching staff.
I absolutely agree on that - the money. But that is where TU has always been as far as coach hiring is concerned. For instance, John Cooper hired a local HS coach named Larry Coker (who won the NC at Miami and is at UTSA now) to coach running backs during his tenure. Glenn Dobbs did the same with FA Dry (who went on to head coach TU successfully) and moved on to TCU. The are many examples. Very few coaches start out their career on a DI staff full time. Most, at least at some point, are HS, NAIA, D-III etc coaches. There is an abundance of good, successful lower level coaches out there that can coach at this level imo. But the HC has to be aware of who to hire and where they are. There are a lot of Art Briles', Chad Morris' and Gus Malzahns and yes, Bill Blankenships who are in waiting. The problem with the way this went down is that it looked so bad when BB hired of all people, his son to coach the most important position on the FB field.
If that is as limited as the Bill Blankenship coaching tree is, then we would eventually have been in this position anyway. It's inevitable. As a matter of fact, one of the coaches's mentioned was the offensive coordinator at Texas A&M (who coached Johnny Manzell) who was on the TU staff before he was fulltime - Spavital. And Spavital has a pretty close relationship with the Blankenships as I understand.
IMO those guys are out there in an abundance and the puzzling thing is that BB should have had a "ready list" of coaches able to step up into DI college coaching (QBs) that didn't include his own son.
I hope JB is the answer, but BB doesn't realize how many people out there outside of the program want him to fail (OU, OSU in particular) and even several in the media and the local community. This was adding fuel to the fire IMO. Can you imagine what kind of pressure there will be on BB, JB and the entire staff next year? They now will have a very short leash and they not only will have to win, but to many TU fans, they will have to look pretty doing it imo.
He should have made a lot more than one or two calls to more than one or two people ready to move up. But of course this is what happens when many of those coaching prospects saw the train wreck we had last year at QB and on offense. They probably view this as a one and done job. I would.