mdleast

Wut?

Score! Score! Score!

aggy may get to speak with Ryan Day after all…

Really, Big Noon Guys? Both of these teams should be in the playoffs?

An insurmountable lead in Big Ten play

Zzzz…wait, did something finally happen?

This reply brought to you from the mid to late 90s

Perfect entertainment for my 2nd sceeen

Two championship plaques at the same time…

As much as we all may have dunked on the LHN over the years, I realize I am gonna miss it when it’s gone. In fact, after watching the post game show and bestowing of awards (which we watch after every game) mdmost and I actually went back and scrolled through the pregame show mainly to look for any “best of” montages and they didn’t disappoint plus they seemed to be in an especially festive mood for this last home game which (after a 50 point ass kicking) made it extra fun. I realize I will really miss it post-games in particular. [emoji869]

“It feels good”

Always fly American as I want to be able to choose my seat and being in Dallas they seem to fly everywhere i want direct. This was the first year we have ever flown anywhere for Thanksgiving (stayed in a beach house in Malibu) and was apprehensive of how the crowds would be. Chose to fly out Tuesday morning and fly back today as i had read those are the least busy Thanksgiving travel days. Pleasantly surprised to report that both DFW and Burbank (i always want to avoid LAX + it’s cheaper flying into/from here vs LAX) were extremely quick and easy to get through. Like way quicker than i’ve experienced in summer travels.

SIAP but great (long) article by The Athletic forensically breaking down the Jimbo issues: COLLEGE STATION, Texas — After the final game of the 2022 season, Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher spoke with an air of validation. The Aggies had just defeated No. 5 LSU by 15 points. Never mind that the win completed a 5-7 record, Fisher’s worst as a head coach, or that his uber-talented, preseason top-10 team failed to make a bowl game. ADVERTISEMENT Leaning slightly forward with his arms crossed, Fisher sounded like a man convinced, even in the face of his program’s immense struggles. “There’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing,” Fisher said. The comment caused a brief panic among fans, and even some in Texas A&M’s administration, who felt Fisher needed to adapt to the rapidly evolving college football landscape for the Aggies to unlock their potential. On the surface, he did. But behind the scenes, many things stayed the same. Nobody could make Fisher change, two athletic department staffers said. He wanted to do things his way and dug in his heels. Armed with a massive contract and a buyout more than triple the previous largest in college football history, he felt unfireable. But less than a year later, on Nov. 12, A&M did what some considered unthinkable given the $77 million it still owed Fisher and fired him. (And the athletic department will foot the bill; program sources told The Athletic multiple times in the past year that if Fisher were fired, donors wouldn’t be the ones paying the buyout. The 12th Man Foundation, the athletic department’s primary fundraising arm, will pay for an initial one-time payment of $19 million, and the athletic department will fund annual payments of more than $7 million, athletic director Ross Bjork confirmed the Sunday that Fisher was fired.) The offensive guru, one of five active coaches to have won a national championship, was lured away from Florida State at eye-watering cost because he was the man the Aggies deemed capable of meeting their own lofty ambitions. go-deeper GO DEEPER Inside the numbers on Jimbo Fisher's eye-popping $77.6 million buyout But X’s and O’s are only part of a head coach’s duties. Coaches are responsible for an organization that includes 120 players, 10 on-field assistant coaches and dozens of staff members across operations, recruiting and personnel, scouting, administration, player development and academics. ADVERTISEMENT Fisher loved the schematics. But as the sport evolved and roster management became paramount with the advent of the transfer portal and one-time transfer rule, Fisher’s emphasis on an underperforming offense and failure to adapt to growing organizational needs created a disjointed and, at times, chaotic atmosphere. “There isn’t that clear vision,” said a current team staffer, who was granted anonymity, along with more than a dozen others within or close to the Texas A&M program, so they could speak candidly. “What’s our messaging? What’s our vision? How do we sell it? What’s our program about? Everybody here just does their own thing.” After a 45-22 record in six seasons and no championships to speak of, why did it all go wrong? Why, with every other ingredient an elite program needs, couldn’t Fisher’s Aggies break through? In College Station, Fisher struggled to find and keep healthy quarterbacks capable of directing his offense. (Tim Warner / Getty Images) When Texas A&M hired Fisher in December 2017, it was widely considered a coup. Two months later, Texas A&M System chancellor John Sharp handed him a plaque proclaiming a future national title with the date unfilled. At FSU, Fisher went 83-23, led the Seminoles to a BCS national championship and a College Football Playoff appearance. The fast-talking West Virginia native admired A&M’s top-notch resources. The Aggies had a top-10 athletic budget, spent half a billion dollars on facility renovations, had given their previous coach a massive contract, had unparalleled fan support and resided in a recruiting hotbed. He trusted then-A&M athletic director Scott Woodward, whom he’d known since his LSU days. The program checked a lot of boxes, except championships: The Aggies won their last conference title in 1998 and their last national championship in 1939. Fisher, who knew how to win, was the missing piece, or so the Aggies thought. After giving Fisher a 10-year, $75 million contract, Sharp told the Houston Chronicle that his only concern with the length of the contract was that he couldn’t get Fisher to agree to a 15-year deal. ADVERTISEMENT Looking back, Fisher’s best days were behind him. “Jimbo lost his fastball,” a former Texas A&M staffer said. “He was hungry and motivated at FSU. Then he started reading his press clippings.” The downfall wasn’t immediate. In Fisher’s first year, the Aggies went 9-4 and beat LSU for the first time since joining the SEC. He ensured every staff member received a game ball to commemorate the historic seven-overtime victory. In year three, A&M had its best season of the Fisher era. The Aggies went 9-1 in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign, winning the Orange Bowl and finishing fourth in the Associated Press poll, their highest postseason ranking in 81 years. He elevated recruiting and stockpiled the roster with elite talent. In a postgame victory speech at the Orange Bowl, Fisher proclaimed, “We ain’t done yet.” In September 2021, Fisher signed a contract extension for 10 years and nearly $95 million guaranteed. A month later, Fisher scored the landmark victory of his tenure, a 41-38 upset of No. 1 Alabama. That winter, A&M signed the highest-rated recruiting class of the modern era. On signing day, Fisher — while denying accusations that A&M bought the class — vowed, “If you don’t like that we’re coming on, get used to it. I ain’t going nowhere.” go-deeper GO DEEPER Jimbo Fisher triggered by accusations of NIL slush fund: Calls rumors ‘garbage’ and ‘irresponsible as hell’ But as the program peaked, cracks in the foundation began to show. None were more visible than A&M’s decline on offense, which was supposed to be Fisher’s specialty. The Aggies lost quarterbacks to season-ending injuries three years in a row. Offensive line play deteriorated. Fisher, who was the primary play caller and handled the offensive game plan, evolved slowly. “Jimbo’s scheme was antiquated in 2014 when he won a national championship at Florida State,” an opposing SEC staffer said. “It was kind of out-of-date then, and it’s just not gotten better in 10 years.” ADVERTISEMENT The Aggies failed to score 30 points against FBS opponents in 13 consecutive games from November 2021 to November 2022. Calls from fans and critics for Fisher to ditch play calling and hire a true offensive coordinator grew louder as the Aggies stumbled to a losing record. Despite his defiant tone after the win over LSU, Fisher relented after the season, hiring former Arkansas and Louisville head coach Bobby Petrino. In August, Petrino called the offensive installation “a collective effort” but said he would handle play-calling duties. Bjork confirmed Petrino did call the plays this season, but three athletic department sources said Petrino didn’t have full offensive control and that he called plays primarily from Fisher’s offensive scheme. So why hire Petrino or a coordinator at all? “He felt like he had to, just for perception,” the athletic department staffer said. “His ego would never allow him to (relinquish offensive control). He wants to prove to everybody, ‘See, my scheme works.’” Said Bjork to The Athletic, “My job was to say, ‘Coach, we’ve talked about an OC. Now’s the time. You’ve said it. We all agree. We’re going to turn it loose.’ And however it worked after that, that was up to them.” Five people in or close to the program described Fisher as stubborn. If something worked at FSU in 2013, Fisher’s belief was that it would work at Texas A&M. Suggestions to do things differently weren’t often well-received. “He liked confirmation,” a former A&M assistant said. “Sometimes the coaches would just say whatever they thought he wanted to hear because they’d be burned out in meetings. … You knew he was gonna do whatever he wanted to do anyways.” Said the former A&M staffer, “If you told him ‘no,’ or something he didn’t want to hear, he would talk s— about you, like a little kid or something.” ADVERTISEMENT Fisher’s contract armed him with immense power. The athletic department staffer said Fisher made it known he could get others fired: “He would say, ‘I’ve got the stick, and I’ll use it.’” The offense received the bulk of Fisher’s attention. A lot of a team’s shortcomings can be papered over by a great quarterback, and Fisher understood that. Jameis Winston, Christian Ponder, EJ Manuel and JaMarcus Russell became first-round picks under his direction at Florida State and LSU. Fisher, who played quarterback at Samford, was also hardest on his quarterbacks. “He’d dog-cuss QBs,” a former personnel staffer said. “I’ve never seen a dude tear up a young quarterback like Jimbo did.” Despite his early success with FSU QBs, he later struggled to develop his quarterback recruits into stars. Since Winston, not a single Fisher high school quarterback recruit has finished his career as the starter at the school to which Fisher recruited him. At Texas A&M, the only quarterback that started and finished consecutive seasons under Fisher is one he didn’t recruit: Kellen Mond. Jimbo Fisher’s high school QB signees since Jameis Winston PLAYER SIGNING CLASS RESULT John Franklin III 2013, FSU Transferred after 2 seasons JJ Cosentino 2014, FSU 30 career attempts, no starts in 4 years Deondre Francois 2015, FSU Transferred after 4 seasons De’Andre Johnson 2016, FSU Dismissed Malik Henry 2016, FSU Transferred in first season Bailey Hockman 2017, FSU Transferred after 1 season James Blackman 2017, FSU Transferred after 4 seasons James Foster 2018, Texas A&M Transferred after 3 seasons Zach Calzada 2019, Texas A&M Transferred after 3 seasons Haynes King 2020, Texas A&M Transferred after 3 seasons Eli Stowers 2021, Texas A&M Transferred after 2 seasons Conner Weigman 2022, Texas A&M Sophomore at Texas A&M Marcel Reed 2023, Texas A&M Freshman at Texas A&M A former A&M recruiting staffer pointed to mechanics and how Fisher instructs quarterbacks to hold the ball as a hindrance, citing the case of Haynes King, a former four-star recruit who transferred to Georgia Tech last winter and has been more successful there than he was at A&M. King’s personal quarterback trainer told 247Sports in October that King’s throwing motion had become elongated. “If you watch film, you’ll see Haynes King is holding the ball really, really high at a certain location,” the former recruiting staffer said. “Now you see Haynes King playing free and open. … (Fisher) tries to mold them in a certain way … it may have worked in the ’90s when he was at Samford, but these kids these days? They want to play more like Patrick Mahomes. They want to play free.” ADVERTISEMENT The development issues weren’t exclusive to quarterback. The offensive line, despite having two freshman All-Americans in 2021, has regressed, ranking last in the SEC in pressure rate allowed in three consecutive seasons, according to TruMedia. Fisher hasn’t had a 1,000-yard receiver since 2014, and none of his wide receiver recruits at A&M have turned into NFL Draft picks. “We played them last year, and we were like, ‘Holy s—.’ There was first-round talent across the defensive line, the entire two-deep,” the SEC staffer said. “And then you play them this year and it’s like, ‘They’re still really good, but it felt like we played the exact same team last year.’ Are these guys really developing?” The recruiting department is symbolic of how Fisher handled things. During his first fall at A&M, he walked into the bullpen where recruiting staffers worked and told them recruiting would take care of itself. “If you win games, you will land good recruits,” Fisher said, according to the former personnel staffer. “If you lose games, you will not land good recruits.” That simplistic view isn’t entirely off base, but as roster management evolved, the need for an efficient, well-run recruiting department, led by a director of player personnel or general manager running the operation as the head coach’s proxy, has grown more important. There were no consistently scheduled days for the on-field coaching staff to watch recruiting film as a group, which is unusual, the personnel staffer said. The former A&M recruiting staffer bemoaned Fisher’s indifference to the details. “We’d sometimes watch kids as an entire staff and provide them all this information that was never ingested,” the recruiting staffer said. “We’d have sheets upon sheets, and (Fisher) didn’t even care. He didn’t want to go over the itineraries for recruiting visits. Didn’t care.” ADVERTISEMENT Fisher’s reluctance to evolve in certain player acquisition areas also became an issue. Before this year, he rarely utilized the transfer portal, signing only seven scholarship transfers in his first five seasons. He signed 10 before this season out of necessity because more than two dozen players from the 2022 team hit the transfer portal. A&M endured constant turnover in its recruiting and personnel department. After signing the No. 1 class in 2022, much of that staff departed, including director of player personnel Marshall Malchow, who joined Dan Lanning at Oregon. Four months later, Fisher hired Kevin Mashack from Indiana to succeed Malchow but parted ways with him after a year. For the past five months, A&M hasn’t had a director of player personnel, a position filled at every other SEC program and every Power 5 program in Texas. “That position is so, so important in today’s environment,” Bjork told The Athletic. That A&M doesn’t have a player personnel director with the winter transfer portal window set to open on Dec. 4 is “alarming,” the former personnel staffer said. While the recruiting department was an afterthought, Fisher was passionate about landing top players. Fisher has always recruited high school prospects well. Of his 13 signing classes as a head coach, 10 ranked in the top 10 nationally. Former staffers lauded Fisher’s charisma with recruits and families and ability to form bonds with them. “Jimbo is a great closer,” the former A&M recruiting staffer said. But the pursuit of the top-ranked 2022 class, which is the highest-rated in the modern era, became an obsession for Fisher and his staff, to the point that Fisher inquired about the 247Sports Class Calculator and how certain commits would affect A&M’s recruiting ranking. The former A&M recruiting staffer said Fisher ignored character questions if the recruits were five-star prospects. ADVERTISEMENT “He’s like, ‘Nope, he’s a five-star, we wanna take him,’” the staffer said. Multiple members of that signing class broke team rules that warranted suspensions. Seven members of the 2022 class transferred out after their first season, including all four who were suspended. “It’s like we’ve collected the most talent possible but I don’t think it was really strategically done the way you’d build a roster,” the current team staffer said. “They were just acquiring talent. I don’t know how much of a team it was.” That could apply to the staff as well. Although Fisher had three former head coaches on his staff — Petrino, defensive coordinator DJ Durkin and offensive line coach Steve Addazio — and trusted them to do their jobs, team staffers say Fisher provided no clear direction on how people were supposed to operate. “We had no idea what was going on or when we were off,” the former A&M recruiting staffer said. “He could take his private jet and go back home to see his kids or wherever, and we’re sitting there like, ‘Well, shoot, now we have the weekend off, didn’t know about that because Jimbo didn’t care to tell us.’” Fisher kept a tight circle, confiding mostly in his right-hand man, director of football operations Mark Robinson, and receivers coach Dameyune Craig. But the buck stopped with Fisher and processes often bottlenecked as a result. “He was the only one who could make a decision,” the athletic department staffer said. “Nobody else was empowered to make a decision.” The chaos trickled down to the roster. Although disciplinary measures for those 2022 freshmen became public, multiple people within the program described poor day-to-day discipline and accountability for players toward the end of the Fisher era. Being late to meetings or workouts was met with few, if any, consequences. ADVERTISEMENT “It was kids doing whatever they wanted,” the former assistant said. “And Jimbo showed a little leniency to those kids. Then, the older kids on the team were saying, ‘When we were kids on the team, you didn’t let us do it that way.’ It wasn’t good.” After those 2022 recruits left the program, discipline improved in 2023. But the on-field issues persisted. Quarterback Conner Weigman’s season-ending injury in September was a major blow. The offensive line struggled more than ever. A&M’s special teams allowed three touchdown returns and was one of the worst units nationally in kickoff coverage (Fisher didn’t have a full-time on-field assistant dedicated to special teams). A 15-point road loss to Miami in Week 2 foreshadowed issues that lingered. One-score losses to Alabama, Tennessee and Ole Miss left fans and school leadership frustrated. “Our program is stuck in neutral,” Bjork said the day A&M fired Fisher. Over time, the dysfunction took its toll. Despite having top-10 roster talent each of the past three seasons, A&M went 19-15 overall, 10-13 against SEC teams and 12-14 against Power 5 competition under Fisher from 2021 to ’23. That included seven consecutive losses in games decided by one score and a nine-game road losing streak. The athletic department staffer called football the worst-run sport in A&M’s athletic department. “It seems like things were just really hard,” Bjork told The Athletic. “And look, winning is hard, I get it. But processes and procedures should not be hard.” A Week 2 loss to Miami this September put a concerning ceiling on Fisher’s sixth season. (Sam Navarro / USA Today) So where does Texas A&M go from here? The administration is more than a week into a wide-ranging coaching search. The sooner A&M can get someone in place, the better. Bjork set the opening day of the winter transfer portal window, Dec. 4, as an informal deadline to give the new coach a chance to retain as much of the roster as possible. ADVERTISEMENT Several names have been connected to the A&M job. Mike Elko, who is only the second coach to take Duke to consecutive bowl appearances, seems like a natural fit given his previous experience with A&M as Fisher’s defensive coordinator. UTSA coach Jeff Traylor, who has taken the Roadrunners to consecutive conference championships and has them in the mix for a third, would provide a Texas-heavy identity given his background as a former state championship-winning high school coach in the state. Kansas coach Lance Leipold’s work pulling the Jayhawks from the ashes would give the Aggies a builder. Arizona coach Jedd Fisch’s varied background includes extensive NFL experience coupled with his revival of the Wildcats, who went winless the season before he took over. Bjork has specific traits he’s seeking in the next coach. Among the dozen attributes he listed, phrases like “supreme organizational skills,” a “culture of discipline” and someone who “can capitalize on modern day college athletics” stand out given Fisher’s shortcomings. This time, there will be no plaques, no 10-year guaranteed contracts. The hire will be more grounded in reality. But the Aggies won’t change their lofty ambitions. If they can keep their loaded roster together, they should. “Expectations should be sky-high there, because of the resources they have,” the former assistant said. “That school deserved way more than what we gave them the last few years.” The Fisher hire proved that it’s not as simple as pairing a big-time coach with a ton of resources. There are no shortcuts to a championship. Texas A&M must find its man to build the program without skipping steps. “The ingredients for a championship are here,” Bjork said. “Aggies want to do it the right way and deserve excellence in everything that we do.” (Top illustration: John Bradford for The Athletic; Photos: Carmen Mandato, Logan Riely / Getty Images)

Pliny with an ocean sunset view imo #thankful

Bland is certainly not a very bland player….

From my kitchen chalkboard but also from a beach house in Malibu where, regardless of location, I am #Thankful that this is the last time our Longhorns have to endure the possibility of a flying tortilla FIGHT!