Worst era of a coach

[East Coast Mustang]

1984 Aloha Bowl - Bobby Collins, Head Coach
1985 No Bowl
1986 No Bowl
1987 No Bowl
1988 No Bowl
1989 No Bowl
1990 No Bowl
1991 No Bowl
1992 No Bowl
1993 No Bowl
1994 No Bowl
1995 No Bowl
1996 No Bowl
1997 No Bowl
1998 No Bowl
1999 No Bowl
2000 No Bowl
2001 No Bowl
2002 No Bowl
2003 No Bowl
2004 No Bowl
2005 No Bowl
2006 No Bowl
2007 No Bowl
2008 No Bowl
2009 Hawai'i Bowl - June Jones, Head Coach
2010 Armed Forces Bowl - June Jones, Head Coach
2011 BBVA Compass Bowl - June Jones, Head Coach
2012 Hawai'i Bowl - June Jones, Head Coach

This.

[SMU2007]

yay mediocrity. Here are the wins to get us to those 4 games:

2009:
SFA
UAB
ECU
Tulsa
Rice
UTEP
Tulane

2010:
UAB
Wash St.
Rice
Tulsa
Tulane
Marshall
ECU

2011:
UTEP
NW St.
Memphis
TCU* (this was a great win)
Tulane
Rice

2012:
SFA
UTEP
Houston
Memphis
S. Miss
Tulsa

I guess these wins get some people excited.

Previously we were losing to those same teams. BTW you are making a very strong case for why it is difficult to recruit to SMU in football. Even when we beat the teams on our schedule, our fans don't care. We rarely fill our 32,000 seat stadium. With fans like ours I would never give SMU a look in football. What do we offer in football that would make us attractive to the top athletes? If you want a solid education go to Stanford, USC, UCLA, Rice, Duke, Michigan, Virginia, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, etc. If you want a rabid fan base pick an SEC or BIG school. I think there is a niche for us, but our fans are fairly delusional. SMU is not the most welcoming school for minorities and many top football players are minorities.

I agree with every single one of your points. Particularly, smu being a difficult place to recruit to. That's why it takes even more effort than it might at another place and another reason why this staff is not what we need right now. The coaches who were most active on the recruiting trail were run off in some sort of p*ssing match. The ones we have now at least appear to be in complete "wait for them to come to us" mode. I'm not asking for us to reel in 5 star recruits, but like I mentioned before, tcu has had almost no 4 or 5 star recruits until pretty recently. I am also fairly confident that they had very few recruits with zero other offers whereas we always seem to have a lot of those. Why are we not regularly competing with (whoever you want to consider our peer) for recruits instead of NW Louisiana State and Univ of Phoenix? If this staff is out there aggressively recruiting, they sure are being quiet about it.

The only way anyone will ever care about any of the wins in this current conference is if we are fighting for a bcs slot. The only way that is happening is with better recruiting top to bottom. And the only way that is happening is with a different staff.

[Mustangs_Maroons]

[quote="mustangxcPreviously we were losing to those same teams. BTW you are making a very strong case for why it is difficult to recruit to SMU in football. Even when we beat the teams on our schedule, our fans don't care. We rarely fill our 32,000 seat stadium. With fans like ours I would never give SMU a look in football. What do we offer in football that would make us attractive to the top athletes? If you want a solid education go to Stanford, USC, UCLA, Rice, Duke, Michigan, Virginia, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, etc. If you want a rabid fan base pick an SEC or BIG school. I think there is a niche for us, but our fans are fairly delusional. SMU is not the most welcoming school for minorities and many top football players are minorities.[/quote]

Your argument is clearly thrown out the window when you could say the same thing about basketball, but look what a great coach with motivated recruiters can do. SMU can be attractive, and I would argue, to a certain extent, moreso in football, where we have a tradition of great football players (Doak Walker, Eric Dickerson, etc.) Can you say the same about some of the schools we're doormats to now? Quit with the excuses. Yes, Jones did help to bring us from being a cellar dweller to a team that borders on mediocrity. For all the money spent on football, we shouldn't settle for mediocrity anymore, and Jones is clearly not willing to do the work to get us to the next level. I'm sure we have qualified peopel that can find us a good replacement. It's in a better state now, but I don't think any of us can be content with where we are at, unless we're happy with mediocrity.

[mustangxc]

I think our fans will care when we beat Memphis, Cincinnati, UCONN, Temple, etc. in basketball, not so much in football. So not apples to apples. Attendance is proportionately not nearly as bad in basketball as in football and can get decent much more easily. As has been stated repeatedly, even in our best years we never had more than 32,000 fans for any opponent that did not bring huge numbers of fans with them.

[couch 'em]

Bennett 2007