From CFN

[SC Pony]

http://cfn.scout.com/2/920153.html

4. And there's no Pony Express in sight.

By Richard Cirminiello

I don’t want to completely diminish the importance of recruiting, but unless you’re one of the small handful of schools competing perennially for a national championship, the process is grossly overrated. For the other 90% or so of FBS programs, success is all about coaching. Always has been and always will be.

Two-star, three-star, four-star. It matters little what experts say about you before your career begins compared to what you look like four or five years from then. That’s where the good coaches earn their six and seven-digit salaries and the average coaches wind up looking over their shoulders this time every year. Take June Jones and Al Golden, for instance. Until they arrived at SMU in 2008 and Temple in 2006, respectively, hope was non-existent and football games were little more than social gatherings for students and the locals looking for an inexpensive day out. In short spans, times have changed. The caliber of the players? Not so much. The caliber of the teaching? You bet.

One man in Dallas, armed with a fancy offense and a blueprint for extreme makeovers, is piloting a program out of a quarter-century ditch that began with the infamous NCAA Death Penalty in the 1980s. One man in Philadelphia, brimming with confidence and a tireless work-ethic, has helped breathe life into a program that was teetering on extinction just a few years ago.

Entering the final turn of the 2009 regular season, SMU is bowl-eligible and leads the Conference USA West Division, needing wins over Marshall and Tulane to play for a league championship. Temple, exiled from the Big East earlier in the decade, has won eight straight games and controls its own destiny in the MAC East Division. Two men. Two thousand reasons why they have no business being in their current positions. And two more examples why success in college football will always hinge on hiring the right man for the job. Athletic directors at struggling schools from Louisville to Notre Dame and Illinois to Virginia know this to be fact, which is why the

[Dutch]

well said.

[Harry0569]

CFN is the premier college football site, and it's great to see SMU get some love from them!