This is not an attempt to validate the ranking...that's for someone else to play with, but right now I would take a 6-5 season and think it was damn great.
would have been 7-4 or 8-3 and in a bowl game if Cavan had stuck with Flanagan all season instead of trying to let Sanders have the position- or if Copeland had just let Rossley stay one more season
huntnfish wrote:would have been 7-4 or 8-3 and in a bowl game if Cavan had stuck with Flanagan all season instead of trying to let Sanders have the position- or if Copeland had just let Rossley stay one more season
both the Flanagan and Rossley points are spot on. The referenced season is a lowlight for those two reasons.
Tom Rossley would have gotten blown out by Rice. Plus there is no way in hell that you can look at Cavan's performance and claim that Rossley would have done better. Both the offense and defense were completely revamped for the better I might add-something Rossley never showed the slightest ability to do. Rossley never had a team with a strong running game, never had a team with a DECENT defense and could never convert on third down or in the red zone. SMU was much better in run defense, rushing offense, third down conversions. Say what you will about SMU with Kueck et al as offensive coordinator but that SMU team with Dickey as offensive coordinator was well coached-in a style completely different from Rossley's failures. Way too much focus is spent on Head Coaches as opposed to coordinatos anyway. That being said my strongest criticism of any coach since the DP was playing Sanders over Flanigan but I'm not sure it would have resulted in more wins. As for those of you that [deleted] and [deleted] about a coach enforcing team rules-that gets really old.