Recent Comments

Bowen is not a top 10 OC by any stretch, but he's better than Corn and Stiney, IMO. He's OK. He will get better over time. This season our defense couldn't get off the field when they needed to in several games. I think we can certainly upgrade from Marve. Especially coaching LB's.

Shawn Clark Out at App State

As a App State Alum, this was definitely needed as the program has gone downhill the past few seasons. Good to see them be proactive

Oh, I agree - and even on offense, I think Bowen would be helped tremendously by a better line. I said somewhere else I hope Pry isn't afraid of making tough staffing decisions, because we definitely need to do better on defense.

By my unpracticed eye, it seemed to be because there was no confidence in the safety play. Thus the other backs were cheating to help and got caught out doing it. The Duke coach spotted it and took advantage early.

I'm not sure Marve is his "buddy."

Listen to coach Cheetah on Boundary Corner. Pry was in touch with him and Marve about giving them jobs before he even got interviewed here. They have an active group chat after several of those coaches lived together at a previous stop. It's like a mini fraternity of coaches. If Marve wasn't part of the original group he was definitely added later. They all kept in touch and families did weekend trips together before Pry got the VT job

All that to say they are absolutely buddies and Pry will almost certainly not act rationally when it comes to making business decisions about any of those guys

you don't have an issue with analytics, you just (rightly) believe that small sample size results often don't match the takeaways from a large sample of data -- which is actually a core tenet of analytics.

did we back off of him last year? i recall being surprised when he went from Buffalo to Kent State when it was rumored we were gonna take him

Recruiting trends up when either the floor is raised or the ceiling is raised. Recruiting is overhauled and accelerated when both the floor and the ceiling are raised.

I am "okay" with Pry seriously raising the floor of the recruits we're taking. We aren't putting all our eggs in the 0.95-rated basket only to wind up with Plan C 0.82-rated project we've flipped from Directional Rustbelt Tech on NSD.

That alone signals "improvement" because it's hard not to agree that the floor has been raised. And a lot of the guys who represent that floor haven't even really seen the field yet due to redshirting etc. It also doesn't change the fact that we need to be and should be landing blue chippers. but so far it appears that the strategy is to build out the foundation of the roster via solid but unspectacular 'crootin and then land difference makers at the positions of need in the portal. I don't think that's particularly sustainable, but i at least follow the logic. But i definitely want blue chippers. but i get it.

I... don't disagree.

If that's the story Pry wants to tell, then fix the defense. He's had 5ish top 10 defenses in his career? Fix it.

I'm ADD and well over 40, where memory is the third thing to go. Outside of a handful of big plays each game, it's hard for me to remember exactly what a specific defender does in coverage on a regular basis. /shrug

That's why I depend on the experts here to lay out performance metrics. ;^)

I think the advanced metrics are just one side of the coin: i.e., we had more good plays than bad plays over the course of the season.

The flip side of the coin was that we lost a bunch of games for exactly the reasons you've stated: untimely mistakes, some questionable play calls, and inability to get stops/scores with the game on the line.

It all adds up to what this season was: a wasted opportunity to make meaningful progress for the program.

Yeah, I knew there was a pecking order but it wasn't in the original post and was apparently feeling too lazy to look it up and rather rely on my peeps here.