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JoeFalcon brought up an intersting topic in the "Fire the coach" thread which I thought would be really good conversation.

JoeFalcon wrote:What scared me a little at the time is that both Buddy and Pooch came from the same system as both were assistant coaches under York.

Perhaps we need to branch out beyond the Jerry York coaching tree.

This peaked my interest as to what kind of boss JYork was to his assistants. I respect York as most people do. But I wonder how well he develops his assistants? It's a fair question.

Does anyone wish to undertake some investigation to see the career paths of his assistants? This may be a pretty good topic.

Honestly I think that York treated his asst. like puppets. This assumption is due to the fact that this is how Pooch treats his asst. There is little respect and their comments and contributions are rarely needed. Heaven forbid you might have a thought that would go against Pooch too. You never know, if that happened you might end up in the AHL or even at Wisconson.

bigdog wrote:Honestly I think that York treated his asst. like puppets. This assumption is due to the fact that this is how Pooch treats his asst. There is little respect and their comments and contributions are rarely needed. Heaven forbid you might have a thought that would go against Pooch too. You never know, if that happened you might end up in the AHL or even at Wisconson.

Wrong assumption. York gave/gives his assistants a lot of leeway and respects their opinions. That's one of the things that makes him a good coach. The other thing he does well is surrounding himself with quality assistants that relate well with the players. The players may dislike/hate him but love the assistants and that's ok with him. His job isn't to make friends with his players, his job is to field a quality team. (It's very much like Urban Myer's approach when you think about it.)

As far as his ability to develop assistants to the point where they're ready to be the head guy? Buddy was successful at his prior position (RPI) before coming to BG and his coaching style was the complete opposite of York's. Personally, I think Buddy's biggest problem lay in the ability of his assistants to land recruits. They had given up on the 'A' recruits and settled on the 'B' based on the premise that our facilities could not longer attract the 'A' players and Buddy bought into that (from his own mouth). This is supported by the fact that his last class had a lot of talent and that class was recruited, primarily, by Smith after Hills and Wilson left. Given a little more time I think that Buddy would have met with some success with Hills and Wilson out of the picture, but it was too late.

Pooch is, obviously, trying to take York's approach to coaching but isn't meeting with the success of his mentor. I can't answer the question why, but it may be that he hired an assistant that was too much like him (Fogerty) when he really needed an assistant that would buffer his hard line approach with the players. It's possible that he has that now with Danton and Doug.....I don't know. My view is that it's too early to tell. I'm going to chalk up the last two weekends to the coaching shake up caused by Fogerty's departure and hope for the best down the line.

I can't say anything about York cause I know nothing about him, really. I can say that Pooch had an asst. Coach that was an excellent buffer with the players. He got little respect and I mean little, that is why he left. Maybe the aspect that Pooch is missing from York's teaching is respect. I know he has close to zero for the players and it is clear by how many coaches that have been associated with this program that have left, he have very little for them too.

From my perspective, Buddy treated his assistants very well. He treated everyone associated with the program very well. He was (and still is) very easy to talk to. His assistants actually said a lot in the locker room between periods. Pre and post game speeches were usually limited to Buddy, with the occasional player saying something before certain games.

I was trying to get a gauge of W/L records more than just speak to personalities. I don't know if the data would be telling, but I'm curious.

I'm a data driven guy.