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.
