Game Night Toledo!

[roguewarrior]

I love Andrew Clair at RB, but he’s been injury prone, went out after taking a hit, never got back in. Hopefully, he’ll have a healthier Jr. season.
Would seem we’ve got a couple of backup RB s that camn help. Would like to see the kid from Sandusky, 1st RB since Stew Williams from Sandusky?

I like 21 Raymore better than Clair, to be honest. Apparently he is the most difficult to stop in practice.

I think Clair is probably the more talented pure running back since I've started following BG (granted I am younger than several other people on AZZ), but he just hasn't had a solid offensive line to prove it, plus he has certainly had injury problems. That said, I see your point and I could see Raymore being more difficult bring down because he's like 60 lbs heavier. With a porous O-line, he'll probably see a bit more time this year. Maybe he can help wear down the defensive fronts a bit more early in games.

My biggest issue with the game coaching wise was the botched goal line set. It was hurried and panicky. More vexing is a play designed and practiced all week for that situation, with Raymore getting the ball.... and they didn’t use it?! You would think pressed for time, it was a no brainer to run it..... dude is a load.

[Class of 61]

Ray more did look good, certainly deserves some more carries as out top 2 RBs are smaller. Power back type can give us a different look, which is why I mentioned the Sandusky kid.

[BGSU33]

Speaking of McElwain, he used a new qb that he recruited and beat Ohio University last evening.

I’m glad you mentioned this. I couldn’t even stomach much of our game so I watched OU-CMU. Two programs who are head and shoulders above us. AND - for those of you who keep explaining how we need time, CMU won 1 damn game two years ago and went to the MACC the next season under a new coach. They did what they needed to do with what they had. I understand curbing expectations, but at some point you need to show some sort of improvement and stop blaming youth or the past staffs. CMU and OU both rolled two redshirt Freshman QB’s out there and they both balled out. A player doesn’t need to be a Jr or Sr to be good for crying out loud. It’s about recruiting truly good player and making them better. Not hoping for a bad player to be better in several years just because he’s now an upperclassmen.

That's like comparing apples to dump trucks. CMU did not go through the type of roster destruction BG found itself in a year ago, where they were something like 15 players below the 85 threshold.

Well, here's an apples to apples comparison for you directly related to BG then. In Gary Blackney's final year of 2000, BG won a measly 2 games running a 3-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offense. We were horrible. We hired Urban Meyer, who inherited a mess of a team and program at that point, and he additionally he ended up running off a number of players who didn't buy in. Despite taking over a really bad team, and being a first-time head coach himself, he and his staff took that downtrodden team that experienced very little previous success for years and completely changed not only the culture, but scrapped the entire schemes - most important the offense - and ran the spread with a bunch of guys who were recruited to play (and played in it poorly) a pro-style offense. In one offseason that same team that couldn't get out of its own way a season ago went out the following year and won quadruple the number of games from the previous season, with far less scholarship players running completely new schemes, capped off with a season-opening win over Missouri in the opener, which was of course on the road.

Anyone who knows and has followed BG football for the past two decades knows this story, and also understands just how difficult it is to accomplish this. The important issue to reflect on it concerning it is - positive things can be done and accomplished despite walking into a bad situation. Meyer didn't blame Gary Blackney's downward spiral his last few years, or the athletic director, or the administration or the lack of players he was drastically under the allotted number permitted with. He instead took what he had, and did an INCREDIBLE job with it. IMO, it was the biggest transformation I have seen from any team or coach in all my years following BG. While I don't ever expect to see it replicated again, that doesn't mean one couldn't expect to see progress in areas. Jinks - thankfully - has been long gone from BG now for awhile. Most of his players are long gone too, as well as his assistants as well. This is Scot Loeffler's team now. And while it's far from perfect, we've seen this movie before almost exactly 20 years ago. We (fans, alums) don't expect a miracle like Meyer practically provided. But we do expect to see positive progress. If a good coach can come in and immediately turning things around - in one year - having inherited that kind of a mess, then I don't think it's too much to ask - or expect - for a (hopefully) good coach and his staff now in their second year together to not immediately turn things around, but at least get things moving in a different direction, without using youth and numbers as a crutch, especially seeing the impact your peers are having with freshmen (Miami won a MACC with a frosh QB last year, OU and CMU are both being powered by RS Frosh this year). That said, the Meyer to Loeffler situation is an apples to apples - make that - a dump truck to dump truck comparison truth.

[zete]

....there is only one U Meyer. He came and got it done. Not many coaches measure up to what he has accomplished in the coaching ranks. We were luck to have had him a few years.
We will continue to give young coaches chances here and hope for results. Lots of intangibles make the job very challenging. Someday the sun will shine again for a brief period of a few years and then we will start over. That is just the way it is.

[Hammer]

There is only one Urban Meyer and also I think that team had more talent and strength. Loeffler has inherited a much worse offensive and defensive line. This will be more like a Clawson build with less to start with. The big head scratcher is the qb situation. That was the worst qb display I can remember in a BG uniform. He must have looked completely different in practice.

[MarkL]

The QB play looked about like Aaron Pankratz against Buffalo. And agreed, the 2001 team was in far better shape for a new coach to take over than the 2019 team. And Urban Meyer was a once in a generation coach.

[Falconwriter]

There is only one Urban Meyer and also I think that team had more talent and strength. Loeffler has inherited a much worse offensive and defensive line. This will be more like a Clawson build with less to start with. The big head scratcher is the qb situation. That was the worst qb display I can remember in a BG uniform. He must have looked completely different in practice.

Agree.

(1) It's still an apples to dump truck comparison because Urban was a once in a generation coach, especially at a MAC school.
(2) I've been watching BG football since 1972 and I have never seen a roster more depleted of talent than the one Loeffler inherited; and it's not close.

My biggest gripe from the Toledo game is the lack of discipline I saw all game long, on all kinds of levels. Whether that's a Loeffler thing or not will become obvious soon enough. Right now, I'm inclined to think it's related more to the broken up and disrupted practice schedule the team has been subjected to this entire year. It's hard to develop as players when you aren't getting consistent reps, even in practice.

[hammb]

There is only one Urban Meyer and also I think that team had more talent and strength. Loeffler has inherited a much worse offensive and defensive line. This will be more like a Clawson build with less to start with. The big head scratcher is the qb situation. That was the worst qb display I can remember in a BG uniform. He must have looked completely different in practice.

I'm not close enough to the program now to know how it compares, but it's re-writing history to say that Urban inherited strength on the lines. In fact, that was the subject of one of his first tirades (driving some players off). I knew a LOT of the roster back then. I'd say I was friends with a half dozen or so guys and was acquainted with at least 20 of the scholarship guys on that final Blackney early Urban team. I always said, during the end of Blackney that I knew exactly why they sucked. Players would brag about showing up for weight training, signing the roll to be counted as attendance, and then go home to sleep. When Urban got here we had only one scholarship player on the team that could bench 400# as a max. Not that bench press max is an overwhelming indicator of how good a player is, but I know for a fact that he saw that as a massive indictment on the strength and work ethic he was inheriting.

I do hope that we would see more progress from Loeffler this year than we did last year, but in a pandemic all bets are off. I also don't think it's fair to compare anybody to Urban Meyer. I firmly believe we went from a bottom 15 coaching staff at the end of the Blackney era to one of the top 5 coaches in college football history. Urban was a prodigy and he was a superstar from the moment he accepted a HC position. IF we are going to hold people to that standard we will always be disappointed. Clawson did a great job here, he was no Urban. Babers did his job here, he was not even close to Urban.

The beauty of Urban, that cannot be understated (or most likely replicated), was his ability to motivate. He took over a team with a couple dozen awful work ethics that pulled all the other players down to their level. Urban ran those people off and immediately got the players who stayed to become the hardest working team of scholarship athletes I've ever known. The guys that stuck through Urban (and I knew guys that did, and guys that left) still absolutely adore him, and while they were playing they busted their ass like no other team I've ever seen. They won in that first year by outworking teams, and the fact that Urban was a savant (at the time) schematic coach to go along with his master motivator personality. The following year that work ethic had manifested itself into a powerhouse defense (by MAC standards), and he also lucked into inheriting a superstar QB prospect tailor made to play in that scheme he ran.

I'll be rooting for Loeffler, but holding him to Urb's standard is unfair. IT's equally unfair to assert that the program was any better off when urban got here than it was when Loeffler got here. It's not an insult to just admit that Loeffler is no Urban Meyer. He doesn't have to be. MAC teams don't find Urban Meyer that often, I'd love if he can simply be PJ Fleck.

[TommyG]

There is only one Urban Meyer and also I think that team had more talent and strength. Loeffler has inherited a much worse offensive and defensive line. This will be more like a Clawson build with less to start with. The big head scratcher is the qb situation. That was the worst qb display I can remember in a BG uniform. He must have looked completely different in practice.

Urban didn’t inherit more talent/strength on the lines...that is just false. He flat out transformed that team into winners.
Loeffler has some time to get it straightened out, I just haven’t seen much of anything on the field that makes me think we’re well coached.

[BGSU33]

There is only one Urban Meyer and also I think that team had more talent and strength. Loeffler has inherited a much worse offensive and defensive line. This will be more like a Clawson build with less to start with. The big head scratcher is the qb situation. That was the worst qb display I can remember in a BG uniform. He must have looked completely different in practice.

Urban didn’t inherit more talent/strength on the lines...that is just false. He flat out transformed that team into winners.

I agree, that's a false statement. Meyer took over a very bad team that was spiraling downward, got rid of some bad seeds, and did a REMARKABLE job the following year with new schemes using the same players. As I said before, what he did was without a doubt the biggest turnaround and best job of any BG coach I have seen, and I'm sure that will never change.

[guest44]

Once a coach starts publicly discussing the amount of time needed to rebuild, you should raise questions. Hell, Mike Jinks said BG needed to rebuild a MAC Championship team and needed time to do it, and the BG administration and local media just ran with it. Loeffler has been here nearly two years and hasn’t even felt the urgency to find a actual quarterback. No quality transfer and no freshman ready to get thrown to wolves for growth. It’s all excuse making based off a model and a coach very unique in Clawson. A model that included two prior complete rebuilds on Clawsons resume. Loeffler has jobs, staff members who struggled at bigger jobs, and limited success at those jobs on his.

This is the MAC. It doesn’t take a decade to rebuild. Bowling Green should never ever be a 18 point underdog to Kent St at home. That’s total incompetence of an athletic department.

The better question regarding the Loeffler contract could be what BG will owe him, and not what is buyout will be to go elsewhere. The MAC East has good coaches unlike many of the Clawson years, and coaches who don’t seem to be job jumping.

[Schadenfreude]

Once a coach starts publicly discussing the amount of time needed to rebuild, you should raise questions.

I stopped reading here.

[guest44]

Once a coach starts publicly discussing the amount of time needed to rebuild, you should raise questions.

I stopped reading here.

You were the biggest Mike Jinks cheerleader on this message board.

[Schadenfreude]

Once a coach starts publicly discussing the amount of time needed to rebuild, you should raise questions.

I stopped reading here.

You were the biggest Mike Jinks cheerleader on this message board.

It's true that I didn't relentlessly hound Mike Jinks from Day One. I gave him a chance to prove himself. And, once he was hired, what choice did any of us have but to hope for the best? Yes, Jinks's resume did look shaky, but dwelling on that was not going to help once he was hired. Relentlessly trashing him right out of the gate was not going to help us win.

When it became absolutely clear that Mike Jinks wasn't going to figure out how to be a head coach in the MAC, I was clear-eyed about it. This is what I posted in September 2018, a couple of days after the Eastern Kentucky game and several weeks before Bob Moosbrugger took action:

I've seen enough. This isn't working.

I have no idea if Bob Moosbrugger can scrape together the $850,000 or whatever it would take to buy Mike Jinks out, but that may be the least bad option at this point.

You on the other hand have had nothing good to say about Falcon football in years. I'm not even sure why you keep posting here except to troll the rest of us.

To suggest that no coach should ever speak of a rebuild is ridiculous. Sometimes, a rebuild is in order. Dave Clawson had to do it. Now we find BGSU in that situation again. Acknowledging it is the first step to fixing it. I'm much more confident in Scot Loeffler's capability to turn this around than I ever was Mike Jinks.

[MarkL]

Schad, I'm with you except I was ready to be gone with Jinks before you were. I had serious reservations about the guy when he was announced. And if you look back at my posts then, you won't see much enthusiasm for me. I defended him against what I thought was a rush to judgment before he showed what he had but that doesn't mean I liked him. Just thought he shouldn't be attacked yet.

And then the 2016 season happened.

And then 2017 was worse.

I was ready for him to go after 2017. Made it clear on this board that I thought it was best he be let go after two years. I still stand by this post about 2017. But I understood why he got a third year. And then it became clearly evident to utterly everyone early in 2018 he still wasn't getting it to work.

I like Loeffler. I see what he's working to build. And I also see that due to not taking the JC shortcut and living with Mike Jinks' dumpster fire, it will be a slow process making a good football team. Frustratingly slow. But we have to let Loeffler do what he does. Now if three years pass and we see no player development, we can address the topic again.

Some people however seem to have an axe to grind. Regardless of who is the coach. I don't get it.