Bearish said:
PEPT11 said:
bear2be2 said:
This is a great post and one that will likely fall on deaf ears here.
I don't have any idea if Matt Rhule and his philosophies will work out at Baylor or in the Big 12, but I know he's playing a long game and it will take some time to find out. If it works, he'll look like a genius two years from now, and everyone here will be eating crow. If it doesn't, he'll likely join Beal and Steele near the bottom of the Baylor coaching hierarchy.
But it's clear from both his words and actions that he's always viewed this as a long-term rebuilding process and his recruiting strategies and personnel decisions have reflected that. As long as positive progress is being made, I'm willing to be patient and see if that light bulb goes on at some point. But frankly, it doesn't matter what I'm willing or unwilling to put up with because he will (and should be) given a fair amount of time to put his words and philosophies to action.
Here's the thing that bothers me about this: even if Rhule is proven "right" in a couple years, these first two seasons didn't have to be this bad. He's wasted these seasons based on his stubborn refusal to adapt his schemes to the personnel he has and the conference he plays in. This didn't have to be a gut job. We had enough players to be respectable last year and this year. He just made choices that made the team significantly worse.
I bet those Temple fans disagree. As much fun as 2-10 must have been for them, I'm sure they saw those back to back 10-winners and thought it was all worth it.
Temple was winning 8-9 games annually before he took over, barring the single season right before. Then he won two games and 4 games. This is because he's too egotistical and not a winner.
Winners can't survive this level of failure not because of external pressures but because they themselves hate losing this much. Rhule doesn't have that and it's why he'll never be an elite coach.
At the very least we'd be better just by hiring someone that hates losing. Rhule seems to want to win a specific way and is fine with losing when his way doesn't pan out. That's a fireable offense in itself imo.
Finally, if I were Rhoades I'd have been all over him last season for blaming players all the time. The fact he's still doing it is unacceptable. You want to know why they seem like they're going through the motions out there? It's because they don't like their coach. They don't want to fight for him. I bet him blaming them for literally everything has something to do with that.