I'd wage that 95% of Notre Dame fans couldn't have told you who the Purdue WR coach was 10 days ago or would have known where JaMarcus Shephard was 10 days ago. Same with Holoman Wiggins. Yet now there's a ton of WR coaching experts who are sure that Notre Dame got this hire wrong.
A lot of smart people who know a lot more about football than I do all rave about Stuckey and say that Notre Dame got the next big name WR coach instead of hiring someone else's WR coach who is just gonna look for an OC job in a year or two.
Brady Quinn played with Stuckey in Cleveland and loves the hire for Notre Dame. Dabo recommended him.
Seems like Notre Dame got itself a pretty good, maybe great, WR coach.
Notre Dame doesn't need a WR coach to come in and develop Rondale Moores and David Bells. Notre Dame needs a WR coach who can get Carnell Tates to come to Notre Dame on a yearly basis. And honestly, no one knows if Shephard or Stuckey can do that at this point b/c neither of them have yet.
I hope the intel that Shephard was considered the top candidate going into the interviews was wrong. If the only reason Stuckey was hired is b/c he interviewed better than Shepard, that's all it means...that Stuckey is better at interviews, but he won't be doing a lot of interviews as WR coach.
Inexperienced hiring managers tend to put more stock than they should in interviews, and Freeman and Rees are inexperienced.
Conversely, if it was the glowing reviews from Dabo, Aranda, etc. that swung it Stuckey's way in the end, I'm fine with that.
It's the most high, low and emotional group I've ever seen.
It was imperative that we maintain Elston or we were doomed. Elston leaves, "oh well he wasn't that great of a coach. We'll be fine without him." This one was probably the best example of what you are referring to and I agree with you.
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Out.
For me it’s maddening and almost stupid because it distorts what should be so many good conversations about what is vs the mythical what we want to pretend.
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But the fact that most fans didn’t know assistant coaches 10 days ago is meaningless. Fans generally don’t know position coaches from other teams, with some “high-profile” exceptions. When they come on ND’s radar, they educate themselves. To the extent there is skepticism over Stuckey, it is clearly based on lack of experience and on-field performance to measure. Most ND fans didn’t know Mason “10 days before he was hired.” Yet I thought you wrote a great article about what an “impressive hire” he was. That article was based mostly on Mason’s experience and the production he coached on the field. Some fuel was added by all the pre-hire commentary about how important the WR coach hire was due to ND’s situation.
If your comment here was in any way directed toward me (I don’t know honestly), let me correct: I’m not “hand-wringing” about it. I’m good with Stuckey, as I’ve stated, and I am trying to focus on his positives. My comments down the board are only about my view of how the hiring went down. I apparently have a minority view on how things went down. No big deal as far as I’m concerned.
I will disagree with your last point a little. I think the WR coach both has to get elite talent to ND but also has to develop it. And definitely has to develop the non-elite talent (not every schollie is going to a top 50 player). Your recent article about Quinn and Hiestand underscores the point, I think. Not exactly sure what you meant about Bell & Moore. Both were 4*. Bell was in the Colzie-Styles-Merriweather range of ranking at 247. Agree, though, that neither Shephard or Stuckey has proven they can land a guy like Tate.
because he's the most recent piece of a puzzle, that seems to be getting a little messy.
We hired a completely inexperienced HC and we were told it's ok because he's a great recruiter and he's special, he IS ready to be a HC.
To this point the recruiting rep is holding up (for how long if he starts losing?), but he's shown to be anything but ready to be a HC in general, let alone at ND. So now we have a completely inexperienced HC (who has no knowledge of the offensive side of the ball), combined with a relatively inexperienced OC, an even less experienced WR Coach, a RB coach (and big time recruiter) who might be leaving, and no official announcement of an OL coach yet...and on top of that offensive mess no Defensive Coordinator or DL coach...all this combined with what we saw in the Fiesta, and even for someone like me, who is glad tiga king is gone and is consciously making a mental and physical effort to stay positive, there is reason for concern here.
Maybe it all works out wonderfully in the end (I sure hope so) but presently it feels like the needle is moving a different direction than when all these players announced they were coming back.
have seen this year. It will have an impact on any coach and direction of any school regardless of experience because the downfall of man, Human Greed, is currently running rampant through CFB right now.
There is no way to project out what is likely to happen, other than there is going to be a massive divide between the winners and losers. Some with great experience will be sideswiped off the map while others with little experience will appear to be the cream of the crop.
Money has a real way of ruining all good things.
A meltdown after having a 21 point lead, was a devastating start and doesn't inspire confidence.
This is exactly where i am at. Every day there seems to be another nugget of concerning news. The truth is none of us will really know for a year.
Fans, like the media, will do research on these guys. Form an uneducated opinion and either celebrate, proceed with caution (like me) or just plain hate the hire. Bears fans are going through this exact same thing with their HC candidates. This is what fans do. Media pretends like they know all these candidates personally and can recite what hospital they were born in or their 7th grade football stats. Only a few can. Let's be honest here. It's all a gamble. The youth movement this program has taken within the staff is taking us down a road that is unpredictable at best. Let's talk next year at this time before we start blasting fellow Irish fans for their opinions.
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Onto a pedestal in less than 24 hours should be a huge red flag. Surprised more people don’t see it. I guess if their “media” tells them something viscerally appealing ….
worse because it has little real impact on the masses. So, it's easier to say XYZ media outlet said it so it has to be true. Most really don't care to lift up the hood and look underneath because it's not really that important to them and more or less is just talking points.
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