This from yesterday’s annarbor.com: “Eastern Michigan football coach Ron English tears his team down to properly rebuild his program.” At first, I thought this was going to be a story about Ron English getting emotional and crying, but it turns out to mean “tear down” as in “rebuild.” Here are the opening paragraphs of the story:
When the Eastern Michigan University football team begins practice Aug. 9, the roster won’t include 39 names it did a year ago. Fourteen players graduated. Twenty-five others either were asked not to return or chose to leave.
EMU coach Ron English, who replaced six members of his coaching staff, believes the turnover will benefit his team. He believes the Eagles are better equipped to begin building a winning program.
“If you go to Detroit right now and you buy one of these old houses, are you going to try and refurbish it or are you going to knock the thing down and start over?,” English said Friday. “You’re probably going to knock it down and that’s what we did. We said, ‘We’re going to take a hit here, but we’re not going to tread water.
“We’re going to knock the thing down and start over.”
I don’t know much about football, but this seems to be an “all-in” strategy: if it works, English will be a hero and undoubtedly a hot pick for the next job up the coaching food chain. If it doesn’t work, this might be his last coaching job, period. Maybe that’s too extreme….
Oh, and the house analogy doesn’t work for me. It seems to me that if someone were to go into Detroit city nowadays to buy an old (abandoned and/or burnt-out) house, then that person must be interested in restoration and actually making that old house like it once was. If you were just going to “tear it down” to build a new house, wouldn’t you just do that in a new housing development?
What other kind of strategy would a coach employ besides going “all-in?”
Truth be told, this is something all new football coaches face when coming to an organization that has a history of, err, underachievement. If Ron English is going to build a successful program, he needs players who fit the team’s personality. You can’t get that your very first year because most of your players are from the previous coach’s team.
We can’t have high expectations of English and his program until at least his third year or even fourth year, given the talent deficit from last year’s squad.
The tear-down makes sense given last year’s doughnut festival (that is, the zero wins and worse-than-everyone rating…a lonely bid to the Dom Bakeries Bowl, if you know what I mean). But one issue here seems to be with those twenty-five others who have parted ways with EMU (or with the football program…the article is ambiguous in this regard). Roster shedding goes on all the time, of course, but I don’t personally see it as an admirable practice in 1-A football, assuming many if not all of them were recruited to EMU. I haven’t compared rosters to see who they are, and while I do understand English must have a group with a common vision, let’s hope those who weren’t asked back were thought of as students. This is conjectural, since I don’t have any reason to think otherwise, but twenty-five does seem like a large number following an “Embrace the Process” campaign.
While I’m EMUTalk-ing, I guess I’ll toss out there that I for one would like to see Eagle Football try the five-year scholarship model that has worked out so well for Wake Forest. It did cost WFU a bit more to get it up and running, but it resulted 1) winning records in a historically mediocre program, 2) a mature, unified cohort of fifth-year seniors, and 3) a couple of consecutive bowl games, the revenue from which surely exceeded the investment in a fifth year of support.
High turnover is the norm whenever a new coach comes in and installs a new system. I also felt English was fairly open about not agreeing with his predecessor’s approach when it came to recruiting (Ron said something to the effect that earlier recruits were too small and, by implication, lacked the physicality needed to compete).
I do wonder why he waited a season if he was just going to clean house anyhow? Maybe he just didn’t have enough bodies otherwise.
Housecleaning has two sides. One, a new coach wanting to win and clearing the roster for hopefully a better season. The other side is that it’s a reminder that athletic scholarships are 1 year renewable scholarships (not 4 years guaranteed) and if any of these players were on scholarship one has to wonder if they will be able to continue their education.
Perhaps I don’t follow football closely enough, so please, serious fans, correct me if this is wrong: Coach English came to EMU not a year ago, but about a year and a half ago; he was involved in recruiting players for his first season at EMU during the first half of 2009, before his first season began. I recall him speaking, in his first months here, about his active recruiting and the fruits it would produce. So too with his hiring a whole new coaching staff. That he’s now “tearing down” the team and his staff suggests that he’s purging his own recruits and his own hires. Compare the rosters, and see which of his recruits he’s keeping and which he’s purging. Are his current choices admissions that his prior choices didn’t work out? Is there a fatal flaw in this logic? I pose it for the always anonymous Sports Advisor, who is worried that these late summer changes in EMU football reflect more panic than careful strategy for the future. Much EMU precedent suggests that’s correct, sadly. SA also wonders about the kids booted from the team. When were they informed? A record of failure is a huge liability for recruiting efforts, and signs of purging the recent recruits doesn’t aid the recruiting process.
The loss record of last season is largely due to problems deeper than any coach can fix. We’re competing in an increasingly expensive sport where EMU is, basically, unable to compete, and it’s a sport which few EMU community members see value in our playing the game. My sympathies to Coach English, for facing such a deep set of problems. Most members of the EMU community regard football as irrelevant or nearly so to the University’s purpose – a true fact, but one that need not affect on the field performance. The fact that EMU football is largely seen as marginal to university purposes by EMU community can of course be viewed either as a problem or as an opportunity. Education First, anyone?
The idea that a coach should have 4 or 5 years to produce results is questionable. Coaches don’t, in Div 1, get the big bucks merely based on the promise that someday in the future, years into the future, their coaching work might yield some wins and might somehow contribute to the university’s mission. Coach English has a generous contract, and has been given extraordinary support. Very good. Let’s not now seriously consider lowering expectations for his performance. Time that we start seriously examining the results, costs, benefits and purpose of football at EMU. These activities must be approached not as a cheering section, but with the data driven analysis and careful dialog that befits our university. My thanks to the Sports Advisor! Go Eagles! Education First.