Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Franklin to Hire Two Defensive Coordinators from FCS

No official announcement has been made by VU, but Chris Low of ESPN.com is reporting that CJF plans to hire William & Mary DC Bob Shoop as his defensive coordinator and Georgia Southern DC Brent Pry as his co-defensive coordinator. Other reports confirm the Shoop hire.

21 comments:

Vandy-Montana said...

I like this hire. William & Mary has been a power in I-AA football lately, and GS has come back from the dead. Good good...

Anonymous said...

That makes me wanna shoop...

Anything but Gatorade said...

*facepalm*

Anonymous said...

Please tell me April Fool's day came early. This is terrible news. Franklin is a RECRUITER, not an X's and O's guys (we've already established that on this board). So we really need super smart and capable coordinators. This is not the splash hire I was looking for (ala Randy Shannon). FCS! You have to be kidding me. Guess we better recruit 5 stars around the board because they aren't exactly going to be gimmicking it up with systems coaches on Xs and Os. This Sucks!

Anonymous said...

Not the flashy hires I was expecting either, but I trust Franklin and what he's doing. Besides, we are Vandy! We have to win before we can sell our program to recruits and coordinators. You have to prove you are good coach first, then everything else will follow

Douglas James said...

A splashy hire is done for recruiting purposes not X's and O's purposes. I don't know if they guys are great defensive minds or not but the fact that they are FCS coaches does not mean they aren't excellent coaches.

Anonymous said...

On the contrary Xs and Os hires can be flashy. Norm Chow, June Jones, Mike Leach, Monte Kiffin. These guys aren't known for recruiting, they are known for innovative play-calling. Since we swung and missed on an Xs and Os guy as head coach (Gus) we needed to get some of it on the coordinator side. Unfortunately we did not with these FCS hires.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like some of you are panicking. These 2 guys, I think, will be good for Vandy. We don't need "splashes"...we need solid coaches who can motivate and build a competitive team. Much of our problem with the last staff was an inability to evaluate talent; and to teach / coach proper technique at critical postions. This is a solid staff being built; now comes the fun part....evaluating the existing talent base. I hope that CJF has already put the word out to the entire team that all positions (esp the qb competition) will be wide open for spring practice. Every good SEC team has a decent starting qb. We should be good at RB and WR in the spring. Now,... qb....?

Anonymous said...

Speaking of "splash" hires; my guess is that CJF talked to Randy Shannon about the DC job. He likely has been holding out for a higher profile job / program for the last several weeks. He would have been a great "splash" hire but I am very confident in the way the staff is being put together by CJF. Shannon knows that even if he sits out this season that he will be in high demand by several D1 programs at the end of next season.

Bobby O'Shea said...

I'm not saying this means anything, but clearly one group thinks both Shoop and Pry know what they are doing. According to footballscoop.com:  "Shoop won the 2009 FootballScoop D1-AA Coordinator of the Year and Pry was a 2010 finalist for the same award."

I think we might need to consider that this coach knows more about football and assembling a staff than a bunch of guys (myself included), who read a blog and have more than a passing understanding of the game. Just because we've never heard of a coach doesn't mean he isn't a great hire.

Anonymous said...

The other thing that is common to all of these coaches is that either a) they played football at an excellent academic institution or b) have coached at one before. I think these are solid hires for Vanderbilt.

Anonymous said...

all the apologists better be prepared to jump ship then and say that i was right when and if we don't snag 7-8 wins after this "great" staff gets its own class in place. no excuses then.

Bobby O'Shea said...

How would one go about saying you were right if you post anonymously?

Anonymous said...

I just mean all the kool-aid drinkers should apologize to those of us who thought we needed more horse power in this hire. Trust me there were plenty of non-anon people on Vandymania to go around. I'll live through them knowing I was right all along. See, the thing is I do want vandy to succeed. But i'm sick of people just saying "football will get better" because we are all in and because franklin says the right things. those are not empirical reasons to say its going to get better. some of us require a track record of evidence.

Bobby O'Shea said...

Anonymous 10:50, you are an example we should all strive to follow. As a kool-aid drinker myself, I think the "horse-power" argument falls for a couple reasons.

First, it assumes that that you and other "empiricists" know horse-power when you see it. Stats are telling, but can be limited. Stats often paint distorted pictures and that show someone what they want to see. I'm not saying they aren't important, but I'm more of a Potter Stewart pornography guy myself.

Second, the argument assumes "horse-powered hires" would want to coach in Vanderbilt program Coach Franklin is building. I suspect (although I'm certainly willing to admit I could be wrong) many of those critical of Franklin's hires were not fans of the decision to hire CJF in the first place. If that underlines all your assumptions, I suspect there's not much that can be done.

Finally, at least with respect to the 2 men we are talking about, you're facts are inaccurate. One of the best indications as to the quality of a coach is what his peers think of him. As I mentioned earlier, "Shoop won the 2009 FootballScoop D1-AA Coordinator of the Year and Pry was a 2010 finalist for the same award." I suspect they don't just give these awards out willy-nilly (For example, I have yet to be honored as blogger of the year, or at least the runner up for such an award). Almost invariably, coaches start out at small programs and work their way through the ranks based on their talents. Often, the work they do is not seen by blowhards like the people who read and write sports blogs (myself, very much included), but noticed by those in the coaching ranks.

Coach Franklin has been incredibly deliberate in his hiring process. This is something he has thought a lot about. And, unlike us, it's his job to figure out how to make Vanderbilt football good. This is not to say he'll be successful (the program certainly doesn't have much history of that). But I think it is unfair to say those of us not pounding our chests for more are somehow delusional. Coach Franklin, in his first 6 weeks of heading the program has done a lot of things well. His public statements, the way he's gone about his hiring, and the general vision he's laid out should give Vanderbilt fans (who want it) confidence. Whatever, pass the kool-aid.

Anonymous said...

Let's see...what was the track record of the cain-kiser-caldwell regime?

2-10...blowout losses all over the place...

CBJ?

One d-1 win per year each of his first three year.

And people are stupid enough to bitch about this upgrade taking place. Sometimes it looks like we have fans who actually DON'T want to win...they must LOVE losing. They cling to S O V like a security blanket and a passy.

Anonymous said...

the last poster clearly doesn't understand the formal of argumentative logic well. does it mean that because i think cfj is a bad hire ergo that means i was an apologist for VCDW and the administration's willingness to put up with crappy results from the previous coaching regime? where does it say that if I espouse A I also have to espouse B. Clearly you never took a formal logic class at Vandy. I have never supported the previous coaching regimes. From day 1, I've been bitching to take out the big buys and buy us a slew of coaching superstars.

Anonymous said...

@ Bobby... you said:

"Coach Franklin, in his first 6 weeks of heading the program has done a lot of things well. His public statements, the way he's gone about his hiring, and the general vision he's laid out should give Vanderbilt fans (who want it) confidence. Whatever, pass the kool-aid."

1. Public statements are promises not empirical data showing he can win in the SEC at an academic oriented schools

2. Vision! Anyone can lay out a great plan. Execution is an entirely different animal. Again you're believing mere strategy. Words!

3. The way he's going about his hiring. I for one wouldn't say this has been good. Our OC is a nobody and our DCs while good in the small time show have done NOTHING to recommend that they are capable of stopping the big dogs of the SEC.

Why didn't VCDW simply pull out his daddy warbucks and a rocket from zeppos and buy us a real coach. We have one of the biggest endowments in the country. If they were serious about winning we would have spent WHATEVER IT TOOK to bring the closest thing to "a sure thing" into coach. There is no such thing of course as a "sure thing" but CJF is not even close to one. He may succeed, but I would like a little more than "might succeed" at this point in the disaster that is our program's history. For god sakes, SMU after it was killed via the death penalty got June Jones!

Bobby O'Shea said...

Anonymous 1:45,

I think we can agree that there is a fundamental disagreement between those fans who are happy (or at least reserving judgment) about the hiring of Coach Franklin, and those who aren't. If you're in the former camp, you are hanging your hat on his public statements, his reputation as a recruiter, and a general sense of optimism (naive as it might be). If you are in the later camp, there is very little he can do (in terms of hiring, etc...) that is likely to please you because he wasn't your guy. That's fine, but it also confirms my second point.

Coach Franklin is putting together his staff. That staff (one would assume) will fit within the type of program he is looking to build: young, eager, and looking for an opportunity to coach in the best conference in college football. That some of these guys might be unproven as far as you are concerned, frankly, doesn't bother me and certainly doesn't both Coach Franklin.

The statement about VCDW pulling out "daddy warbucks," to me, ignores what happened during the coaching search. Vanderbilt tried to do that when they pursued a certain offensive coordinator from a school in Alabama. It didn't work out. Now, if you are someone who thinks the courtship of said coach fell apart because of VCDW or Vanderbilt's unwillingness to lower academic standards or build palatial practice facilites, then I surmise you are a Climer/Biddle disciple who believes Vanderbilt's struggles in football are somehow related to a "lack" of an athletic department.

Finally, the notion that Vanderbilt's endowment enables the university to spend whatever it wants (assuming there is the will to do so) is simply false. Endowment funds are usually very restricted insofar as they can only be used for certain things (i.e. what the benefactor endowed the money for). Vanderbilt can't raid the endowment to pay "WHATEVER IT [TAKES]" it get a coach you believe would show the university was serious about winning. Despite the misconceptions that persist, the endowment is not operating cash and is limited in a whole host of ways that only people as smart as Seamus can understand.

Moreover, it would be absurd for Vanderbilt to pay a coach (take Jim Harbaugh for instance) 10 million dollars a season to do a job that, at most, another school would pay him 5 million for. That's not smart, it's desperate. Second, your "pay anything" argument assumes there is an amount of money that would be enough to lure such a "near sure thing" coach to Nashville. I think the saga with the coordinator from the Plains demonstrates that if you don't want to coach at Vanderbilt, no (reasonable) amount of money is going to change your mind. There will always be a reason not to take the job. I'm not saying it can't happen, just that your solution is not as easy as one might think. The June Jones situation is not as simple as SMU throwing a boatload of money at him (although they did), and the Mustangs caught lightening in a bottle with that hire. If fans are serious about Vanderbilt athletics having the financial dexterity to write the kind of checks you're talking about, give to the National Commodore Club.

Anonymous said...

The SMU death penalty was 1987.

June Jones has been there three years and has a 16-22 LOSING record.

Anonymous said...

Bet you 100 bucks CJF doesn't have that good a Winning PCT in 3 years here.