What are the "ugly truths" about the football program?

[appvette]

For a staff that preached the value of analytics, they sure didn’t seem to be able to analyze the data and take actionable steps to turn those trends around.

Ideas are easy, execution is everything

-John Doerr

-Michael Scott

[appgrad95&97]

The ugly truth is this: Hiring Clark was lazy (not necessarily bad), extending him was bad. Five seasons from '17-'19, we have fallen as a program. I don't know how may years it will take us to get back to where we were. I don't know that we'll ever get back to being a top 5 to 10 G5 program. I know we have a new coach and a lot of things to improve. At this point success for me is developing an identity on offense and building back a defense that doesn't look lost for big chunks of games.

[MrCraig]

Ugly truth is we continued to try and do things the way they used to be done and not adapt to the players we had. Chase Brice was a generational arm, and we tried to establish the run and not pass much, and tried to run the same offense we did with Zac Thomas and Taylor lamb.

You could extend this to Joey Aguilar too. We had a QB who could throw, run, and improvise, but they seemed to try to mold Joey to the play calling instead of shifting the play calling to use Joey’s talents more.
We saw very little option runs, designed QB runs, or RPO with Joey.

[WASU 93]

Another ugly truth is we played extremely undisciplined football. We were highly penalized and a lot of those penalties came at the worst times. We developed a bad habit of turning the ball over a lot. We seemed to be unprepared very often, leading to poor starts and constant bad angles (which made us look slow).

I made a series of posts a month or so back detailing a lot of core statistics and how we were trending negative in most of them. For a staff that preached the value of analytics, they sure didn’t seem to be able to analyze the data and take actionable steps to turn those trends around.

If you want ugly truths, just look at the data-it was all there.

Team Penalties
2016 (Satt). 6.09 per game/57.69 ypg
2017 (Satt). 7.0 per game/63.92 ypg
2018 (Satt) 6.38 per game/57.82 ypg
2019 (Drink) 6.79 per game/64.21 ypg
2020 (Clark) 7.33 per game/ 67.58 ypg
2021 (Clark) 6.07 per game/53.14 ypg
2022 (Clark) 5.58 per game/51.38 ypg
2023 (Clark) 4.35 per game/40.67 ypg
2024 (Clark) 6.0 per game /56.91 ypg

The last 4 years have been our best years in number per game and yards per game. But, I don't think the offense was as good once it got behind the chains. (my opinion/didn't research that part.

[MrCraig]

Host a Spring game in the actual spring. Not 30 degree Feb/March
Anyone have contract details?

I am more in favor of a controlled scrimmage rather than full blown spring game.

I live near Athens, GA and Kirby Smart killed it with their spring game. When he became coach he called out the fan base and basically said “if you wanna win, the fans need to be at everything” and challenged them to sell-out the spring game. Now “G Day” is a huge event every season when it was kind of just an afterthought before Kirby.
Loggains and co. could do something similar at App. I mean, I’m sure the students would love another chance to slide down Miller Hill!

[BambooRdApp]

Host a Spring game in the actual spring. Not 30 degree Feb/March
Anyone have contract details?

I am more in favor of a controlled scrimmage rather than full blown spring game.

I live near Athens, GA and Kirby Smart killed it with their spring game. When he became coach he called out the fan base and basically said “if you wanna win, the fans need to be at everything” and challenged them to sell-out the spring game. Now “G Day” is a huge event every season when it was kind of just an afterthought before Kirby.
Loggains and co. could do something similar at App. I mean, I’m sure the students would love another chance to slide down Miller Hill!

Got to have a later spring game in order to have at least some possibilities of warmer weather if only slight chance
Also have it on a home basketball weekend and work schedule around both so fans can do both. We are not Gawgia...so, need additional enticements in my opinion....

[bcoach]

Getting P4 coordinators, FCS HC and a former P4 HC to interview is exactly the applicant pool I would have predicted.

Agreed. I’ll add though a g5 coach we could have given a significant raise too.

I’ll wait until the contracts are out but I’m guessing us and uncc will be in the same ballpark again on pay.

Difference is they got a proven winner at the g5 level and we got a mostly career coordinator.

Both have pros and cons but one has a higher floor IMO.

100%

[HurricaneYosef]

Another ugly truth is we played extremely undisciplined football. We were highly penalized and a lot of those penalties came at the worst times. We developed a bad habit of turning the ball over a lot. We seemed to be unprepared very often, leading to poor starts and constant bad angles (which made us look slow).

I made a series of posts a month or so back detailing a lot of core statistics and how we were trending negative in most of them. For a staff that preached the value of analytics, they sure didn’t seem to be able to analyze the data and take actionable steps to turn those trends around.

If you want ugly truths, just look at the data-it was all there.

Team Penalties
2016 (Satt). 6.09 per game/57.69 ypg
2017 (Satt). 7.0 per game/63.92 ypg
2018 (Satt) 6.38 per game/57.82 ypg
2019 (Drink) 6.79 per game/64.21 ypg
2020 (Clark) 7.33 per game/ 67.58 ypg
2021 (Clark) 6.07 per game/53.14 ypg
2022 (Clark) 5.58 per game/51.38 ypg
2023 (Clark) 4.35 per game/40.67 ypg
2024 (Clark) 6.0 per game /56.91 ypg

The last 4 years have been our best years in number per game and yards per game. But, I don't think the offense was as good once it got behind the chains. (my opinion/didn't research that part.

Kind of shocking to see statistically

I interpret this data as under Satt / Drink our teams were so talented, and opponents were not, that penalties didnt really have a negative effect on us

While under Clark our talent decreased, opponents improved, and penalties often times had a negative impact on the results of games

[DoesntEvenGoHere]

Loggains only knows NFL & SEC football as a staff member or player. I would expect the expectations & "care" factor to be increased by this staff. Even if he retains some, I believe we'll see a lot of the things fans want; spring game, more media availability, uptick in recruiting.

The only difference between Drinkwitz & Loggains is the fact that Drinkwitz seemed hungrier initially. He came in with a plan and kicked this place into high gear immediately. With Drinkwitz you could tell he was not planning on staying here for long.

Loggains has been hired only for about 48 hours so still early to tell how fast he wants to get started but with the portal situation we're not exactly in the same scenario as when Drink was hired. You may see Loggains retain some staff simply because he needs positions filled to help with recruiting starting tomorrow.

Recruiting & Development carry your program. You can be a an average recruiter if you are a phenomenal developer. You can still win. You can do the same vice versa & win. You just can't be average at both. The great teams are phenomenal at both.

Drinkwitz set Clark up for failure really. Drink handed the keys to a Ferrari to Clark but in reality that Ferrari was out of gas & needed an oil change. Drinkwitz got the keys during a time where the roster was loaded. His strength program was about maintaining & not developing. He wanted to go to the NY6 that year & it worked aside from "Love Week" which cost us.

Clark was given a roster still competitive but lacked a year of development really. Then he tried to fix it & he just did not do a good enough job. He tried to fix it again & ran out of time. I believe Matt Greenhalgh was the best hire he made here. Given more time I think he could have fixed the development piece quicker & potentially still have a job.

This is probably what he argued as well, but ultimately that doesn't factor in the on-field performance or decisions, which cannot be ignored. He didn't have a huge network. His staff hires seemed lazy. So he put all his eggs in just recruiting bigger & more highly touted recruits & not enough in developing them or making the required staff adjustments to fix issues before they were exposed. We were complacent & simply not hungry enough. He was, I believe, but not everyone around him. At the end of the day while Clark could have been a great face & leader of this program, he didn't live up to the standard.

[spacemonkey]

Ugly truth is we continued to try and do things the way they used to be done and not adapt to the players we had. Chase Brice was a generational arm, and we tried to establish the run and not pass much, and tried to run the same offense we did with Zac Thomas and Taylor lamb.

You could extend this to Joey Aguilar too. We had a QB who could throw, run, and improvise, but they seemed to try to mold Joey to the play calling instead of shifting the play calling to use Joey’s talents more.
We saw very little option runs, designed QB runs, or RPO with Joey.

Truth!!! This is when I was ready for a complete coaching change. We got it. I will wait to see what we have next.

[MrCraig]

Host a Spring game in the actual spring. Not 30 degree Feb/March
Anyone have contract details?

I am more in favor of a controlled scrimmage rather than full blown spring game.

I live near Athens, GA and Kirby Smart killed it with their spring game. When he became coach he called out the fan base and basically said “if you wanna win, the fans need to be at everything” and challenged them to sell-out the spring game. Now “G Day” is a huge event every season when it was kind of just an afterthought before Kirby.
Loggains and co. could do something similar at App. I mean, I’m sure the students would love another chance to slide down Miller Hill!

Got to have a later spring game in order to have at least some possibilities of warmer weather if only slight chance
Also have it on a home basketball weekend and work schedule around both so fans can do both. We are not Gawgia...so, need additional enticements in my opinion....

Well yeah. We ain’t gonna get 95k ppl up to Boone for a spring game. But with enough good marketing and making it seem like something more important, they should be able to at least get 20-25k.

I remember them having a spring game and stuff when I was at App, but it was always an afterthought. Not a “must do.”

[Seattleapp]

The ugly truth is this: Hiring Clark was lazy (not necessarily bad), extending him was bad. Five seasons from '17-'19, we have fallen as a program. I don't know how may years it will take us to get back to where we were. I don't know that we'll ever get back to being a top 5 to 10 G5 program. I know we have a new coach and a lot of things to improve. At this point success for me is developing an identity on offense and building back a defense that doesn't look lost for big chunks of games.

Hey do you think the Clark hire was lazy? You’ve posted this exact message 150 times.
We get it.

[appgrad95&97]

The ugly truth is this: Hiring Clark was lazy (not necessarily bad), extending him was bad. Five seasons from '17-'19, we have fallen as a program. I don't know how may years it will take us to get back to where we were. I don't know that we'll ever get back to being a top 5 to 10 G5 program. I know we have a new coach and a lot of things to improve. At this point success for me is developing an identity on offense and building back a defense that doesn't look lost for big chunks of games.

Hey do you think the Clark hire was lazy? You’ve posted this exact message 150 times.
We get it.

And I was right, so STFU

[Seattleapp]

The ugly truth is this: Hiring Clark was lazy (not necessarily bad), extending him was bad. Five seasons from '17-'19, we have fallen as a program. I don't know how may years it will take us to get back to where we were. I don't know that we'll ever get back to being a top 5 to 10 G5 program. I know we have a new coach and a lot of things to improve. At this point success for me is developing an identity on offense and building back a defense that doesn't look lost for big chunks of games.

Hey do you think the Clark hire was lazy? You’ve posted this exact message 150 times.
We get it.

And I was right, so STFU

Ok tough keyboard warrior. I figure you’d be in mourning because we didn’t hire Rich Rodriguez. The second of your two tired talking points.

[WASU 93]

Another ugly truth is we played extremely undisciplined football. We were highly penalized and a lot of those penalties came at the worst times. We developed a bad habit of turning the ball over a lot. We seemed to be unprepared very often, leading to poor starts and constant bad angles (which made us look slow).

I made a series of posts a month or so back detailing a lot of core statistics and how we were trending negative in most of them. For a staff that preached the value of analytics, they sure didn’t seem to be able to analyze the data and take actionable steps to turn those trends around.

If you want ugly truths, just look at the data-it was all there.

Team Penalties
2016 (Satt). 6.09 per game/57.69 ypg
2017 (Satt). 7.0 per game/63.92 ypg
2018 (Satt) 6.38 per game/57.82 ypg
2019 (Drink) 6.79 per game/64.21 ypg
2020 (Clark) 7.33 per game/ 67.58 ypg
2021 (Clark) 6.07 per game/53.14 ypg
2022 (Clark) 5.58 per game/51.38 ypg
2023 (Clark) 4.35 per game/40.67 ypg
2024 (Clark) 6.0 per game /56.91 ypg

The last 4 years have been our best years in number per game and yards per game. But, I don't think the offense was as good once it got behind the chains. (my opinion/didn't research that part.

Kind of shocking to see statistically

I interpret this data as under Satt / Drink our teams were so talented, and opponents were not, that penalties didnt really have a negative effect on us

While under Clark our talent decreased, opponents improved, and penalties often times had a negative impact on the results of games

So, Here's one look
Our Offense
First Down's Rushing to First Down's Passing Ratio:

2016: 156 Rushing/114 Passing. (Lamb)
2017: 137/114. (Lamb)
2018: 131/112 (Thomas)
2019: 151/124 (Thomas)
2020: 159/96. (Thomas)
2021: 144/151 (Brice)
2022: 125/126 (Brice)
2023: 122/181 (Aguilar)
2024: 104/134 (Aguilar)

[appgrad95&97]

The ugly truth is this: Hiring Clark was lazy (not necessarily bad), extending him was bad. Five seasons from '17-'19, we have fallen as a program. I don't know how may years it will take us to get back to where we were. I don't know that we'll ever get back to being a top 5 to 10 G5 program. I know we have a new coach and a lot of things to improve. At this point success for me is developing an identity on offense and building back a defense that doesn't look lost for big chunks of games.

Hey do you think the Clark hire was lazy? You’ve posted this exact message 150 times.
We get it.

And I was right, so STFU

Ok tough keyboard warrior. I figure you’d be in mourning because we didn’t hire Rich Rodriguez. The second of your two tired talking points.

He just won a conference title. At JACKSONVILLE STATE.

[Seattleapp]

The ugly truth is this: Hiring Clark was lazy (not necessarily bad), extending him was bad. Five seasons from '17-'19, we have fallen as a program. I don't know how may years it will take us to get back to where we were. I don't know that we'll ever get back to being a top 5 to 10 G5 program. I know we have a new coach and a lot of things to improve. At this point success for me is developing an identity on offense and building back a defense that doesn't look lost for big chunks of games.

Hey do you think the Clark hire was lazy? You’ve posted this exact message 150 times.
We get it.

And I was right, so STFU

Ok tough keyboard warrior. I figure you’d be in mourning because we didn’t hire Rich Rodriguez. The second of your two tired talking points.

He just won a conference title. At JACKSONVILLE STATE.

And it must be eating you up inside.

[WASU 93]

Another ugly truth is we played extremely undisciplined football. We were highly penalized and a lot of those penalties came at the worst times. We developed a bad habit of turning the ball over a lot. We seemed to be unprepared very often, leading to poor starts and constant bad angles (which made us look slow).

I made a series of posts a month or so back detailing a lot of core statistics and how we were trending negative in most of them. For a staff that preached the value of analytics, they sure didn’t seem to be able to analyze the data and take actionable steps to turn those trends around.

If you want ugly truths, just look at the data-it was all there.

Team Penalties
2016 (Satt). 6.09 per game/57.69 ypg
2017 (Satt). 7.0 per game/63.92 ypg
2018 (Satt) 6.38 per game/57.82 ypg
2019 (Drink) 6.79 per game/64.21 ypg
2020 (Clark) 7.33 per game/ 67.58 ypg
2021 (Clark) 6.07 per game/53.14 ypg
2022 (Clark) 5.58 per game/51.38 ypg
2023 (Clark) 4.35 per game/40.67 ypg
2024 (Clark) 6.0 per game /56.91 ypg

The last 4 years have been our best years in number per game and yards per game. But, I don't think the offense was as good once it got behind the chains. (my opinion/didn't research that part.

Kind of shocking to see statistically

I interpret this data as under Satt / Drink our teams were so talented, and opponents were not, that penalties didnt really have a negative effect on us

While under Clark our talent decreased, opponents improved, and penalties often times had a negative impact on the results of games

So, Here's one look
Our Offense
First Down's Rushing to First Down's Passing Ratio:

2016: 156 Rushing/114 Passing. (Lamb)
2017: 137/114. (Lamb)
2018: 131/112 (Thomas)
2019: 151/124 (Thomas)
2020: 159/96. (Thomas)
2021: 144/151 (Brice)
2022: 125/126 (Brice)
2023: 122/181 (Aguilar)
2024: 104/134 (Aguilar)

# of Punts App + Opponents/Opponents 3rd Down Conversion Percentage:

2016: App 58 Punts/Opponents 75 punts. Opponents 60-180 on 3rd down 33.3%
2017: 57/74 Punts Opponents 60-181 33.15%
2018: 53/77 Punts. Opponents 59-186 27.29%
2019: 71/85 Punts. Opponents 62-202 30.69%
2020: 37/58 Punts. Opponents 65-172 37.79%
2021: 51/75 Punts. Opponents 68-198. 34.34%
2022: 44/55 Punts Opponents 71-168 42.28%
2023: 54/66 Punts. Opponents 72-179 40.22%
2024: 40/36 Punts. Opponents 57-127. 44.88%

[appgrad95&97]

Hey do you think the Clark hire was lazy? You’ve posted this exact message 150 times.
We get it.

And I was right, so STFU

Ok tough keyboard warrior. I figure you’d be in mourning because we didn’t hire Rich Rodriguez. The second of your two tired talking points.

He just won a conference title. At JACKSONVILLE STATE.

And it must be eating you up inside.

Yeah. Five years with no conference titles, and not knowing when the next one will come... That eats me up inside.

[Seattleapp]

And I was right, so STFU

Ok tough keyboard warrior. I figure you’d be in mourning because we didn’t hire Rich Rodriguez. The second of your two tired talking points.

He just won a conference title. At JACKSONVILLE STATE.

And it must be eating you up inside.

Yeah. Five years with no conference titles, and not knowing when the next one will come... That eats me up inside.

Yes because Rich Rodriguez was the obvious choice to lead us to dominance 5 years ago. Have you even looked at the baggage he has? I don’t think the powers at be wanted anything to do with that. And just out of idle curiosity, who was your pick this time since you’ve been so vocal in letting everyone know who we shouldn’t have hired