How are you enjoying your UVA Cavaliers' this year? I'd truly like to hear your thoughts on that and Bronco and the state of the program, maybe as connected to your thoughts on the state of the GT program. I'm patient. You can have up to 15 minutes to put this together.
I'm loving the heck out of it
Here's the thing. I don't like Bronco Mendenhall. I wouldn't want to hang out with him. I wouldn't send my kids to play for him. I think he's largely full of it.
That said, he's also clearly at least a competent football coach. He may even be an above average ACC coach. We shall see. The point is, he's clearly good enough to coach at UVa. He doesn't recruit kids that get in trouble, he wins enough games that we're not embarrassed, and he doesn't bang his assistants.
The difference between UVa and Georgia Tech is that UVa realizes that that's good enough. We haven't been blessed with an almost unbelievably good run of coaches that have disguised our underlying structural issues. If he does that for 20 years, he'll never have a hot seat, and we'll build him a statue at the end.
It's a little bit lame rooting for him because he's such a tool, but whatever, I have no complaints.
We'll see how much of his success has been the result of fantastic success mining the transfer market for QB's since he's arrived at UVa. We're going with a kid that we have developed from the beginning next year, and who knows how it'll go.
As it relates to GT, I'm not sure how much it does.
Personality wise, Bronco is probably closer to PJ than he is to Collins. He's not a recruiter guy, he's a "recruit a bunch of guys who want to run through the wall and get it done on effort" type. I mean, he's a douche, but in addition to being a douche, he's that as well.
I don't think they're really going to succeed the same way, if they're both going to succeed.
I'll be honest, I would be genuinely surprised if Collins succeeded at GT the way you guys want him to.
I have bought into the idea that GT is academically hard as hell, and not for people who don't take school seriously. I have further bought into the idea that GT's administration will not do football any favors, and will not let a bunch of borderline cases in. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have a hard time imagining that "one of the hardest places to recruit to" is a good match for a coach whose route to success revolves around out-recruiting the opposition.
I've been wrong before, I'll be wrong again, but it doesn't seem like a good impedance match to me. ALL THAT SAID, if he's going to succeed, it's going to take a few recruiting cycles for it to happen, because he's not going to outscheme people the way PJ did. You have to let him recruit his guys, and then let them develop for 3 or 4 years, and have several recruiting classes of his guys in a row before you can evaluate, because that's his model, and if you didn't want that model, you shouldn't have hired him. You have to let him succeed or fail his way, and that will be a judgement you can make in 2022
