I don't like the idea of judging ANY coach based on a sample size of 1 year (or less). Doesn't seem appropriate imo.
Taking the personalities out of it what is normally expected is some transitional changes & at a same-same offensive/defensive transition you expect upside particularly if the coach was underperforming. If you’re invoking something different, well some downside if the coach was doing ok & reasonable to assume the same if the coach was performing poorly.
Then you’ve got to manage the expectations. I’m guessing we expected a much bigger splash. I say that because we dissuaded some of those we had been recruiting. You only do that if you think you’re trading up. When you start getting rambunctious in your proclamations, well the expectations get raised. Expectations were not just raised, they were moon launched. The overhaul of historic proportions, laughable & if you thought the job too big or complex you should have passed. When I hire someone to fix a broken area, I don’t expect him to destroy my operation in order to save it.
To compound this, you have a new staff that lost control of the team before & during a game against an FCS team in which discipline was going to carry the day. If this had been nearly any other FCS team, the result likely would have been dissatisfying but not unsatisfactory. Unfortunately for the coach, this ended up not being the case & 3 weeks later those that follow college football are now associating GT not with “that high school offense” but with the team that lost to an FCS team, a team running the same offense our fanbase ridiculed/despised/call it what you want but they used it to beat us. It added an extra chuckle factor that is annoying. Then we scored a safety against an AAC team. Now it’s damn dude, WTH are you guys doing?
You can dismiss all this, say it isn’t so, delude ourselves into thinking others don’t think like that about GT, but they do. I live far enough away we’re not a regular source of discussion, but a peripheral one.
It’s not time to run the coach out of here, proclaim him to be defective, but he needs to establish the narrative again. It starts with week to week progress in fundamentals. The longer the perception there’s negative progress, the harder coach’s job becomes. Many on here seem like they never had a “new hire” Leader that got off to a bad start. It’s not easy to repair/recover, but many a man has done just that. Time will tell on coach. I trust you all that the extracurriculars are just what we need, but they’re an added distraction down in my neck of the woods and feed the negative narrative. Coach will either make his job harder or easier today. Let’s hope he makes it easier because I’m not sure he has the DNA and/or experience to recover from making it much worse.
Obviously this is all just my opinion.