Is this a serious question?
1) lack of multi-year contracts for assistant coaches which greatly limits the pool of applicants. I believe CU is the only team among BCS programs with this serious limitation. Good asst coaches are easily plucked away by other program which don't have this limitation
2) very little local talent - 90% of the players have to be recruited from a distance of over 1000 miles away
3) a very narrow academic curriculum and getting narrower all the time, with limited majors which turns-off certain recruits. In a recent interview, Barnett made mention of how big a problem that is at CU.
4) No juco admissions which makes rebuilding a much more difficult and very lengthy process
5) Admissions requirements for freshman which imply that CU is a much better school academically than it is. Vandy, Northwestern, UCLA and Stanford can easily out recruit CU for a great athlete who also is a great student because they are actually great schools academically, unlike CU! Notice that, although we have the worst team in the conference on-the-field, we are #1 in the # of players (16) who received PAC 12 Academic honors. We have many good students who are simply poor football players. That is not a coincidence.
6) A donor base simply unwilling to finance desperately needed facility upgrades, though every other school in the PAC 12 has easily solved this riddle. One of the major problems at CU is that major donors are encouraged by leadership at CU to give to academics not athletics
7) a judicial affairs office which comes down harshly on off-the-field incidents by football players - see Austin Vincent and Jeffrey Thomas. Thomas was sent home before classes started because the coaching staff was fearful he would get the boot due to his off-the-field incident in August while he was in Boulder
8) As has been well-chronicled, a university administration and Board of Regents which has not truly supported the program since Gordon Gee in the late 1980's. For example, compare the comments of CSU's President, Tony Frank, about the importance of athletics to CSU compared to Bruce Benson's silence on the matter. Do you think Benson would publicly advocate building a new stadium like Frank has at CSU?
9) a new structural problem - treating even the mildest of head dings like this is a little league team of 8 year olds. I counted 20 players who have missed at least one game this year due to concussion symptoms! Do you think this is the norm? This has become another huge competitive disadvantage for CU, as if they needed any more
I wonder who will be first to say that none of these structural impediments should make any difference to having a winning program at CU? That's the way of CU fans and allows them to fully blame every coaching staff for our problems - whether it be Hawkins, Embree or even Barnett. It's nice and tidy to fully blame the coaching staff at CU, but simply untrue.
My opinion is that a good college football coach is not sufficient at CU to win - we need a miracle worker to overcome these deficiencies
You make many good points. However, are they all completely true?
1. This is no doubt a challenge. But is it a massive problem? We gave EB a multi-year conract and we seemingly have a moderately impressive group of position coaches. I do agree that this is something unique to CU that makes things harder.
2. Yes, it's not a bunch of awesome local talent. What helps? Not getting any of the good players from the state. That's failure on the coaches. There's also countless examples of schools where home grown talent isn't exactly great.
3. What do recruits want? Seems like most recruits at other schools major in: some stupid PE crap, sociology, or business. CU has 2 of the 3..
4. It does make it somewhat harder, but it doesn't help when the coaches seemingly give up without trying. We seem to be able to find them when we really want to..
5. Is this even true? We rolled in Crawley when freaking Tennessee dropped him due to grades. Dejon Wilson notoriously didn't have good grades. Kisima Jagne apparently must have had some pretty bad grades. I remember Nebraska making the same argument for them having a bunch of players on the all Big12 academic team.
6. I think most people agree with you here.
7. Errr, Vincent was about to become a registered sex offender and the rape scandal is quite recent. Is this even why Jeff Thomas left school? Sounded more like his choice.. maybe moett can enlighten us.
8. Yes, Benson is a problem.
9. Oh my. Firstly, I'd like to see that list of 20. That's a lot of players. Secondly, Embree has been the champion of this anti concussion thing. So..
Like I said, you make many good points that most of us agree with. We aren't blaming this mess entirely on the coaches. We do wonder how Boyle is somehow able to navigate this mess and is successful, yet we're unreasonable to think that Embree might be able to do something similar with the football team. It's not the best comparison since bball and football are different sports, but it's still something to wonder.
My opinion is that a good football coach can win here, we don't need a "miracle worker." We didn't get to be a top 25 all time program by requiring miracle workers only. Mac, Rick, and Barney all saw differing levels of success. It's not like Hawk and Embree are anywhere near what those guys did.
