j_crazy;486922 wrote:Waiting for the inevitable blaming of brian kelly (who, along with a WEAKSAUCE schedule is the only reason they won 12 games last year).
I am not going to put it all in Kelly, but he is not without blame. Look, Brian Kely is a tremendous gameday coach. Give the guy time to prepare for a game and he can draw up the x's and o's with the best of them. He can coach kids up and has an air of confidence about him that makes everyone believe they are winners. However, his biggest weakness as a coach at UC was his recruiting abilities. On offense, Kelly only recruited 13 offensive linemen in his three years here. Only 9 of those guys are still with them team. The guys he recruited as OL also were not your traditional OL, but kids who played TE or on the defensive side of the ball in high school who needed to mature and put on a lot of weight. Likewise, if you look at UC's recruits the past three years, Kelly all but ignored the defensive side of the ball. Again, the guys he did pick up on the defensive side of the ball were projects (a lot of TE's which he planned to convert to DT and DE). Insiders who follow UC recruiting, will tell you Kelly's own ego led him down his path. Early in his tenure at UC, Kelly had a lot of success at moving around Dantonio recruits to other positions (ie. Connor Barwin from TE to DE, Mardy Gilyard from DB to WR, Jacob Ramsey from LB to RB).
Finally, at UC Kelly all but but the recruiting on his assistants. The kids who are here today will tell you they did not even meet Brian Kelly before signing. He left it all up to the assistants. Many will point to this as a reason why UC was not able to recruit better the past few years, despite having three straight seasons of ten win seasons and back to back BE championships.
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