Welcome to the Friday Feedback, pretty good at what it does, flanked by loyal compatriots but out of the game for a little bit. You could also call it the second choice to coach Baylor this season.
In reality, there was just a small pool of candidates to coach the Bears, and figure those in that pool would probably be wary. Mack Brown wasn’t going to be the hire, because there’s a chance he’d want to be the full-time guy or that others might. It absolutely could not have been defensive coordinator Phil Bennett. Nobody — Dino Babers, Phil Montgomery, etc. — was going to leave a full-time head coaching job in late May and go to Baylor, where no one knows what’s yet unwritten.
So in Jim Grobe the Bears get an excellent hand, a steady and steadying personality who is quite liked by his peers. His first coaching staff at Ohio University wasn’t much unlike his final staff at Wake Forest. People left, but it was rare, and it was always for a better opportunity. People weren’t in a rush to leave Grobe’s side, because he was a good man and a good coach, and that industry isn’t replete with one or the other, never mind both.
In a public relations sense, this is a shrewd move for Baylor, which desperately needs empathizers even as it refuses to let recruits out of letters of intent. People are not going to, and ought not, root for Baylor right now, though a lot of the bad seeds are gone, but the players free of guilt? They are now cast as characters in need of fans and friends, and Grobe is the sort of guy who brings people to that side of the crowd. You might root for the plucky coach who’s clearly doing this as a selfless one-year deal to help who he can help, and you might hope the kids get something better than what’s likely coming their way.
In a football sense, this is harsh. Grobe is a 2016 option, and he’s not a needle-mover the school has to hire in 2017 to again deploy the massive momentum Baylor had going before all of this. But how many players know that? Probably all of them, and most of them know they’re going to be on the team in 2017 and Grobe will not. For a program losing recruits now and sure to find difficulty attracting players during this round of recruiting, that’s dangerous. Players — kids — can push limits and test boundaries, tune out messages and speakers and wait for the calendar to turn, and, honestly, there’s probably not much Grobe can do about that because he has to restore install a culture there that must last far beyond his days, however long or brief they are.
Also, are we sure Grobe was/is good? I know, I know … Wake Forest won an ACC title! (Remarkably, Wake was 6-0 on the road that season.) But, man, that was a weak ACC, the Demon Deacons were 2-3 and outscored 98-66 against ranked teams and the ACC title game remains one of the top exhibits for those who do not like title games. (It also set up WVU v. Georgia Tech in that season’s Gator Bowl.)
Grobe then followed that special 11-3 season with 9-4 and 8-5 records and then five straight losing seasons at a combined 12 games below .500 in ACC play.
Now, out of coaching for two seasons, he’s in charge of what had been one of the country’s top ascending programs. This is a different cat and a different hat, and there’s, like, no precedent to suggest this will work. But Baylor might not be interested in wins and losses as much as direction, and that in itself might be a victory for a place that’s proved it will not be defined or damned by football.
Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, be careful how you make your point.
Mr Burns said:
Is he saying that eight and pho should be the yearly expectation? That’s mediocrity. They need to challenge for a title here and there.
Are we making pho puns now? I’m all for that. (I resisted the urge there, on principle.)
Mack said:
It will be interesting to see if Baylor does the “hire a ‘good guy’ for a couple of years to get everyone off our back, then fire him and hire the winner.” That’s usually the tactic teams use in college football.
To his credit, Mackstrodamus said this before Grobe was hired. We owe him that.
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