A few win. Quite a few lose.
Paul Johnson at Georgia Southern, Navy and Georgia Tech, Ken Niumatalolo at Navy, Monken at Georgia Southern and Army and Brian Bohannon at Kennesaw State are the four guys who have done this as head coaches in recent years. The four of them plus Ivin Jasper, Navy's current OC, were the offensive staff at Navy during Johnson's HC tenure at Navy when this system reinvented what was possible at a service academy.
Seven head coaching stints, service academy and non-service academy, from Power Five to FCS, and all seven have been highly successful.
And IMO very boring to watch
To each their own. I love watching it, which probably biases me in the opposite direction.
clearly our ceiling would be limited
Paul Johnson won the ACC in year two! They won their division in the ACC three times! They won at least 9 games four times. He had one losing conference record in 11 seasons at GT.
Johnson proved this wasn't just a blowout-prevention mechanism for scrappy little underdogs with no talent, comprehensively proved that, but the conventional wisdom is crusting over the facts already. Snap out of it!
I doubt a Mookie Cooper would want to play in the triple option, even if we won 8 games.
I don't mean to dogpile on you here, but this is such a perfect distillation of the message board mindset that just baffles me. Is the point of the program to recruit, or is the point of the program to win?
We've won 8 games THREE times since 1990! And that's having won big recruitments a ton of times over that span. Not enough perhaps, not as many as others, but we've landed that huge player away from the big boys so many times and have next to nothing to show for it. If we can sustain success for the first time in decades doing things a different way, who freaking cares what Mookie Cooper thinks?
why would anyone on an upward trajectory choose Illinois?
Because it's a bunch of money to compete against a division where no one scares you at all, and the bar for being treated like the second coming is hilariously low. Win eight games a couple of times and you're either Coach For Life at an enormous salary here, or you can punch your ticket to a bigger job and even more money. And you're inheriting a roster in pretty okay shape, with cupcake schedules out to 2025. And a brand new gleaming facility to sell.
This is by no means a great job, but it's not one of the very worst by any stretch. It's not Kansas or Rutgers.