Agree to disagree. That would have him winning even less games than Lovie in conference. Seems incredibly unlikely.
It COULD be that Bielema's comments about changing his style and his eyes being opened by the NFL mean that he's going to fill out his staff with a bunch of lightly credentialed NFL guys, galaxy brain himself into playing a style of football he doesn't have the expertise in he thinks he does, be brashly overconfident in his ability to recruit and end up decimating the already thin roster chasing guys away, and then John Groce himself plowing all his energy and resources into in-state recruiting battles he's never going to win.
That COULD happen, that's completely plausible with everything we know now, and the results on the field would be catastrophic.
I don't think that's the most likely outcome, and I think it's more likely that Bielema will hire a high quality staff with some recognizable overlap from where he's been previously, he'll evolve in his system outlook somewhat and be flexible to best suit his players, he'll be opportunistic about using the Covid rules to have the best roster he can right away and then really hit a four hour radius around Champaign hard with a credible staff of real deal college recruiters and show real improvement there.
Whichever outcome happens, everyone will claim in four years that it was obvious all along. And that will be a lie. The outcome is not obvious in this moment. The story is still to be written.
That really was THE issue with the Lovie era. That's a good metric to look at. Thnx for posting.
I'd call it a subsidiary issue of THE issue which is that from Day 1 until last Sunday Lovie never felt he had to run his program up to the industry standards of college football. One tendril off of that was that he never built a coaching staff capable of success on the recruiting trail, but there were others.
Remember how many practices Lovie just called off during that first spring ball, satisfied that enough work had been done? It wasn't just one, it was like 3 or 4. There were flashing red lights all along the way.
I didn’t finish the job but was looking at the 247 rankings since Lovie was hired and on average we are either last or very close to it over that period. Lovie was able to bring in some bandaid transfers to cover up the worst of it, but I think it’s fair to say even the bulk of transfers were players that never lived up to their potential as recruits for whatever reason.
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