-
Wildcat_Brad
- 5 stars Rating: 94
279 votes total - (1028)
- 21 months
- Send Message
- Follow User
- Ignore User
-
BradAllis
- 5 stars Rating: 89
1089 votes total - Brad Allis
- (5386)
- 33 months
- Send Message
- Follow User
- Ignore User
-
wineknow said...
It’s not who should be our next coach it’s what should be our next coach.
Let me explain by analogy. In the fall of 1985 I took a class called US-Soviet Military History with Dr. Oswald. Medical Redshirt Steve Kerr and I became friends in that class – but I digress. Dr. Oswald spent ½ a semester telling us how awesome the Soviets were. We read about soviet troop strength assessments in Afghanistan and we compared the number of tanks each country had. The Russians (keep in mind the cold war was at a crescendo in 1985 – Reagan is calling them the ‘Evil Empire’.. etc..) literally had something like 8 tanks for every one of ours. Holy Crap!!! What if a war broke out? They literally could steamroll us with the 80,000 tanks they had while our paltry little force of 10,000 tanks would get crushed! OMG – we better start building some tanks!!!! Right?
But we didn’t. In the second ½ of the class we learned about our response to the mighty Russians. We built the A10. The only true ground attack aircraft the Air Force has ever built and they have hated it since day one – but other than the C-130, it is likely the most important and successful plane the Air Force has had since WW2. The A10’s were stationed at Davis Monthan while I was growing up and I remember the high pitched whistle of the engines over head – a very unique sound. The plane is ugly as sin. The pilots call it ‘Warthog’ rather than the official name; ‘Thunderbolt’. The cockpit is built around a 6” thick titanium ‘bathtub’. There’s a monster of a gun in the nose and so much armor on the plane that’s it’s top speed is slower than Keola Antolin. The dumb asses in the Air Force have cancelled the program 15 times and brought it back every time we’ve gone to war. Guess what it does? It kills tanks. LOTS of ‘em! In 2003’s Operation Iraqi Freedom a single A10 recorded 13 tank kills on one single mission. We’ve got 700+ of these planes… do the math.
The point is that our next football coach need to be an outside the box thinker. We can’t win an arms race against USC (or Texas or Oklahoma) until we win a lot more games. So we need an A10. Tomey designed a giant killer defense and against the rising tide of prolific offenses in the PAC-10 back then… hey that was a pretty good idea. Texas Tech realized they were at a huge disadvantage in the BIG 12 (Lubbock is surpassed on the shit hole index only by El Paso) so they ‘invented’ an offense and frustrated the hell out of everyone in their conference for a few years – but they did crazy stuff to achieve that. The Double Eagle Flex and Texas Tech offenses are long gone has-beens (yea, you heard me wake the F*** up and realize our so called ‘offense’ managed 24 points in the last two games) but THEY WORKED in their time and they worked especially well against the very teams the two schools were under matched against.
This is why Vanilla and Chocolate do not work at Arizona, because all things being equal – we will always be a second rate program. We have to take steps to change that. We need rainbow sherbet! If the competition builds big, powerful teams, recruit speed and FB IQ. If they build a great offense, recruit great defensive players. But for the love of god, stop trying to run when we have an O-line that can’t run block and no proven running backs, just because that’s what traditionally is the right call. Throw caution to the wind and take chances. You are going to lose anyway. INVENT something. Be creative. That’s WHAT we need our next coach to be. WHO it is, is less important.
BTW – I think the A10’s left Tucson about the time Tomey did.
-
BlkMtn said...
Not the first to respond, but I haven't read anything else.
Pretty fair analysis. Actually I think the A-10's are still around DM. My next door neighbor was an A-10 pilot. You know why they kill tanks? Because the shell has a plutonium cap (I think, or some rare hard hard metal) and it's about 18 inches long, maybe 20, and about 3-4 inches around. I asked him how many were shot by the Gatling gun cannon that the plane is built around, in a minute, and he scratched his chin and said, "well in a minute, I don't know, but about 80 of these a second. Unbelievable.
I agree that we do need some advanced thought processes. But some parts of football are constant, like blocking, tackling, etc., and at this level, our team has some basic defects, at this level, of those primary skills.
The A-10 Thunderbolt analogy for our next coach.