He's a garden variety pretty good DC. He's not been identified by people who make these decisions to be a wunderkind who needs to be a HC. He has had a couple of pretty poor ass chowings as DC in big games against elite teams. Clemson and Michigan come to mind.

I recall several games (at USC among others) where an offense was having their way with us and, although it was obvious that we needed to adjust, we waited until halftime before really changing our play.

Good coach, not great.

But I still posit that if we could run the ball effectively, and not have the defense out on the field all game they wouldn't have looked so shitty.

The rest of the staff blows goats though. I feel bad for Rees.

Davie
Minter
Fazio
Darnell
Lea

I would take Lea over any of these guys under Lou.

Only Alvarez was better.

Tenure at Pitt.

He is representative of ND football. Our version of good.

That doesn't really advance any argument. Georgia put up 23. Kentucky, A&M, Auburn, LSU held them to less. Florida held them to 24. Missouri to 27. Vanderbilt to 30. Baylor to 26.

ND's performance was not remarkable. But, no, it was not a Michigan embarrassment.

taken several different sets of starters -- losing many if not all the top players from the previous season -- and plugs new ones in and the defense produces the same or slightly better results year over year (and top 40 level, so not repeating the same crap results).

I don't think you need gurus to win titles. What you need are competent coaches that know how to craft a system and teach it to players rapidly in a way they can consistently execute. That's what Lea is doing. The LB crew this past season is a good example -- all new, feared to be a back breaker for us, actual results were above average and arguably as good as the previous season.

Contrast that to our offense as a whole -- where we have a system that aside from being crap even if implemented well (since by design we have no intention of running well -- and when we absolutely need to) has proven to be one our players can't seem to master. That's especially true for the QBs.

Quinn is likely by several orders of magnitude the worst coach we have. He compounds it by also trending toward being a poor recruiter.

It is effective against bad defenses and that pads the statistics.

It is the system that is defective by design and by its very essence just terrible. Poor Rees is steeped in it.

we couldn't stop a dive play...in the rain when we knew they'd run...we made Patterson look like a Heisman candidate that night.

I don't recall seeing a single adjustment that worked all night long

and "blows goats."

moniker.

But top to bottom, we might just have the very worst staff of any major conference team. Just woeful.

under a different HC? We saw that fairly consistently with Davie and Weis coaches. Hand them to Urban and Florida and suddenly those that sucked at ND don't suck there.

Part of what makes most of our coaches suck under Kelly -- is Kelly. On the offensive side of the ball he only allows half an offense to be practiced. We could have God as our RB coach and probably still would only see marginal improvement to our running game.

in his brain.

other system while at ND and also being capable of successfully implementing it. Those are of course both highly likely to happen for a first time OC.

It clearly was a very high percentage move. Thank God we have a genius HC that was able to see this move when the rest of us were incapable of recognizing it. Urban in effect did exactly that -- so we can look forward to the fact it has actually happened before.