Awards Maze

I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend. Also, I hope everyone managed to move to the schools they wanted. If you haven’t already, check out the interview with coach nortonis, the current D-1A champion. It was a good read that provided some insight into the mind of a champion. Today I think I am going to blabber about the coach of the year award. I saw a few posts in the forums about the award and I figured let me throw my views in there too. This is just the way I see things and I am sure many will think I am crazy and they are right. I am a bit crazy.

I was once nominated for the award a while back, which was a surprise but I was honored none the less. I was on the list with some great coaches and the best coach on that list won the award, deservedly so. I am not sure how I made it on to the list but here is how I think someone should make the list. If a coach is working with little to start off with and they manage to succeed, they should make the list. Here is were it becomes very subjective, what is very little, and what is success?

I think very little would be to takeover a team that has been Sim coached for a long time, or a team with a crappy roster. What is a crappy roster? Well a roster that did not have quality talent for the school level, what does that mean? If you are at a BCS school and the talent there is not up to BCS level talent then that is a crappy roster. A roster that has talent that is a level or more below were it should be. I know this raises more questions than it answers, but it’s the best I can do. Look at my Aggies, I have a crappy roster that I recruited myself and with that in mind I do not count towards the list of coaches with crappy rosters because I shot myself in the foot with my recruiting. If I had taken over a crappy roster then the story would be different. So, starting off with an all Sim recruited roster and taking over a crappy roster is working with very little. I think this will become tougher to access as the seasons progress since the world is filling up pretty good and the competition for talent becomes tighter.

Now for the success part. If you finish the season with a winning record I think that is success. If you finish in a bowl game that is success. If you win your bowl game that is success. If you win or make your conference championship game that is success. Now this is all assuming you started with either of the rosters described above. You might be asking okay, what about the schedule itself. You have a winning record but who did you play. I think if you played at least 7 human coaches that’s a tough schedule, especially in Wilk were the competition is very high. Now you might say oh, you faced teams that are also rebuilding or in similar situations, well you still had to beat them. The other thing to consider is, of the humans faced how many did you expect the coach to lose to, if they managed to win those games I think that should be weighted a bit more in their favor. You might say well, I scheduled tough but people moved, I say tough cookie. Something else that could take care of the scheduling thing would be the SOS. Everyone knows the SOS helps you in many ways, gets you a good ranking which helps improve the bowl game you land in. So, getting a winning record with a good SOS is a factor in the success equation in my book.

Now am I saying all this to discredit coaches who have built programs for many seasons and are also winning games like crazy, heck no. They should be looked at as well. When we look at them, the question becomes, have they lived up to the potential of their roster. Have they been able to maximize their roster? If you have a roster with studs then one would expect you to do well with that roster. I hear you asking well what about coaches who recruit for potential and don’t chase GUESS rankings. I say to you they should still have studs on their roster since them boys would have developed from all that potential, so they will have studs on the roster. So, a coach being able to extract the most out of their roster in my book is another factor to throw into the equation. What is this extraction I speak off, well you will know it when you see it. It is up to you to decide if they have extracted the most out of the roster.

This equation has a few factors now. So, to recap, we should consider the schedule/SOS, success for that year, and roster quality in determining the coach of the year. Another thing we might consider doing for the world is coming up with multiple awards, and this has been discussed before, not sure what happened. We can have a defensive coach of the year award, offensive coach of the year award, most improved coach, rookie coach of the year award and continue to run the Wilk H.O.F vote.