If All Football Coaches Coached Like John Gagliardi We Would All Be.......

Balanced how?

By including your belief that Gagliardi couldn't work in DI? By saying he's a pretty good coach ... considering it's mostly honkies on the field?

 

The thing that never gets reported in these feel-good Gagliardi stories is that most of what he doesn't do is prohibited by NCAA rules anyway.

The big one being that DIII schools don't give out athletic scholarships.

 

That shouldn't be mentioned anymore as you said. it's a holdover from when they were NAIA when it was different than other schools.

Boom, your point about tackling ankle-breakers...well, yeah, St. Johns's all-American linebacker would have a harder time tackling Adrian Peterson than St. Thomas's running back. But there would be better athletes doing the tackling too (although, for what it's worth, St. John's did kick Coe's ass in the 2002 playoffs when Fred Jackson was an All-American there.). Again, the basics would be the same: it would be more important to put defenders in the right position than having them spending practice tackling each other.

I still don't get why that style wouldn't work. Why do tyrannical styles work at any level, but doing something a bit different from that wouldn't?

Former Alabama coach Mike Dubose has found great success at Millsaps at the Division III level. A former SEC coach of the year. But Millsaps isn't St. John's when it comes to D3 success. I'm assuming you'd think his style, which has had great success at D3, could again be successful in D1. So why couldn't Gagliardi - who has won four national championships - have a shot at success at a higher level? There are countless examples of lower-level coaches being successful as they move up - Bo Ryan for one. But because Gagliardi goes by John and not coach and doesn't use a whistle, he doesn't have a chance? I don't know if a 45-year-old Gagliardi could have won with his style at, say, Nebraska. But it's also impossible to say it wouldn't work, just because he's spent his life at a smaller school (he has a career winning record against St. Cloud State, which is now D2 and has always been a much larger school, although the teams haven't played for two decades).

Before the Gophers hired the immortal Tim Brewster, there was talk that maybe Mike Grant would get a look from Minnesota. I would have loved to see them take that kind of chance and then we would have had a chance to see if the style works, since as I said he works in much the same way. Notre Dame gave Faust a chance (Ok, that didn't work, but the Gophers haven't exactly been the Fighting Irish), the gophers could have tried something different.

Boom, do you by chance hold stock in a tackling dummy company and are concerned that if other big-time coaches followed Gagliardi's lead and didn't ever use dummies, you'd be out a lot of money?

 

You expect a salient point to come from all this?

 

Why the need for snark? Ths is a good discussion. D 3 and small town have provded much more insight than we found in The Times story.

 

I'm fairly confident in saying that John G. would have been a better hire than Joe Salem back in the day.

 

Mike Shanahan was on Salem's staff. As I once posted, I remember the billboards with Smokey Joe clenching a rose in his teeth. What glorious times..

Interesting thread. STG makes very good points. One thing we do need to keep in mind is the size of Grant's school. It's a massive complex. They made the decision way back to keep it a one high school school district.

EP is being booted from the Lake Conference. Grant isn't happy about it. He's got a little bit of a petty streak that comes out now and then. Reusse and Souhan talk about it in the link. Souhan mentions Lakeville, which gave Grant and EP a run for a while before they opened another high school. Grant rubbed it in when he beat them down the road, and I'm guessing Souhan knows this.

http://www.startribune.com/video/?channel=/sports&vid=60809052&elr=KArks5PhDcU9PhDcU9PhDcU5PhDceyckc1EyU&elr=KArksUUUycaEacyU

The conference was too far spread out and something needed to be done, but I wish the Lake would have more schools for the future than it currently seems they will.