Who's next for the Dolphins?

If good college coaches make for shitty NFL coaches, how does a shitty college coach figure to turn into a good NFL coach? Cam Cam is a buffoon. I know this for a fact. This should turn out hilariously. If you can't even get to the goddamn Motor City Bowl with Antwaan Randle El, you don't know much. That was his whole offense with IU - Randle El option, will it be left or right? In San Diego, LT, Gates and Brees followed by Rivers. This house of cards won't stand very long.

 

Nothing was better than when Cam tried the two quarterback offense with Randle El and Tommy Jones on the field at the same time. I think it worked best when Cam would have the barely mobile Jones line up as a wideout, thus making it 10 on 11. That's some innovation right there.

 

Which is why I'm convinced Wayne Huizenga made this hire to start with. Cam Cam works out, fine, looks like he's made the right hire. If he fails, so be it, bring in Cowher for 2008 ASAP.

 

wtf? nothing he said sounds like anything saban said. if anything he's the anti-saban. the un-saban.

 

As someone who attended every single home game of Cameron's Indiana tenure ...

Few are as good at designing an offense to fit the personnel -- the Chargers' offense was the same thing he ran at Indiana when he didn't have Randle El under center (which, admittedly, was rare), and he did a lot of the same stuff with Randle El.

The whole Randle El-Tommy Jones experiement was a VERY big mistake that basically cost him his job, because it cost Indiana a bowl bid in '01.

But his Indiana tenure was full of big mistakes. It seemed his teams would invent a new way to lose virtually every week (some of them were player mistakes -- Randle El fumbling the winning TD away to Kentucky, a misblocked fourth-and-1 that allowed a Michigan State comeback), but a lot were coaching/game management mistakes, where the sideline would look like a Chinese fire drill during the last couple of minutes of a close game. That, and he had defenses that were masters at giving up a big play on 3rd-and-18.

Probably the worst of those losses was when the team blew a 13-point lead against N.C. State in Phil Rivers' first college game. IU had the ball deep in NCSU territory with 5:00 to go. Rivers goes over the top to Koren Robinson twice in the last three minutes to win the game for the Pack (the last was set up by one of the worst defensive holding calls I've ever seen after an incompletion on 4th-and-10, but that's a different story). That was pretty much the beginning of the end for Cameron.

Game/clock management were his weak points at IU, but it seemed that he was beginning to turn things around after the failed Jones/Randle El experiment. It took IU about four games to recover from that, but IU won four of its last five that year (the loss was a game at Penn State that IU could easily have won) and was probably one of the better teams in the country by that point. Had they started with Randle El at QB from the beginning, IU probably would've won at least 2 more games, gone 7-4 and Cameron would've been Big Ten Coach of the Year instead of being shown the door in favor of Gerry DiNardo (speaking of Chinese fire drills, that coaching search was one of the worst).

Probably four things doomed his tenure at IU ...
*-He had never been a coordinator, much less a head coach, prior to taking the job at Indiana. It was basically on-the-job training from Day 1.
*-Early on, his assistant HC was a guy named Pete Schmidt who had been a very successful D3 coach at Albion. Midway through Cameron's third season at IU, Schmidt contracted cancer and passed away. When he left the team, there was a marked difference in the way games were handled ... Schmidt was obviously the "trusted" assistant who handled a lot of the in-game decisions and suddenly Cameron didn't have that guy to turn to. IU lost quite a few close games in the years to follow, right when it looked like the program was about to turn a corner.
*-He placed absolutely zero emphasis on defense, and it showed on the field. When the defense looked to be turning things around and becoming passable, Cameron was fired.
*-He %#%#sed off a lot of the Indiana HS coaches, who in turn sent a lot of their players to Purdue. Prior to Cameron's arrival in '97, Indiana had pretty much owned the rivalry with Purdue on and off the field for the better part of a decade. While Indiana isn't a tremendously fertile state for HS football players, there are a few difference-makers (including PU all-time leading receiver John Standeford, who grew up about 20 minutes from Bloomington in a heavily pro-IU area).
*-His special teams were a disaster that had to rely on gimmicks (like Randle El punting) to survive.
*-Things turned way south after the Phil Rivers debacle in '00, Cameron's fourth year at IU. After that, you could pretty much tell in the players' expressions that they were trying to find out when the whole ship was going to sink every time they faced a little adversity. And a team that probably should've won 6-7 games ended up going 4-7 that year, putting Cam on the hot seat with a new AD. Finally, things get turned around the next year after a 63-32 drubbing at Wisconsin, but IU never really got a chance to finish that season off because of the Randle El/Jones experiment the previous year.

Cameron is a good guy, great with the media, will talk a very good game and he's an offensive genius. But if he surrounds himself with good people, he'll be OK on the sidelines. If he doesn't, he'll have problems.

 

With Capers as his DC, I think he'll be OK.
He just needs talent on the O side and some good youth on the D.
You figure Zach and JT have 2 years left at best.

 

No way.

Cowher is in San Diego, the Giants or the Panthers next year.

That's why Schottenheimer and Coughlin kept their jobs.