Worst Things:
Best Things
After nearly 50 years, I want to believe badly. I can’t just put blind hope like I’ve done so many times over the years because I have too much scar tissue as a result of that. If Lea can make some needed changes on offense, force the University to deliver on some facility upgrades, be much better with the transfer portal, continue upward trend on recruiting, I will totally open up my heart to be broken all over again.
- ETSU Game—nothing else really to be said on this one as it’s been talked about ad nauseum. For me, it is probably this or the SMU game as worst loss since I have been following VU. He had the deer in the headlights look and had no idea what to do when it was clear that he wasn’t ready/prepared for this role.
- Regression of Several Key Players—Ken Seals, Cam Johnson, Ben Bresnahan, multiple guys on defense. He has to look at coordinators and position coaches and assess if they are beneficial for player development. Very concerning.
- Not taking advantage of transfer portal—he has already basically said he botched this, so I give him a bit of a pass since he was green as a gourd—VU needs to use every single tool at its disposal—this is kind of an equalizer for us where we can’t accept partial qualifiers, etc. We can close the gap by getting proven college players who are older and hopefully better understand the value of a VU degree.
- Boring, Unimaginative Offense—it will be key for me to see if they do anything differently on this side of the ball—I would have loved to see them get the WKU OC or some other creative mind but not sure they are going to do that.
- Marketing—CJF understood how to do this. While I am not expecting him to be Franklin on this front, gotta be better than he was this past year on getting in front of media, creating buzz with students and fans by thinking outside the box, promoting the program etc.
Best Things
- Recruiting—after fielding what was the worst VU team in the last ¼ century according to Sagarin, I think you have to be impressed with what they did in recruiting. Over the last 10 years, only one class has been ranked higher (#26—Franklin 2013) and one only class has had a higher player rating per recruit (2018 under Mason) according to TOS. Both could even improve based on adding Daniel Martin and others.
- Team Played Better at end of year—Didn’t pull off any upsets, but didn’t roll over either which they could have done.
- Lea didn’t panic—maybe he is stoic to a fault, but he maintained composure during post-game interviews/mid-week etc. and gave pretty thoughtful answers for the most part.
- Seems to be good at self-critiquing—in a profession where it is difficult for coaches to swallow their pride and take blame, I thought it was unique and positive that he admitted after the year he didn’t do a great job and has to do better going forward. He said it with enough conviction that I think he meant it. Takes a big person to do that (now please go figure out how to improve our offense)
- This one is 100% speculation—but I feel like he has a plan. Not talking about a 10-year plan but I feel like he is the type that can identify areas that need to be addressed and implement a strategy to improve them. He needs to start with offense.
After nearly 50 years, I want to believe badly. I can’t just put blind hope like I’ve done so many times over the years because I have too much scar tissue as a result of that. If Lea can make some needed changes on offense, force the University to deliver on some facility upgrades, be much better with the transfer portal, continue upward trend on recruiting, I will totally open up my heart to be broken all over again.
