I am in your camp. JF did some good things = good recruiter, maintained many of the traditional PSU values and seemed to hire good asst coaches. like Joe, he did not like to play too many guys early - just his style. Not so good on gameday decisions which often did not make sense. like many coaches had +/- attributes. I always thought he took risks that were not a winning strategy. fine line between aggressive and stupic.
re 25 season I was not sure we were sure thing for top 3 finish like the preseason rags had us. all this aside if Tony Rojas does not go down, I think JF is still the coach. No way we lose to UCLA and NW with Tony in the game - even though JF did not have team ready for these games. The things that went wrong in those games were defense and largely due to "0" being in a new spot he could not perform. You could argue there were young guys who could have played and done better, but that was not JF style. All said if Tony does not go down, we win UCLA, NW and Iowa., and go into OSU with 1 loss. We still lose to OSU, but Indy is 50/50, and win out after that. So either 10-2 in playoffs or 9-3 and miss CFP. If we were in CFP we might have won 1 game but never going to win whole thing. in either case JF would still have been coach and we would have had a bit of a rebuild for 2026 even maintaining most of the roster.
JF could win CFP, but not with the talent he would tend to have. he was not the type of coach who can get more with less. MC seems to be that kind of coach but may not be as good of recruiter of 4/5 star players. MC does appear to be a coach who makes good gameday decisions. We will see.
in the end - if Tony is not injured JF is still coach. JF could not survive the embarrassing losses to UCLA and NW.
