I don't think you get to the historical cliff we fell off to the level we did this year without a cause-and-effect; it was so bad that you can't pin it on one cause but an accumulation of many.
A. When Petrino was hired I was under a number of impressions, one of which was Jurich himself lost patience with the options post-Charlie that he went to a Petrino he knew he had by the negotiating short curlies...going into the ACC he had to have a quality coach and an experienced coach. Truth be told that first staff Petrino assembled was a pretty good one, with the type of immediate impact recruiting connections a guy like him needs to be successful. Defensively Grantham Exhibit A who brought his brother (a good D.C. coupled with a good position coach of a brother). Terrell Buckley a good position coach who would leave us for MS State and his connections on the Panhandle. Cort Dennison was a grad assistant with that entire group. With each loss of position coach they were replaced by a lesser coach than they succeeded. They were coordinated by incompetents in Sirmon and Van Gorder who had staffers under them not hired to their systems.
B. Petrino is many things, but I would think in a living room about as dynamic as dripping oatmeal. Forget the numbers and think need. You can be ranked in the Top 30, but if that is built on reasonably coveted players at every position but where you really need it? What quality HS defensive lineman was recruited during his watch? In my mind maybe GG Robinson. Perhaps Greenard. That's two in five years. You need a minimum of four in two years. The math caught up with us this year, which was a concern I voiced loudly when Antwan Odom headed to Starkville with Grantham. Hell the end result is I'm pretty sure the Special Olympics would be able to run offtackle against us.
So you don't have either talent or depth in your defensive front; and the fact you had neither to be coached by general incompetence gave you the ick you had in 2018. For me this will go down as the Year of Ick.
C. So worse yet, you have neither talent, or depth and your one reasonably high quality Defensive linemen gets hurt in the first half of your first game. They blow the Florida State game. Their answer is to Quit. The only thing that salvaged an outright complete right off after that was two short field turnovers up in Chestnut Hill which did nothing more than keep them from getting 50+ like everybody else. The fact is they quit somewhere in the week going into Georgia Tech.
D. In any other year experienced by Petrino he was able to ultimately generate something offensively; in Year 1 in 2.0 he inherited GREAT defensive talent and I don't use that term loosely. They shutdown Clemson at Clemson and knocked out Watson. Our safety play was historically good with Sample and Holliman. We had good corners. We had good linebackers. We had good defensive ends and defensive tackles. We were well schemed....but we were average at quarterback especially due to Parker's losing half a seaon. We slog along with different quarterbacks until Parker got back and things opened up.
...this season that quarterback play never materialized and we remained trapped between the offense we had with Lamar Jackson, and the offense we wanted for the first five year Petrino coached here. It seems subtle, but it isn't easy bouncing back-and-forth between a direct between the tackles drive/zone blocking approach and the quick hitting/quick engagement and peel downfield approach of a zone read offense we enjoyed with Jackson. Personnel changes on the offensive line are incremental changes; ours was forced to be different from one quarter to the next going from Puma to Malik to Jordan Travis to whoever else. Above all else, none of them were efficient with what was unquestionably the one clear personnel strength preseason and that was our receiving corps. Honestly when it comes to quitting, I sort of got the sense that the receiving corps was first.
E. Truth be told, our issues didn't start when Petrino was hired though some root causes were there; I think our problems didn't even materialize when we got beat by Houston. I think the "leadership" deemed missing offensively started immediately after the Clemson game in 2016; I thought our mindset with being just outside the BCS playoff rankings and being pilloried week after week on ESPN by Joey Galloway, Booger McFarland and some of your classic neophytes from the SEC during their BCS Playoff release rankings caught up with some of our kids, and Jaylen Smith's Twitter account weekly was my only evidence. I thought they were spending a hell of alot of time defending themselves instead of taking matters into their own hands. They limped through Duke, UVa where they were miraculously let off the hook and Wake Forest in particular...and either dropped a hell of alot of passes or fumbled the football at historic volumes along the way. They didn't play their way back into reasonable discussion; they clearly played their way out of it despite jaw dropping performances against NC State and BC. I thought that demonstrated a tremendous lack of overall maturity and it continued until the game the other night.
