Between the Auburn game last year through last week's loss, I think the coaches have been getting too much blame for the losses. I think its on the players exclusively. I think CNS did in the off-season what he needed to do from a coaching standpoint with the staff changes and tweaking philosophy. But the one thing he did not do during the off-season is lower his expectation of performance. Why would he suddenly start tolerating penalties and turnovers and poor execution?
The common theme in all of our losses has been turnovers, penalties, and catastrophic breakdowns in the kicking game. Most of the turnovers were fumbles. Most of the penalties were pre-snap penalties. All of that points to a lack of focus by the players. The only way I will accept coaching as the basis for our troubles is if you can show me a loss where we had limited penalties and no turnovers. That would tell me that our strategy, gameplanning, and/or recruiting is begining to suffer.
I think a lot of what we are seeing is sort of second-generation success. Success that is not earned but assumed. The recruiting classes since 2011 represent what I call the second generation. Those kids were lured to the program by the 2009 success and ultimately watched from the sidelines during 2011 and 2012. Those players started becoming a core of the leadership of the team in 2013 and that is when we started hearing the rumbling about buy-in.
As far as I am concerned, I have the coaching staff's back until I see otherwise. All they can do is teach, teach, teach, and stress, stress, stress. If there are not enough players receiving the message you get results like last Saturday. Apparently we still havent reached critical mass on that front yet.
We had a winning gameplan last Saturday that just completely broke down on the field.