I told you in a past post what Crowton would do.

Here are the reasons I wouldn't hire Crowton:

1. At his core, he believes in his own genius rather than his team's toughness. Every great football coach I have every watched carefully believes that toughness and execution are the keys to success. Crowton believes that thinking up the next great play is the key to success. The problem with this approach is that when things are tough or games are close, genius always yields to toughness and execution.

2. He has a lot of ideas, but no plan. Norm Chow was predictable, but with Norm every game plan included packages of plays that were designed to go together. One play set up another play which set up another play. With Crowton, it always seemed like Monty Python's "And now for something completely different!"

3. Crowton always panicked. There are endless stories about players complaining that Crowton never ran what they had practiced or that Crowton was trying to draw up and implement new plays on Friday night or Saturday morning or at half time or during the game. In a lot of games, it seemed like once we were behind by three, the game plan went out the window and Crowton started trying anything he could think of. Instead of trusting the players, the preparation, and the system, he immediately started trying desparate measures to come up with something new.

4. Crowton was never steady. The one thing that was constant with Crowton was that nothing was constant. One story I have heard a few times from a few sources had Crowton gathering the assistant coaches together (at some inconvenience to them) solely for the purpose of determining what time to hold a meeting. After some discussion, a meeting was set for a particular time. Ten minutes later, after everyone had dispersed, Crowton changed the meeting time and asked a staffer to get word to everyone. This carried over to the games. He changed game plans too fast. He changed quarterbacks too fast. He went back and forth on quarterbacks. He went back and forth on who calls plays. You just never knew from one day to the next what Crowton was all about.

5. Crowton was terrible to work for. By year three, there wasn't much loyalty left, and many of his assistants were complaining. At first the complaining was under-the-breath, then a little more to family and friends, and finally, off the record to the media. The defensive staff didn't like the offense since they were lazy, and the offensive coaches didn't like Crowton because whatever they tried to do, he would come back, take over, and mess it up.

6. Crowton didn't have the trust of the players. While I believe that some of the players liked Crowton as a person (and there is no doubt that John Beck saw him as a mentor of sorts), a lot of them were openly mocking him behind his back by the time he left. I have also heard more than a few serious comments along the lines of: "If he would just have us run the stuff we practiced, we would probably be fine" or "I don't know why he doesn't believe that we really can run the ball."

7. Crowton makes no sense. As a counterpoint to Norm's predictability, Crowton would run anything at any time, which we liked as long as Doman and Staley were making it work. When it didn't work, it looked stupid, and was. The win by 9 instead of 2 was senseless. The Curtis Brown 9 rushes for 100 + yards v. UNLV was senseless. About two-thirds of the screens he ran were senseless. His complete abandonment of the center of the field was senseless. Face it, a flea flicker on the first play of the Las Vegas Bowl (for a sack) was senseless.

8. Crowton's offenses do a million things, but nothing well. If you look at BYU in 2002-2004, you can't really define what BYU did on offense. Actually, the closest thing we had to a "system" was probably 2004 where we ran a lot of stretch hand-offs to set up the play action bomb to Watkins. Unfortunately, we didn't do the stretch hand-off well, as some of you may have noticed, so even that wasn't always effective.

At BYU he had a good year 2001, but when it got tough at the end of the year, we got killed twice. In some places, he has had some success, but it has generally ended with him getting killed and looking bad doing it.

In 2004, I thought the team had pretty darn good players for a BYU team. I figured if Crowton couldn't win with that bunch, he probably could win at BYU very often. I haven't seen anything to cause me to change that opinion, and I haven't seen anything at Oregon or in Crowton's history in Louisiana and with the Bears that really calls it into question either.

Bottom line: Unless LSU is hoping to use Crowton to solve Urban Meyer (Crowton ran a lot of Urban's stuff at Oregon), I don't have any idea why they are hiring him.

BaYoU Cougar
Slidell, Louisiana

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