re: Rumors of Elijah Robinson not returning to Texas A&M

Kelly has a good track record of hiring DC’s. House was obviously a miss but I’m curious what went into hiring these assistants. They let house run off his best assistant in Cain and hire a guy House had a relationship with in Lindsey. That makes me think House had a good bit of say in hiring Cooks and Steeples as well.

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They let house run off his best assistant in Cain and hire a guy House had a relationship with in Lindsey. That makes me think House had a good bit of say in hiring Cooks and Steeples as well.

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This is just wrong. Steeples and Cooks were hired before he even contacted house.

And you know this how? Most of the hires Kelly has made were announced well after the deal was done. The fans don’t know the actual timeline on any of it.

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The Mercy knee makes sense now…

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Excellent take!

My initial thought was "What a great negotiation ploy from him and his agent."

House was announced on the 28th and steeples the 29th. Cooks was announced on the 8th, so that was probably a Kelly hire.

Cooks was the only hire Kelly made on defense before hiring House.

I understand your thoughts on Arnett, but it has pretty much been confirmed he showed up wearing a Mississippi State hoodie.

You just don’t do that.

well that's the problem

if you take our recruiting class and you add in Texas and OU to the SEC, you'll find that our class is middle of the pack...

Idk what's going on with recruiting, but this class is weak compared to the rest of the SEC and we are getting blown out compared to the better teams in the SEC.

We still aren't recruiting D-line after 3 years, our best CB prospects flipped to other SEC schools, my god, what is LSU doing

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With the time Kelly had to assemble a staff, House was a great hire, and came with the Honey Badgers seal of approval.

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He had the same amount of time every other staff has.. December and January is the coaching carousel. On paper, the house hire wasn’t good. Nothing in his resume suggested a 2 million dollar coach. Everyone just gave BK the benefit of the doubt. Same as with Steeples, Cooks and Jancek

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It's honestly head scratching, looking at his resume, how our defense is so bad.

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I’ll preface this by saying that I do not intend to suggest that House has done a good job this year. I’m also not saying that he should necessarily keep his job—i think it would be 100% totally fair and reasonable for him to get the axe, and I would not be upset for a second if that happened.


HOWEVER, with that being said, it’s really NOT headscratching that our defense has been so bad: We straight up do not have the guys this year. Think about the season and how things progressed:

The D didn’t look good against FSU, but it also didn’t look anywhere near as bad as later on. The DL actually looked pretty good early in that game, and while we did have a few coverage busts, there were also quite a few times where we had a DB in good or even great position and just got dunked on because keon Coleman is a first round talent who had the game of his life.


From there, we lose Greg brooks from a safety unit that looked to be the weakest (or at least thinnest) unit on the team entering the year. When we lost brooks, the D took anther major step back, from “below average” to “bad”.

We played a few games at that level, before ultimately winding up without our top 4 CBs AND without our best DL. In addition to missing brooks. This was the point when the wheels really and truly came off, and I just don’t think I could be convinced that the greatest DC in the world could’ve had this unit looking like anything other than hot garbage. FFS our starting CBs have been a safety and two true freshmen. And the safeties were maybe the worst of all. When you need harold Perkins to play nickel at times, you know you’re hurting bad.



Now, like I said, I am NOT saying that house didn’t do a poor job. Refusing to go to a spy against Bama, for example, was infuriating. BUT: It was CLEAR AS DAY that he did not think he had anything even remotely resembling the talent he needed to play the way he likes to play.



Last year—when he DID have the guys (which is really just guys with a baseline of competence; it doesn’t take superstars)—he was CONSTANTLY mixing up pressure looks: bringing extra rushers from different spots, dropping different guys into coverage, simulated pressures galore, creepers galore, twists and stunts all over, exotic blitzes, the list goes on and on. Opposing offenses NEVER knew where the 4 passrushers were coming from, and they usually didn’t even know whether there would be 4 or if instead there’d be more or less. Seriously—house put on an absolute clinic with this stuff last year, and it honestly won us games we wouldn’t have otherwise won. The bama game in particular was an absolute masterclass; you can watch every CFB game of the 2022 season and you will be hard pressed to find a better defensive gameplan from any coach in the country.


But we have done precisely ZERO of that stuff this year after the Arkansas game. For me, there is just no way in hell that that’s a coincidence—house didn’t just change his entire defensive philosophy over night. He just straight up did not have guys that could handle those things mentally this year; they couldn’t even handle the most basic stuff, let alone the complicated responsibilities that come along with his preferred playstyle.


So the question becomes: How much of that inability is on house himself? At least some of it is, no doubt. Like I said, I think it’d be a perfectly fine move to fire him; I am fully on board with that if thars what we do. But I do NOT think it’s accurate to call him a bad playcaller. He was operating this year with both hands tied behind his back and a stick in one eye. Nobody would’ve been *successful* defensively with these players; the question is whether you think someone could’ve been meaningfully less unsuccessful than house this year. I’m not sure either way.