AUgryphon

Good question. Were we overpaying? Did new staff not value them? Seems like gross mismanagement to not lock down at least 5 or 6 of them even if you aren’t in love with their potential. Are you going to portal 10 new guys?

I’m also frustrated that our portaling efforts appear to be completely serial, grinding for one transfer at a time. Every position room should vigorously recruiting in parallel, signing 3 or 4 guys a day. I don’t get it. Time is running out and the current pace won’t get it done.

I sort of agree with metafour. We pay DK big bucks to stick around, and then he just transfers next season anyway. These agents only thing that might make sense is a 2 year contract that is heavily back loaded to the 2nd year. Otherwise let him go and spend big money elsewhere.

Indiana narrative is going to justify a lot of weak roster management going forward.

If I wanted to criticize the current staff, I was disappointed that they hadn't fully tampered and there weren't 25 portal guys signing with us the first weekend. We had the time and plenty of connections (think Bank's knowledge of all the Tennessee defensive players) to have stuff set up and ready to go. Assuming we were going to find everything we need on the open market seems unlikely.

I was also concerned that the staff just wouldn't be good at securing the guys they identify. Whatever you want to say about Freeze, he and Redmond eventually figured this out, and our new General manager has never portalled in the big leagues. I don't know that these fears have been alleviated, but signing The OT from Mich St is a good sign that they can get it done.

The clear positives are that:

There are a lot of visitors going in and out of the athletic complex, even more than we are made aware of.

The On3 recruiting guys seem very confident that we will get to 90 or 95 scholarship players.

Golesh appears to be well respected by his players such that most of the good ones followed him to Auburn.

JLee has clearly been converted by the new staff, as he is very vocal about how much he likes them (I think Golesh came out and just hung with the beat writers and made them feel welcomed... smart move).

Paying what we did for Byrum is a sign of a "win now" mentality.

The staff is quality and it speaks highly of Golesh that he was willing to bring in alpha coaches, and they they agreed to work for him.


The verdict will be out for a while on whether the staff can scout and develop talent, so there is no point in getting excited or upset about that now. If they get the roster to 95, and they appear to get the guys they target, then there won't be much to complain about. I guess we could also evaluate from a distance whether or not enough targeted players were sure fire impact contributors. As much as I hate what the portal has done to recruiting, there is a perverse joy in watching a new staff build a team almost from scratch.

I'm ready to get the USF and Howard transfers out of the way so we can move on to the lines.

WR room already seems crowded with the USF guys, and I still hope we grab an elite P4 receiver.

Haven’t heard anything about Derrick Smith’s intentions. Maybe they convince him to move to defense.

Ole Miss has deeper pockets than us? That’s unexpected.

The players declaring for the portal really discouraged me. Both the idea of losing talent, and the reality that these players don’t care about the fans or university… but I think I’ve finally come to peace with everything by just focusing on the 30 million cap. When all is said and done, will we have a 30 million roster? If we do, then it’s all good, and Golesh will have everything he needs.


I’m expecting us to be able to discern whether or not our team is worth $30 million when we look at our roster in a couple of months.

I’ve got a phd in covering for incompetent coaching, but I’m willing to wait and see with Golesh before assuming the worst. Most, if not all of these announced portal entries smack of kids whose unearned paychecks were about to end. Let’s judge after the portal closes.

OL defections are going to hit different because we have so much to replace just due to graduation. I’ll be annoyed if we don’t go on a major OL shopping spree in the portal.

I could see any of the 3 qb’s being good next year at Auburn. Golesh is going to have to earn his rep as a qb evaluator by picking the right one. Odds are the other 2 aren’t going to be interested in a qb competition.

This series was a waste of time. Talk about botching the landing.

1) We have to sympathize with at least one character, and for the first half of the series the only sympathetic character was Wendy... and then she developed god like ability to control computer systems and xenomorphs, lost all emotion and child-like wonder, and became a stone cold killer via the xenomorph. Is she supposed to be the real villain?
2) The xenomorph is reduced to a pet dog.
3) By the final episode, the eyeball creature was the only interesting part of the show and they did NOTHING with it. They should have had it get into a human (of it's own accord) and either be the true final boss of the series, or be an unexpected ally. And don't get me started on the stupidity of "resurrecting" a dead body that has its chest burst open and no blood. For any body to move it needs all bodily systems somewhat functional. No lungs=no movement. No blood=no movement. It's the main problem with zombie movies that try and make zombification the result of a disease rather than some evil force.
4) The other potentially sympathetic character who was truly vulnerable was the black girl, and they just threw her away for a cheap horror moment. Now the show has ZERO likable characters. The synth is the only one left who I can remotely root for. I want everyone else to die gruesomely at the hands of eyeball creature.
5) There is no arc for this season. No tensions are resolved. It's like they just picked a random episode to stop the season on. Who wrote this?