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Is Petersen the perfect coach for Washington?
whlinder
Member Posts: 4,592 
Warning: TL, DR
Something kind of hit me after watching some of the Penn St dreckfest Saturday night and then arguing CFB with a PSU fan and a Pitt fan on Sunday while golfing.
Based on the actions post-Sandusky/Paterno, PSU clearly cares about winning at football. From the top of the institution on down. Things that get in the way of that - like a lack of institutional control to stop child rape - are just bumps in the road to a winning football program.
Washington, going back to Don James, isn't at the same level of all-importance of winning. DJ (I like to call him that) won too much and overshadowed upper campus so no fight was put up when our boosters were misbehaving. We hired Babs who put a focus on winning at non-football sports and did things like have meetings with all her head coaches where they had to say one positive thing accomplished by that team each week. And then all the things we did to fire Rick, "clean up" the program with savior Ty, and not investing in a real coach when it came to Sark. Victory and Ruins, yada yada, the institutional view is football has to do well enough to support all the other sports, and a good football team is nice, but don't want it to detract from the academics & other great things about UW.
Enter Petersen.
He has all of his points of emphasis and building blocks and philosophies and foundational principles for the team. He's got a thousand things he wants hisstudent athletes players to do. He's actually trying to make them better people. It never says win at all costs.
That's something upper campus can get completely behind.
It just so happens that all of his foundational principles lead to winning. A lot of fucking winning. But only as a byproduct of a process and philosophy that Upper Campus can love. There is no other coach I can think of which would be able to come in and win to the degree we expect him to while also not making the academics all ticked off. Saban, Meyer, etc? Can you imagine the outcry?
I know the season hasn't started yet and we have to LIFPO. But Poolboy is so fucking lucky that C. Pete decided he needed a change and wanted this job.
Something kind of hit me after watching some of the Penn St dreckfest Saturday night and then arguing CFB with a PSU fan and a Pitt fan on Sunday while golfing.
Based on the actions post-Sandusky/Paterno, PSU clearly cares about winning at football. From the top of the institution on down. Things that get in the way of that - like a lack of institutional control to stop child rape - are just bumps in the road to a winning football program.
Washington, going back to Don James, isn't at the same level of all-importance of winning. DJ (I like to call him that) won too much and overshadowed upper campus so no fight was put up when our boosters were misbehaving. We hired Babs who put a focus on winning at non-football sports and did things like have meetings with all her head coaches where they had to say one positive thing accomplished by that team each week. And then all the things we did to fire Rick, "clean up" the program with savior Ty, and not investing in a real coach when it came to Sark. Victory and Ruins, yada yada, the institutional view is football has to do well enough to support all the other sports, and a good football team is nice, but don't want it to detract from the academics & other great things about UW.
Enter Petersen.
He has all of his points of emphasis and building blocks and philosophies and foundational principles for the team. He's got a thousand things he wants his
That's something upper campus can get completely behind.
It just so happens that all of his foundational principles lead to winning. A lot of fucking winning. But only as a byproduct of a process and philosophy that Upper Campus can love. There is no other coach I can think of which would be able to come in and win to the degree we expect him to while also not making the academics all ticked off. Saban, Meyer, etc? Can you imagine the outcry?
I know the season hasn't started yet and we have to LIFPO. But Poolboy is so fucking lucky that C. Pete decided he needed a change and wanted this job.
Comments
For the first time UW athletics and academics all want to be stanford.
This is not the era where the Osborne, James, Bowden types stay at one place for a really long time. Bob Stoops may be the only example. Meyer, Saban, Harbaugh, Chip, etc have all jumped around. It is great to get a championship coach but to get one that will be here for a really long time? Fucking awesome.
i was there when Gerbs was president, and I get more or less what he was about. but this idea that we had/have some kind of Stanford upper campus is exaggerated. yeah, I get it - they pissed off James by not standing by him, and he quit, and maybe that was the reason why. don't really know. I think it was all just a bunch of unlucky shit at the end of the day, and there's no guaranty that DJ would have continued to dominate like he did. scholly limits were coming anyway - i for one blame that as much as anything. i think it was important as hell to be the only game in town in the PNW and that's just gone now.
this academic/athletic tension exists all over the place, including at schools you'd never think give a shit about the ivory tower ... but the admins always care about that.
Donna Shalala has ramped up Miami to be a top 50 institution (usually now outranking us), and I don't think for a second that she's the reason they suck. They've just made a series of bad hires, and getting the right coach often involves serendipity. Watch the 30 for 30 on the U and learn something. Tad Foote was an academic cock sucker of the first order. A total egg head/snob who wanted to make Miami into an academic leader in the region. This fuck head was in charge down there back when Miami was really Miami. Talk about tension between the football program and upper campus. Jimmy Johnson HATED Tad Foote, and I'm sure the feeling was mutual. Didn't matter.
Nobody outside of the academies has higher upper campus standards than Furd, and they've made a run. Do we really have admins that take academics more seriously than they do at Michigan? At UCLA? At Texas? At Wisconsin? I don't think so. Is upper campus why Michigan hasn't been worth a shit in forever? Probably not, and UW is not an academic peer of Michigan's (sorry, much as I would like it to be, it's not). Michigan's academic peers are Berkeley and Virginia.
we've been playing this violin forever. we don't have any harder of a time getting the "right" guys in here than anyone else because of our administration. I just don't see that. We just haven't gotten it right, like so many other programs. Once you lose the winner, the odds of finding another one right away, based on history, is small.
I think winning is sufficiently important at UW. Maybe not Alabama important, but that's a unique standard. I think it's adequately important, but like so many programs, we are demonstrating that it's a lot easier to fuck up a hire than it is to get it right. That, to me, is 99.9% of why we are where we are.
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