Is Petersen the perfect coach for Washington?

Never really thought of it from that standpoint. I read it, and I agree with you 100%.

It depends if he wins a Rose Bowl sooner rather than the 5 year plan.

brchco12 said:

I will also say thank you to harbaugh and stanford for showing the academics you can play tough fucking football and still be nerds.

For the first time UW athletics and academics all want to be stanford.

That is a very salient point. The Harbaugh (and Shaw to a lesser extent) Stanford teams have completely shattered that myth. Forever. Another doogFS myth that has been dismissed as wholy wrong.

whlinder said:

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 his student 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.

Great poast, but any list of reasons that Petersen is the perfect coach for WASHINGTON, dammit, is incomplete without mentioning the complete boner killer he's been for Kent Griswold

whlinder said:

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 his student 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.

eh, honestly, I've never bought into the "upper campus fucked us up" routine quite to the degree most husky fans do. it's human nature - when something shitty happens to us, we prefer to have people to point at so that we can hate them and have fun doing that instead.

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.

Gah

topdawgnc said:

creepycoug said:

whlinder said:

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 his student 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.

eh, honestly, I've never bought into the "upper campus fucked us up" routine quite to the degree most husky fans do. it's human nature - when something shitty happens to us, we prefer to have people to point at so that we can hate them and have fun doing that instead.

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.

@creepycoug‌

Tequila stole your password.

sorry boss. when you only have a pretend legal career, you have a lot of time on your hands. I know that's not the most salient response, but it's all I got right now.

That's a great post ...

I don't think that upper campus is as against football success as others want to believe ... but at the same time, I absolutely do think that they want to win "the right way." Most of the power brokers look at the UW as a world class institution (and rightfully so) and they don't want the football program to be full of thugs and messing up that image. It's far better when the program is full of good kids that keep their name out of the police blotter.

Thinking back how everything went down with (praise be to) PatHadenFS thinking he pulled the wool over our eyes by taking Sark, the thing that never gets talked about enough in my mind is how Pool Boy never publicly worked hard to try to get him. In fact, what came out publicly right after the firing was Pool Boy telling the team that it was his job to go get them a CHAMPIONSHIP level coach. Behind the scenes, there's been a lot of (alleged) feelings that the Athletic Dept (and I'm assuming as a by product upper campus) was getting very tired of Sark's act of having to cover up his indiscretions, used car salesman tactics, and in general keeping him from making the school look like an ass.

Pool Boy used to be a strong spokesperson where you saw him in the news all the time talking about the football program, etc. Now? Haven't really heard much from him at all since Petersen's been here. It's as if he's comfortable with the fact that he has a grown up in charge of the program that he can just turn the keys over to and know that his vision and values match those of the University of Washington and as a result, he can go back to his cabana and get some R&R in.

The other thing though that was missing from the post though was that it was Petersen who pursued this job as much as anything else. Pool Boy (probably rightfully so) didn't even think about Petersen given the number of jobs that he had turned down. The perception was always that Petersen was never going to leave Boise. But in listening to Petersen talk, it seems quite clear to me that THIS was the job that he wanted because he knew it had the perfect mix of expectations combined with values of any job that he could have (save for maybe a place like Stanford).

In the end, we're lucky that we have Petersen as our coach and absolutely agree with the notion that there's a greater than 81% chance that this will be his last job in college football.