College football 2020 offseason thread

What, you never played pickup tackle?

 

Having many years ago spent much of a football season watching six-man in rural Colorado, toughness, while important, doesn't matter as much as cardiovascular endurance. There's just one hell of a lot of running involved on every play.

 

There have been about a dozen games nationwide this season and we might already have our first coaching change. Lots of Twitter chatter swirling that Jay Hopson is out at Southern Miss, but nothing official yet. Southern Miss has a bye this week and doesn't play again until Sept. 12.
They had a piss poor performance against South Alabama and USM fans are pretty unhappy with the mediocre state of the program, but this is a bizarre time for a coaching change.

UPDATE: He gone.

Hopson resigns as Southern Miss head coach - The Vicksburg Post

 

Veteran Washington State broadcaster Bob Robertson died today. Watched Wazzu Coug it for 52 years.

He and longtime analyst Jim Walden were a real treat to listen to.

 

Any insight on this? No losing seasons. Obviously they're not doing this because of one bad game; it had to have been brewing. But is it entirely based on performance? Has his performance been that bad? Or is there something else??

 

BYU crushing Navy. So far, not a lot of great games.

 

Read something on Twitter that Hopson tried to sneak in a kid who was accused of raping two women at knifepoint without consulting the higher ups. That's probably it.

 

It's perplexing.
He hasn't been bad, but he hasn't been great either. He went 7-6, 8-5, 6-5 and 7-6, and didn't win a division title. Southern Miss fans were getting antsy with the mediocrity and starting to grumble. Hopson is a defensive wizard, but his offenses left something to be desired. The leading rushers the past couple of years were in the 500-600 yard range. Some offseason transfers and a less-than-lackluster performance against South Alabama didn't help. Even so, things should not have come to a head this early into the season. Maybe if he'd started 0-3, but not based off of one loss.

I don't know of any scandals or personal or health issues that might have played a part. His contract runs through 2022 and he works cheap (about $500K per year with a very school-friendly buyout). I can't imagine the school would cut ties based on one loss, or that he'd willingly walk away based just off of that. He sounded pretty down and even distracted during Thursday's postgame presser, but I chalked that up to the loss and Hopson being Hopson. He talks Coachspeak better than he does English.

Personally, I hate it for the guy. He was a coaching lifer who spent about 20 years as an assistant at a dozen schools before he got his shot as a head coach at Alcorn State. He did a great job there and then landed a job he'd always wanted at Southern Miss. He paid his dues and earned his opportunity.
I genuinely believe he would have been happy to follow the Jeff Bower model -- have a good 10-15-year run there with a few C-USA championships, maybe one New Year's Six game, and then retire as a beloved figure. He's a Mississippi guy, he'd worked in Hattiesburg twice before, and he considered it his adopted hometown. He was a rare G5 coach who wasn't looking for his next job the minute he was hired, which is a big reason why Southern Miss hired him in the first place.
He was right where he wanted to be, and it just didn't work out. I'm not sure what happened in the end, but it's always sad when that happens.

 

Hopson has recruited a couple of questionable players. The story referenced there broke in February 2019, so if that was what did him in it should have done him in a long time ago.
When he was at Alcorn State he brought in a transfer from Vanderbilt who was among four involved in a rape case there. It was a similar deal, where he low-keyed it and the school's administration threw him under the bus as soon as someone wrote a story about it.
He also tried to bring in the radioactive Art Briles as an assistant coach at Southern Miss, and rubbed the school's administration the wrong way. Those incidents wouldn't have helped his case if it came to a yay-or-nay vote on whether to fire him after another mediocre season, but given the timing on this I have to think it was something else. It could have been another of these things, or something as simple as burnout.
I don't think Hopson is a scumbag. Maybe a little naive when it comes to dealing with those with checkered pasts, perhaps too willing to overlook those things to give a second chance when it's not the best idea, but not a scumbag.

 

I saw in the Yahoo story that the AD is relatively new, i.e. not the guy who hired him. Maybe they didn't get along?