Posts tagged Ron Zook at FanHouse

As part of our College Football preview series, we've been lucky enough to peek into the world of the JoePa Chronicles, where Fake Joe Paterno regales us and those around him with tales of football history, international intrigue, and that one weird story where he probably confused Ki-Jana Carter with Jimmy Carter. Fake JoePa also has lots to say about the upcoming season, and today he talks about the Big Ten.

AND THAT IS HOW LASSIE ACQUIRED THE CANINE AIDS
Just for saving a little red-headed boy? That hardly seems
NOT JUST ANY REDHEAD, A KNOWN IRISH
Whatever. Can I go home now? It's like 8 and all you've done since lunch is watch TV.
THIS IS FILM STUDIES, WE HAD A VERY INCONSISTENT YEAR LAST YEAR
No, it's not. It's the first season of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. And I think you know that because you've been singing along to the theme song even when it's not playing.
GO GO NOW A DANGER
I'm leaving.
GO GO COWS IN MANGERS

The Fighting Illini were quite the surprise in college football last season, going 9-4 overall and 6-2 in the Big Ten a year after finishing 2-10. The quick turnaround in Champaign resulted in the first Rose Bowl berth for the Illini since 1983, and the team celebrated by getting their butts kicked 49-17 by USC.

Still, despite the embarrassment handed them by the Trojans, the 2007 season can't be considered anything less than a raging success at Illinois.

The question is, will the Illini be able to carry that success into the 2008 season? History suggests they won't as they've generally followed every winning season with a losing season in Champaign, but that was before the recruiting machine that is Ron Zook came to town.

So will the Illini continue their climb to becoming a Big Ten powerhouse, or will they return to the back of the pack?

As FanHouse previews each BCS conference, the college football songbook will cast an unflattering light on each conference in the only way we know how. First up, the Big 10.



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Curtis Painter is mediocre

Ah, mediocre football. The annual rite of late summer where fans of middling programs congregate and tell each other things like "if our offensive line is solid then I don't see why we can't go to a New Year's Day Bowl." Soon, of course, love and hopes are, well, amended.

By "amended," of course, we mean "discarded in favor of bloodthirsty savages on sports talk radio complaining about the coordinators and accusing the team of not wanting to win." It's a strange reaction to a 7- or 8-win season, of course, one that ends up in a warm climate in late December (grisly exception: Motor City Bowl, war-torn Bosnia Detroit). The fans never seem to get it: it could be so, so much worse. Look at Minnesota last season.

While Michigan, Ohio State, and (usually) Penn State represent the perennial powerhouse typification for the Big Ten, the conference usually hosts quite a few more mediocre programs. 2008 is no exception. Let's look at some of the programs that, let's be honest, don't stand a prayer of taking the Big Ten crown this season.

Note: fast and dirty transcription follows; quotes not guaranteed to be 100% as printed in the newspaper, but should be the spirit of the thing.

Ron Zook wants to play football. He's very proud of his football team, but as a football coach, it's over. He talked to his football team out in California and they still have a lot of progress to make. Football. (He really did say all of these "footballs" except the last.)

They open it up for questions... and... no one has any. There's a hilarious, awkward pause before someone from the Chicago Tribune finally asks about running backs. Daniel Dufrene is the projected starter, but there will be a committee. Also: you have to, like, tell people who you are before you ask the question. Uh-oh.

Indy Star guy asks about spread stuff, Zook says he wanted something he hated to defend and weirdly says he's excited about the 40 second rule because he thinks it will provide opportunities to hurry the game. This is wrong, right? The ref's going to spot the ball and blow the whistle like he always does. If so, why have I heard that from multiple coaches?

Zook does have Juice Williams' freshman year completion rate burned into his head: 39%. I would also have that burned into my head if I had suffered through that. Eddie McGee gets a mention.

Now that the Big Ten Network and Comcast cable have finally come to an agreement that will actually allow the majority of Big Ten fans to see the network, it's time to figure out what exactly they're going to be showing to fill all that dead air between Iowa/Indiana lacrosse matches and Minnesota/Penn State tennis.

Last season the BTN did a series called "The Journey" in which they followed Tubby Smith and the Minnesota basketball team around during the season and chronicled the changes taking place under Smith. The series was a success, and the network will be doing it again this season, with the focus of the show being on Ron Zook and Illinois' football program.

BTN officials plan to announce Thursday the Illini will be featured in Season 2. Minnesota and its first-year basketball coach, Tubby Smith, were the series' guinea pigs.

"I talked with Tubby and he was impressed with their professionalism," Zook said. "He had the same fears in the beginning as I do."

Chief among those fears?

"This will be like having someone in your bedroom," Zook said.

If you think you know every dirty creative trick schools use to recruit athletes, you may be right. But I'm willing to guess that you don't. I think I learned at an early age about the sneaky ways of recruiting from reading "That's My Story and I'm Sticking To It", by Alex Hawkins.

When Hawkins, then a South Charleston high school senior, was being sought after by football and basketball college coaches, he chose football because it paid more money. "I was offered a farm to sign with the University of Kentucky but I was offered $1,500 a semester, a complete men's wardrobe and a new automobile to play football for coach Rex Enright at South Carolina.

Depending on how you look at it, those days are sadly over. Too bad I couldn't find the bit about the men West Virginia paid to make sure no other coaches talked to Hawkins. Because the South Carolina coaches had to sneak in the back door to make that offer. Undoubtedly, WVU's men were looking for new jobs that fall.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Recruiting always has been and always will be about getting access to the player, and what you can sell them in that time. Despite the NCAA's best efforts to control the contact coaches have with recruits, it seems there's always a loophole.

So when Oregon coaches identified their top 20 prospects for the class of 2005, Gilmore and his staff designed custom comic books starring each recruit as the hero who leads the Ducks to a national title. Because NCAA rules at the time only allowed programs to send letter-sized, black-and-white pages to recruits, Gilmore sent each prospect one page a week. After a few months, the recruit had the full comic book.

The practice of sending a recruit a comic book about themselves was nixed when the NCAA passed a rule that only material that was created by a coach could be sent to recruits. I would not be at all surprised to learn that Oregon offered a spot on the coaching staff to Stan Lee.

Rashard Mendenhall just finished the most productive season in the history of Illinois running backs and was drafted in the first round by the Steelers. He is, of course, rapt with ecstasy when talking about the guy who put him in this position:

"To tell you the truth, as long as Ron Zook is there it will be hard for me to support the University of Illinois football team," Mendenhall said.

Uh. Dude. In a wide-ranging interview with an Illinois newspaper named the News-Gazette that declines to mention where the hell it's located, Mendenhall drops that bomb and many others. To wit:

• His brother and teammate Walter is the only reason Mendenhall didn't transfer before his breakout 2007: ""There was a point where we were at the stadium and I was ready to start walking out and my brother stopped me."
• His animosity had nothing to do with "what happened to" his brother, who is going to graduate and transfer to I-AA Illinois State for his final year of eligibility: "It's so much more than that. It's so much that's going on right now, that went on with me that people don't know. It's hard for me to support how things are done."
• Ron Zook eats babies.*

Like I said: dude. I think we now know why the hyper-talented Mendenhall spent his first two seasons stuck behind decent but uninspiring backs. Well... sort of. At no point in the article does Mendenhall say why he wants Ron Zook to play in traffic, just that "everything wasn't as it appeared to be."

Well, why not? Does Zook have three heads? Does he shave his legs? Did he walk over to Mendenhall's apartment every morning and take a dump on the porch? INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW.

*(Silly blogger, Ron Zook doesn't eat babies. Babies are for Maxiell.)

The man doesn't sleep, so pretty much everyone outside the 99th percentile where he resides faces that fire

"I don't want to sound like a jerk," [USC coach Pete] Carroll says, "But other coaches ... they're just lazy."

Carroll is gripping about the NCAA's ban on off-campus visits during the spring evaluation period (April 15 to May 31). That's a period of time where coaches like Carroll commit to life on the road and find those margins in recruiting and evaluation. Ostensibly, the legislation was an attempt to curb coaches from violating the NCAA's "bump" rule that limits personal contact with recruits at their schools.

For someone like Carroll, this is an unnecessary and unfair "time out". The poor man's got nothing to do except work on his jumper, apparently. Says The Sporting News' Matt Hayes:

The reality is the new rule penalizes those who work hard and build relationships and rewards those who are, yep, lazy.

Nick Saban visited more than 100 high schools in last spring's evaluation period. Urban Meyer's spring jaunts are legendary, and Ron Zook once visited more than 70 schools in 30 days. See the common thread yet?

Those who work hard reap the rewards.

Any coach can watch tape and see potential. The difference is in the details: talking to high school coaches and guidance counselors and teachers early on and getting a feel for intangibles that don't show on grainy video.

The cold reality is the coaching biz rewards the guys who never leave the office and keep family and social commitments to a minimum in pursuit of every possible edge. Someone like Carroll is willing to make those sacrifices others won't. I wouldn't call other coaches lazy (although some are!), but for a competitive freak like Carroll it's probably near-impossible to see things in any other light.

Previously at FanHouse
Pete Carroll Can Not Be Profiled
Pete Carroll Tag
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I already said earlier this week that Illinois running back Rashard Mendenhall would be skipping out on his senior season to enter the NFL draft, and now Rashard has gone and done something I haven't been able to do in 20 years or so.

He made me look smart.

Illinois junior running back Rashard Mendenhall will enter the NFL draft, a source close to him said Saturday.

Mendenhall, the Big Ten Player of the Year, made his final case as a pro prospect in the Rose Bowl, where he gained 155 yards rushing and added 59 receiving yards in the Fighting Illini's loss to Southern California.

Rashard's mother, Sibyl, says there's a press conference on Thursday at her son's old high school, Niles West.

While Mendenhall's absence is going to be a tough void to fill in Illinois' offense next season, Ron Zook actually sees his early departure as a good thing for the program.

Zook said he not only has no problem with [Rashard's departure], but also is looking forward to having more Illini leave Champaign early. Because that will mean Illinois is enjoying success as a team.

''We're going to get to a point in the program where we're going to have that issue. That's what you want. We have some other guys on this team that are going to have the opportunity possibly to do that.''

I have a feeling Ron may not feel the same way next season when he doesn't have Rashard around to bail Juice Williams out.