You Pollard haters sure like to load up on some revised history and Monday morning quarterbacking.
First off, the Chizik deal. That was a huge hire when he made it. The national media was in shock that we could pull in a hire on that level. The fanbase was thrilled. He had a major rebuild to deal with when he got here. If you don't remember, Mac left the shelves pretty bare, and we were just a couple plays away from coming off of a 0-12 season the year before. GC had made some shakeups with his staff and nobody can say for sure that he wouldn't have made a bowl this season if he had stayed. He is now the head coach at an SEC power and was playing in a January bowl game. He may not have been the perfect hire, but he was far from bad.
Now for McD. If you don't remember, Morgan's last year wasn't all that great. We failed to reach the post season despite the fact that we had 2 potential NBA guys in the guard court. People on this board whined on and on about the "street ball" style of play. We didn't D up, we didn't rebound well, and it looked like the players were running the team. McD seemed like the perfect hire to address that. A guy who would bring in strong fundamentals and a team first style of play. A guy that had proven himself as a head coach, and a native Iowan who would view this as a destination job. He was also being connected to the Iowa and KSU jobs, we weren't the only ones interested, and we got the job done. Yes, the contract was bad, but given the instability in the program, we needed something to get a quality candidate on board.
Cael. Once again, this was another very popular decision at the time. We wanted to get him locked up so that we didn't repeat the disaster that was the Gable scenario. You know, the one that basically has made us a perennial number 2 to Iowa for that last 2 decades? He made a bold move and got the job done. Cael bolted for reasons that nobody on this board knows, but it looks like Jackson was still a great hire to replace him. I don't see any faults of Pollard here.
On top of all this, he locked up BF for the long term, and has managed to keep the volleyball staff here despite bigger fish like UCLA trying to pull them away. This fall we ranked the highest we ever have in the President's cup, a great indication for the health of our programs on the whole.
He has also grown the budget, achieved record football ticket sales during some very down years, renovated JTS, built a bball facility, and it looks like they are serious about trying to get something done on the end zone. All this while being the smallest budget school in our league, as well as being number 2 for in state.
It is easy to look back at some of these things now and say oops, but if you can honestly say that you thought most of them were wrong at the time, you are kidding yourself (or you are MontyBurns).
