The Importance of Gary Moeller
If depends what the meaning of if if...
What if I never stop negging you?
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What if you stepped away from your keyboard and stopped posting these?
Your comment reminds me of a SouthPark episode I saw where Cartman eats food through his anus and poops out of his mouth, and that is why I don't watch SouthPark.
What if Kate Upton and I had a secret love child that was raised by a pack of koalas?
but that one's good
Moeller got a shitty deal.
It happens sometimes
Bruce Madej told my Sports Media class that Moeller would've been retained if Bo was in town to cut off the media firestorm, but alas Bo was on vacation.
Geez I hope he wasn't on a boat fishing,
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Mo recruited tough players and they played tough.
Lloyd benefitted greatly from Mo.
I like Lloyd, but he let the staff and team go stale as we all know.
It was clearly a bad decision to fire him based on what he did being a one time occurence and Bo being in favor of him staying. A lot our athletic struggles can be attributed to our incompetent ADs during the last 20 years. We hired Ellerbe and Hoke who were way underqualified.
The only question would've been how much magic could he have worked in 1995 and 1996 with Driesbach and Griese at QB. They were not very good those two years, and you need a solid QB to run his offense.
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What if... Antonio Bass didn't get injured.
There is no guarantee if Moeller stayed on he would have won a NC, but I think he would have been successful and probably would have coached as long as Carr did. Carr had the perfect season in '97 with a stellar defense and an offense that scored enough to win all their games. Brian was a great leader as QB and of course Woodson made big plays on defense and offense! Too bad the Husker coach had to announce his retirement causing many of the coaches to vote NE as number 1. Michigan would have shut down the one dimensional Huskers if they had played.
Beside '06 Carr's last 5 seasons were not stellar. It looked like he had gotten tired and did not put his full effort in being a top coach in college football.
I sure hope Harbaugh can turn Michigan around where we are always competitive in the B1G and we can make it into the playoffs. It may take a few years but I think by 2017 we will win the B1G!
the mistake was in making Moeller the head coach. I don't think he had the distant, disciplinarian mentality needed at the top. The 'what if' I've always found interesting is had Carr been made HC at the get go with Mo continuing as his OC.....
Just to be clear, I'm not saying this to knock or be negative on Moeller. Just recalling my perception at the time and him as the head coach. I would argue, given what he did as a Michigan DC then a Michigan OC, that Moeller my be the pre-eminent assistant coach in the history of the program and even in all of college football.
I bet that if Carr had been coach Desmond doesn't get that pass against ND. Going balls out wasn't Carr's style.
on this blog about the play a year or two ago with interviews of Moeller and Holtz thrown in. If I remember correctly, there were 3 different options on the play and it was up to Grbac to decide which one to call when they got to the line.
Michigan never seemed to lose because they were undisciplined. The only mental breakdown I can think of is the Hail Mary (Just knock it down!!!). And outside of Damon Jones, I can't think of any off-field issues.
Wow, I remember it differently. I remember Moeller's teams committing a ton of penalties, and Carr really improving in that regard.
This thought experiment assumes Moeller gets through a very rough patch, even if he doesn't get fired. He lost 4 games in each of his last two seasons, then Carr lost 4 in each of his first two. Assuming Bo covers for the drunken night scandal, that still mars the guy's reputation and we're looking at four mediocre seasons in a row.
Not so sure in that environment that he sticks around. And under those circumstances Carr doesn't get hired.
So not sure your "What if?" is necessarily so rosey. It should also be noted that he was following Bo, who only finished outside the top-2 in the Big Ten four times in his career. Following those seasons he won the league outright three times and put together the 1985 season where UM finished #2 in both polls at season's end. He never had two bad seasons, much less four in a row, so people were judging things by a different standard at that time.
Moeller was a great recruiter and the players absolutely loved him. I had friends who played for Moeller and they all raved about what a fantastic person he is. This is why the whole drunk-incident was so out-of-character for the man and is a shame.
Everybody gets one Mulligan in Life, I suppose.
The other interesting thing about Gary Moeller is that he was the Captain of the OSU team back in the early 60s, and now...he is All Blue. Its remarkable how intertwined the Michigan program is with the one down South.
Moeller never got a Mulligan, though. He never got another chance (the Lions never gave him a fair shake). He was irreparably damaged.
getting the UM job after Bo retired was his Mulligan because his head coaching stint at Illinois didn't exactly set the world on fire.
As oposed to all the other guys who burned it up at Illinois.
Mo went 6-24-3 at Illinois. His successor, Mike White, went 47-41-3.
Mo was a better coach than that record suggests, but Illinois is not an impossible school to win at. They usually have the occasional good season, although they struggle to sustain it.
the next head coaching job the other guys got wasn't at one of the premier football schools in the country.
It's the intertwining that makes the rivalry so great and sets it apart.
I don't think there is any doubt that Michigan wins more games from '95 forward with Gary Moeller as head coach. He was chosen by Bo for good reason: he was innovative, and a tremondous recruiter. With Lloyd Carr as DC and the rest of the staff Michigan is stacked, and wins probably ten to fifteen more games than they did over '95 to '05.
Some combination of Bo and Moeller are proably able to appoint a suitable successor around '05 or so, and more likely than not we do not have the slide from '07 to '14.
Here's the other side of the coin: we likely have a Carr-like figure as head coach right now, and not Jim Harbaugh, in this alternative universe.
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I don't think there is any doubt that Michigan wins more games from '95 forward with Gary Moeller as head coach.There is plenty of doubt actually. Mo only went 8-4 in 1993 and 1994 even though both of those teams were stacked with future NFL players. There is a lot of revisionism going on in this thread. At the time Mo was fired, many Michigan fans were relieved. There was a sense that the program was stagnating.
I have said it before and will say it again: Carr was a great coach. We will all be going nuts if Harbaugh is able to duplicate Carr's level of accomplishment. If we had only appreciated him more when he was here, we might not have had to go through the Rich Rod/Hoke era . . .