Justjoshnya

February 14th, 2015 at 7:14 PM ^

Crazy that Wellman made more than Barwis.. They weren't even close to being equal and Wellman made 40k more a year. Just shows you how much of a disadvantage Rich Rod was at with how much money they were willing to pay his staff.

Joined: 02/11/2015

MGoPoints: 106

snarling wolverine

February 14th, 2015 at 7:28 PM ^

There's more to it than that.  The market for coaching salaries has been steadily rising.  $190K for a strength coach in 2007 was a pretty competitive salary - it was enough to lure Barwis away from his alma mater.

RichRod was actually able to land his first choice for most of his assistant coaching positions. Casteel was pretty much the only one that got away.   Unfortunately, that ended up being really critical.  But on the whole, he was quite fortunate in getting the assistants he wanted.  Even without Casteel, he was able to land Scott Shafer - from Harbaugh's staff, ironically.  

 

 

Joined: 12/14/2011

MGoPoints: 98417

2manylincs

February 14th, 2015 at 10:55 PM ^

I apologise if either of you played under barwis or wellman, but these arguments seem to be hollow. If either of you have a way to measure a s/c coach beyond wins and losses, I would be interested. But at this point it appears that you're judging the value of one staff member on the results of the team , as a whole. There are many people to blame for recent failures in the football program, but both posts appear to be void of any worth beyond slamming the martin regime as a rrod apologist. Get over it! Hackett did his job, we have good coaches (we all hope). We compensate them well. Get over it!

Joined: 04/27/2014

MGoPoints: 943

Danwillhor

February 14th, 2015 at 7:57 PM ^

he was in no way worth a dollar more than Barwis for so many reasons. AW is likely my #4 "most disappointing" staff members of the last regime. For all the before & after infomercial flex pics we'd see from players each year it just never seemed beneficial. We'd always look like the inferior team physically, even vs bad conference teams. Players never seemed to get faster, stronger, bigger at the rates of almost every other program in the country. Watching "small" Baylor WRs look more physically fit/cut/etc than some of our safeties & HBs was sad (let alone our WRs). He came in with tons of praise but I don't think he did much of anything to make our guys more athletic & physically ready to compete. At least Barwis gave kids an attitude on top of seeing him turn Brandon Graham into a doughy DL with unfulfilled potential into a yoked up AA caliber DL in the first off-season. Molk, Martin, RVB, Lewan, Omameh, Hemmingway, etc all showed clear results & quickly. Players stagnated under AW, IMO.

Joined: 12/02/2008

MGoPoints: 8609

panthers5

February 15th, 2015 at 10:52 AM ^

When will this guy and the unrealistic understanding of what he does come to an end? Barwis is a self promoter, and we all bought the garbage surrounding him hook, line, and sinker. Congrats Barwis has his own gym, no one has ever done that before. Congrats he works with the Mets, he's actually done that for a while now, and guess what, they suck.

Mike Martin trains with him, awesome. It is insane for guys who trained with their S&C coaches to come back right? Shoelace chose to come back and work with Wellman, so did Lewan, rather than work with Barwis. 

YOu want to talk about inferior physically? Lets talk when Barwis was our S&C coach. Lets remember when Wisconsin literally linedup and ran it down our throat 28 straight times. Any time we played a team with a pulse, we were embarrassed physically. Before someone gives me the, well Rich wanted us smaller. Why is it that Oregon is 290-300 on the OL, yet they don't get destroyed up front? 

Joined: 01/12/2010

MGoPoints: 462

Royalk81

February 15th, 2015 at 12:12 PM ^

Because RichRod isn't the coach of Oregon and we didn't have Oregon's players.

People always focus on size/strength of the player when judging the S&C coach and that isn't right. A trainer at Ballys could take linemen with D1 athlete genetics and turn them into 320lb behomoths or 275 lbs of "svelt" quickness all the while having them bench 500 pounds. That isn't hard. It also isn't what matters.

I am 225 lbs and I bench 400. But guys much smaller and weaker than me could blow me off a ball no problem. Why? 1) I wouldn't have proper technique and 2) I'm a weightlifter, not an athlete.

Where S&C coaches earn their pay isn't with strength training, it with their dynamic training, I.e. how explosive and mobile they can make the players and how well their injury prevention training works. Basically, by turning big, strong guys into big, strong athletes.

There are so many variables on a football field it makes it nearly impossible to judge those things as just an observer. Unless you are in the weightroom writing down results and seeing improvements, there is no way to say anyone is great or sucks.

That being said, Barwis is ridiculously well respected in the industry...and that goes a long way in proving his mettle.

Joined: 01/03/2009

MGoPoints: 219

panthers5

February 15th, 2015 at 12:56 PM ^

But all things being equal, how do you judge either of the two in terms of S&C? What metric is being used? Show me something of substance that says person a is better than person b.

 

I understand everything you said, and I played division 2 football, so I am well aware of dynamic lifting. However, do you really think that what Barwis was doing was really that different than Wellman? I can tell you one thing, our guys were gigantic under Wellman compared to Barwis. Is that a result of Rich Rod? Sure. However, if you're going to sell me Barwis is such a God amongst S&C Gods, where is the proof? He had more pro's in his first year at Michigan (Trent, Martin, Hemmingway, Molk, Graham, Minor, Brown) than he probably had in his career at WVU. 

 

Is Barwis well respected, sure, is he considered the best? Hell no.

Joined: 01/12/2010

MGoPoints: 462

antidaily

February 14th, 2015 at 8:38 PM ^

I don't think Barwis is overrated at all. The mythos around him that made people think we would win just by being in better shape wasn't his fault. And the fact that Mike Martin and Foote and a bunch of NFL and NHL guys train with him tells me he gets results.

Joined: 05/21/2009

MGoPoints: 7509

bluelaw2013

February 15th, 2015 at 12:47 PM ^

I love to think that some posters just lurk here for years only to, on rare occasion, pop out with a little random snark. That doesn't appear to be quite what happened here, given the more substantive comments made earlier in this thread. But this little jab is still kinda funny to me, coming from an otherwise rather old, rather quiet account.

Joined: 09/24/2013

MGoPoints: 1893

Danwillhor

February 14th, 2015 at 8:05 PM ^

I do partially blame the field turf. Then again, I think we should have dropped 5-10 Million on a proper drainage system & underlying bed of drainsoak to bring back natural grass when we renovated the stadium. The old system was trash as the field is below ground level. It lacked an average (let alone good) subsystem for draining & pumping out excess water but retaining enough to keep it healthy. That's why our field would be disaster by game 5 (7 if the year's weather was good). I just think The Big House looks sterile with fake turf. I think it also doesn't break like grass so I am in the camp of thinking it causes a bit more knee injuries.

Joined: 12/02/2008

MGoPoints: 8609

pappawolv

February 15th, 2015 at 9:22 AM ^

You do realize that a many of the injuries occorred during practice either in Glick or outside.  Stretching your conclusion a bit to say it is because of the game field surface.  Of the injuries that I know of that happened in a game they were because of contact/collision

Joined: 04/14/2014

MGoPoints: 521

dcallen39

February 14th, 2015 at 8:51 PM ^

I wonder if anyone has documented whether the recent ACL tears have been contact or non-contact related. Strength training has limited relationship to ACL injuries that are caused by a contact force to the knee. I do think that quality strength training can prevent more of the nagging soft tissue injuries from occurring, but we should be cautious when trying to associate blame for an ACL injury.

Joined: 09/05/2010

MGoPoints: 387

CoachBP6

February 14th, 2015 at 7:28 PM ^

Got high hopes for Tolbert. I was really displeased with Wellman. Tons of injuries, lack of power / strength at the point of attack, and lack of speed were hugely disappointing to me with so many highly ranked recruits..

Joined: 12/18/2013

MGoPoints: 7967