Jim Grobe's tumble

Jim Grobe's name was hot not long ago.

He was one of the few people to interview for the Nebraska job that ultimately went to Bo Pelini.

Before Arkansas landed Bobby Petrino three years ago, Grobe spent a long night mulling an offer from the Razorbacks. He elected to remain at Wake Forest.

And here at Clemson, Grobe was at or near the top of Terry Don Phillips' list on two occasions:

-- When Tommy Bowden let it be known he was on his way out the door to Arkansas after the 2007 season, and when Dabo Swinney was auditioning for the job over the second half of the 2008 season.

Had Bowden ended up going to Arkansas, I'd say there's a good chance Grobe would be the coach now.

Same deal had Swinney gone 2-4 instead of 4-2 as interim coach.

Grobe's stock isn't nearly as high now. The Deacons finished 5-7 last year, and now they're 2-8 and dragging an eight-game losing streak into Saturday's game against Clemson.

Is Grobe not as good a coach as a lot of folks thought when he was compiling an astounding 28-12 record from 2006-08 and winning an ACC title in 2006?

Or is he being dragged down by a traditional doormat that does not have the resources or recruiting to win on a consistent basis?

I tend to believe it's the latter.

Grobe's formula when he arrived at Wake Forest was to redshirt all of his freshmen. The investment paid off when those players were in their fifth years in the program, and it served as an equalizer when the Deacons were matched up against teams with superior personnel.

It also didn't hurt that Grobe managed to spot and land some top-flight players that the recruiting experts missed (Aaron Curry, Alphonso Smith, Kenneth Moore, Riley Skinner, and a few others).

But Grobe's current senior class numbers a grand total of seven. He signed 14 players in February of 2006, months before the monumental turnaround began, and attrition has cut that class in half.

It has forced him to play freshmen instead of redshirting them. Wake Forest's starting quarterback, Tanner Price, was in high school last year. The Deacons' defensive two-deep, 15 of the 22 players listed are either freshmen or sophomores.

Here's what Grobe said in a recent Winston-Salem Journal article:

“This is the senior class we recruited off that 4-7 year when nobody knew: ‘Can they really get it going? It’s the same old Wake.’ As honestly as I can tell you, there are some teams in the country that just reload every year. We’re not one of them.

“If we have a few kids that don’t quite achieve the way we need them to, maybe don’t do as well academically or they get homesick.... We had one kid get homesick and leave. One kid has a girlfriend and leaves. You have this and that, and then some kids just don’t develop like you hope they will and you’ve got problems here because were not going to have 85 five-star recruits here and just pick and choose who plays every year.”

And in a refreshing moment of candor, Grobe acknowledged that he didn't do a good job of evaluating talent back then:

“The screaming and yelling and going crazy’s not going to help. We never start with criticizing the players. We’ve got to look at the coaching first. A big part of this is us. Our biggest problem is that we made some mistakes in recruiting and we’re paying for that a little bit right now, but recruiting at Wake Forest is not a science.”

The Deacons are awful in so many ways, particularly on defense. They lost 68-24 at Stanford, 52-21 at Virginia Tech, 62-14 at Maryland, 31-0 at Florida State and 38-3 last week at N.C. State.

The current spiral began with a trip to Clemson last season. Entering that game, the Deacons were 4-2 with wins over Stanford, N.C. State and Maryland. The Tigers entered that game with a 2-3 record and were coming off an awful loss at Maryland. A lot of Clemson folks were wondering how in the world the Tigers were going to win.

Clemson blasted the Deacs 38-3 and went on to win the Atlantic Division title.

Since that day, Wake Forest has lost 13 of 16 games. The only wins have come against Duke (twice) and Presbyterian.

Since compiling an 11-6 record in games decided by a touchdown or less from 2006 to 2008, Grobe's team's are since 3-7 in those games. They were 0-5 last season in games decided by three points or less, and this season they suffered back-to-back home losses to Georgia Tech and Navy by allowing touchdowns in the final 26 seconds.

Grobe probably knew there'd be days like this. Hard to avoid them at a place like Wake Forest.

But you have to wonder if he sometimes daydreams about what might've been had he ended up somewhere else.

A few Friday links...

Stewart Mandel has an interesting take on the struggles of some major powers who are supposedly loaded. He says to blame bad coaching, not recruiting rankings.

Take a look back at Rivals.com's Top 100 recruits from 2007. Among the top 30 alone, eight are already in the NFL (including Jimmy Clausen and Eric Berry), several others are current college stars (Cam Newton, Ryan Mallett, Tyrod Taylor) and plenty more are solid starters (USC receiver Ronald Johnson and center Kris O'Dowd, LSU receiver Terrance Toliver, Illinois linebacker Martez Wilson). Look further down the list and you'll find more NFLers (Rolando McClain, Joe Haden, Aaron Hernandez, Dez Bryant, Jahvid Best) and other current stars/starters (John Clay, Drake Nevis). You'll also find plenty of busts, but that's to be expected, and the ratio of productive players versus busts is about 2-to-1 -- better than a typical NFL draft first round.

Mandel also presents his list of hot coaching names.

Looks like Ralph Friedgen is off the hot seat for now.

Athletic director Kevin Anderson, hired in September to replace Debbie Yow, said in a release by the school today that Friedgen will be back for his 11th season in 2011 --- the final year on his deal.

“Based largely on the improved performance of our team and student-athletes this season, coach Friedgen will be our head football coach next year,” Anderson said in a statement. “Once this season is complete, Ralph and I will sit down to discuss the current state and future of the program. Right now, the team’s focus will be on winning the 2010 ACC championship and a bowl game, which our coaching staff and student-athletes have put themselves in position to do. We hope our fans, students, and alums will come out and support us in the effort.”

Sorry, but I'm just finding it hard to get jacked for Saturday's "big game" in College Park between Florida State and Maryland.

Hard to believe that the Seminoles haven't finished better than 5-3 in the ACC since 2004 (they're going for six on Saturday).

Their win totals over the last five years:

2005: 5
2006: 3
2007: 4
2008: 5
2009: 4

Georgia and Boise State in the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Classic next year?

Speaking of Georgia, how about this nugget:

Bobby Burton of 247Sports.com this afternoon posted a tidbit on our Texas site that according to multiple reputable sources out of Austin, the University of Texas had been contacted by a person representing Georgia's interests regarding the services of defensive coordinator Will Muschamp. (Post is linked below)

On this end, UGA athletics director Greg McGarity firmly denied that report when reached this evening.

"We have a football coach," McGarity said. "Mark Richt is our football coach."

Wow.

From the Wizard of Odds, a clip from a long, long time ago has Lou Holtz being a -- gasp! -- mean old man to a poor little TV intern. And now the intern has become a big, bad producer in Minneapolis, and she's recounting that awful, traumatic experience in an interview.

"No matter who you are, whether you're scraping the gum off the streets or you're President Obama, you treat people with the respect that you'd want to be treated with," she said.

Seriously?

Look, Holtz is a phony. All those smiles and jokes and magic tricks you see on camera do not accurately illustrate what this man is like off-camera, and that's what you see on the video.

But for this chick to make this big a deal of it, this many years after the fact?

If that's the worst experience she's had dealing with a ticked-off coach -- a coach who, by the way, had legitimate reason to be ticked off because he had to wait longer than he was told to do a live interview -- then she doesn't have much experience covering sports.

Now that this woman has risen to such big-time status and is releasing this shocking expose, I'm sure Holtz really, really regrets being a tail.



LW