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Friday, April 18, 2008
What does Paul Johnson expect?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Today’s topic: A little about how Paul Johnson approaches expectations.
It is still far too early to ask a new head coach what he’ll expect of his team, so the first question I asked (multi-pronged) in this regard was: How in your first year will you arrive at your expectations going into the season, how will you decide what will be satisfactory, do you set certain benchmarks in terms of wins, average rushing yards per game, points allowed that if not met will determine if the season was pass or fail? I wanted to know what he will look for in predicting what his team will be capable of this fall.
Bad idea. How could I forget? Coaches in general hate predictions, perhaps none moreso than Johnson’s Tech colleague, Paul Hewitt. Short precursor: Johnson said he’s not one to set what might be called tangible expectations, like win this many games or the season’s a bust, etc. More:
“I have a hard time dealing with that. At the Naval Academy, they had not won that much, and once we started winning (43 games over the last five seasons), at the end of the season I could never enjoy … one year we were 10-2 and ranked (No. 24), and I couldn’t let go of the two we lost,” he said.
Translation: He reached a point at Navy, once he and his staff settled in, where he expected to win, win and win again. He’s not alone among coaches in that regard, although he earlier said sometimes no matter how grand your schemes and ideas are, “physical superiority on some days cancels all else out.”
Continuing … “My expectations are to handle the things you can handle, and don’t worry about the other stuff,” he said. “We need to try to be as good as we can be, get better every day, and then my expectation right now is to get ready for Jacksonville State.”
Sounds like he will be big on the way coaches and — through trickle-down — players set some expectations, however, and there is at least one excuse he won’t allow the defense to “expect” to be able to use as a crutch in the event time of possession is tilted badly away from his team on a given day. Here ‘tis:
“One of my biggest peeves, and I guess it started from when I was a defensive coach, was when the defense says, ‘We’re wore out,’ ” Johnson said. “Well, shoot, stop [the other team on third down] and come out. That’s what the other side is doing. I think from a coaching standpoint, if you have kids that come off the field and do that, you say, ‘Bullcrap’ [to them].”
There are, of course, expectations of all kinds. The kids Tech (and everybody else) recruits have expectations, and sometimes there is no way around them. When that happens, steer clear of those kids even if they meet Tech’s other criteria.
“Any time in recruiting when all a kid’s heard about for the last few years is the University of Georgia, and the stadium is bigger, it holds 90,000 and they draw more fans, hey, if you’re looking for those bells and whistles, OK.
“Now, if you’ve got a kid who’s thinking I want to be an architect, or a kid who’s thinking 10 years down the road, OK, well then, 60,000 is as good as 90,000 and he’s not going to worry about who has the bigger weight room and like that, [Tech will] get those kinds of kids I think. Those are generally kids who are motivated differently.
“That doesn’t mean that the state schools don’t get great kids, too, because they do. They might want to be a journalism major, or something at another school, like sports medicine. There’s a lot of kids that drive kids to pick schools. I’ve seen kids pick a school because of the jersey.”
Moral to that story: Figure out early in the process what a recruit’s priorities are, and if they are too far off what Tech has to offer, don’t waste time and money recruiting him if he’s not likely to be persuadable. Again, not a novel concept, but there’s a lot to be said — in my opinion — for candor like that stated above.
On to Saturday’s spring game.
Matt
