Another stunning 180 yds of offense in a loss.
What does Fox, or our football program in general, need to be competitive in the PFL? How do we get better talent on the offensive side of ball, both coaches and players? Or is having a winning record in PFL play a pipe dream.
I wonder if Fox wants to stay at Valpo for long with the lack of support. It has to be frustrating.
I really don’t understand why we can’t get apex level offensive players to come to Northwest Indiana without an aThor tix scholarship and live in the dorms for 3 years while almost certainly redshirting their first year on campus.
But it’s starting to frustrate me
I really don’t understand why we can’t get apex level offensive players to come to Northwest Indiana without an athletic scholarship and live in the dorms for 3 years while almost certainly redshirting their first year on campus.
But it’s starting to frustrate me
[NOTE: This is not meant as an excuse or a gaslighting statement - just a weakly stated fact.]
Remembering his predecessor and “the coach who shall not be named,” the change to Cecchini brought some sense of mediocre respectability with, in comparison, some significant wins. Fox upped the level of play from that by introducing something I think is called defense to the equation. Throughout Landon’s tenure the D has been our backbone and it has kept us in so many games that in the past would have been blowouts. And he has kinda continued the mediocre level of wins. And, consistently, the margins have closed even further over time.
Now reality. Those reduced margins have not been enough to vault Valpo into the consistent winning season mode, ala for instance, Davidson. Remember: There was a time when even Valpo laughed at Davidson’s football ineptness. No more. But who can we look to for responsibility for this predicament?
FOX? NO and YES No, because I think we all agree he is a good coach and a very good defensive mind. Our D is among the best in the PFL year to year. But their job is not to score points.
Yes, because he hasn’t been able to do two key things on the other side of the ball:
1) Identify an offensive system that optimizes the kind/level of talent Valpo can attract. I keep coming back to the service academies as a prime example. Always overmatched, but over time, they have found unique systems to compete well above their talent level. First it was Air Force, then Navy had their run, and now it’s Army who go nose to nose with the big guys and still win. Ya know, that’s exactly what Davidson did to turn around their program and now they consistently win and have a beautiful new FB complex to complement a winning program to boot.
2) Find and retain a competent OC to implement such a system (or actually any decent system for that matter). The OC revolving door has been accelerating its spinning the past couple of years.
UNIVERSITY AND ATHLETIC ADMIN? YES. Their job is to support and facilitate its programs. FB, merely by it size (over 100 players and large staff is a monolith within the department) requires so much in the way of support (Just uniforms and player equipment alone is monstrous. When they travel it’s a minimum of 70 airplane seats). It appears that the administration covers the basic nut - but minimally. Yet where it counts that remains to be seen. To be honest, I’d be fine with seeing the same old uniforms for two to three years in favor of a greater investment in assistant coaching salaries. The key to sustained success, IMO, is maintaining over time a solid, talented core staff of three - HC, OC and DC. It’s fine for the position coaches to process through (that’s kinda expected) as long as the three key guys remain to shepherd the overall progress forward. But that is not happening anymore. I can only surmise that the biggest obstacle is salaries. [An observation about salaries in the current university economy: how do you justify $60K-75K or more for an OC, when tenured faculty with years of experience and PhDs are being let go? I can’t] .
I believe Valpo needs to understand what success looks like at the PFL level and at Valparaiso and use that as an aiming point for the program.
When diagnosing the PFL’s history as a whole San Diego is the king pin of the conference. My belief is that quite a lot of this has to do with location. Jacksonville also had a run of this in their day. California and Florida have deeper pools of talent.
Butler, Drake, and Dayton have found success due to game day operations, student experience, other sectors of athletics. Davidson picked up on this to an extent.
Now Saint Thomas has brought NIL to the conference in a big way.
Marist and Stetson have never found stable footing. Valparaiso and Morehead State have been left behind and Presbyterian is few years away from being a few years away.
Valpo will never get kids due to location in a way that a coastal school will, and the alumni base is not there for a Saint Thomas NIL flux.
That leaves Butler, Drake, and Dayton as our primary and realistic goals in the conference. Losing to Dayton this year while they are still largely inexperienced and we retuned almost our full defense is alarming. We were 5-0 against Butler/Drake in 2020/2021. Quite frankly we got jumped by our primary competition in the league.
So how did this happen? I think that is what needs evaluated is how that happened.
