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FRUSTRATION

Just a quick question...does ISU have ANY full ride scholarship players on the team or are they ALL walk ons that ended up with good grades and not good football players...Did ISU even recruit or just went to classrooms and selected good students...EXCUSES...EXCUSES!
 
All I can say is thank God that you have both No. Colorado and Weber State on your schedule. The toilet bowl games of the Big Sky conference!! I can really see it coming down to the Weber State game, imagine both teams 0 for conference and truly playing what might be ugliest game in Big Sky history!! Thankfully ISU had enough sense to schedule Black Hills and get at least one win on the board. Great progress Kramer, wished you were at MSU!!!!
 
Actually, Mtfootball fan, the ugliest game in Big Sky history was played by Weber State and Idaho State in 1979, when both teams came in 0-10. The Wildcats eeked out the win, and both coaches got fired.

I don't think Mike is going to get fired, even if the Bengals lose to the Wildcats this year. He is a three-time conference championship coach who inherited an awful situation: very few good football players, and APR sanctions that threatened to shut down the program at worst, and limited scholarships and practice time and prohibited post-season play. He also inherited a program that has historically struggled. It's true that Larry Lewis and Brian McNeeley showed that you could bring quality football players to Pocatello, but even that is made more difficult by today's APR requirements. As Frank noted earlier, Jared Allen wouldn't have gotten into ISU under today's requirements (which also apply to all other ISU sports, it should be noted.)

I'm not making excuses for the Bengals, and I don't think Mike would want anyone to make excuses. Bad football is bad football, and all of us long-time fans and supporters are frustrated and embarrassed. There is no amount of lipstick that is going to turn this pig into a princess.

But most of us recognized when Mike was hired two seasons ago that this is going to be a long, and often painful rebuilding process and no, there are absolutely no guarantees that in four or five years, we'll all be rewarded with a Big Sky championship. But given all the recruiting restrictions ISU has put in place (those self-imposed and those imposed by the NCAA agreement), I don't see any "easy" way out of this mess. Idaho State was fortunate that there was a three-time conference championship coach out there looking for a job when the school was in desperate need for a new football coach with some credibility.

Will he be the long-term solution to a VERY long-term problem? We shall see. In the meantime, we all have the option of supporting the program as best we can through a very difficult time, or choosing up sides and firing away at each other. This thread already illustrates we will have both.
 
For those of you that don't get the APR and recruiting issue...please go to the thread labeled PRESS CONFERENCE, and watch the entire 20 minutes of Coach Kramer answering questions. If you don't get it after that then all you're doing is :dead:
 
There are two sentence beginnings that we don’t like to hear someone say to us: “You always….” and “You never….” Both condemn us to a lifetime of never being able to change or adapt, and both assume that we are incapable of learning in the future. Bad football today does not mean bad football tomorrow. I believe that the young men on our team are able to learn, adapt, and change—and, they are more than willing to do so. I will back them during the process. It’s a teaching moment, and Coach Kramer will get the job done. Go Bengals!
 
So I vented my frustration on this blog, I regret not showing more support for the team. However, I don’t agree with those who use APR as a reason why we should not expect to win. This is a exactly the problem that OU had before Stoops -- there was always some external reason why the team could not compete -- we don’t have as much money as Texas, we did not get the quarter back we were trying to recruit etc.. I am not comparing OU to ISU, I am comparing the attitude. There can't be any reason accepted for not winning. We need to kick the APR crutch to the curb right now !!

I went back and looked at the game stats and we got blown out for really only two reasons.

• Defense continues to give up the big play – we need to adjust the defensive scheme to focus on big play containment. If that means we have to give up some blitz or pressure then we do it because we can’t win games giving up 60 yard plays. I think this is fixable – part of this solution has to be more time of possession ironically we have to slow down the offense to protect our defense.

• We had poor ball control. We had five turnovers that spotted them 35 pts. I don’t know any team that can come back when handing the opponent that kind of advantage. Take that away from them and give us a few scores we could have gotten during those possessions and it’s a game again. This is a coachable flaw.

• A small glimmer of light in the darkness

We had a running game – small but enough to build on.

Pass me a cup of that cool aid.

Go Bengals!!!
 
Coach Kramer did explain what areas were needed for his football program to move forward during the press conference. Hopefully, Coach Kramer and his coaching staff get the support they need to improve their football program. I wish the Bengals good luck in their game against UC Davis as I know the coaches and players want to be competitive and want to win in the Big Sky this season. Go Bengals..
 
It's a tough haul when everyone , it seems, is kicking you when you are down. I hope that there is not one Bengal fan out there that thinks that Coach Kramer and his staff do not want to win games. I hope the same thing about the players. We gotta know that they want to win more that anything. I think most of us disagree on the methods that are being used to accomplish the goal. Probably none of us on here have coached at this level or ran a recruiting program at this level. I know that I haven't. My thinking is that they should look more to the JC ranks, not all of them can be bad students, bring in some good athletes, offer more scholarships and not to just walk-ons. I can't really imagine how hard it would be to recruit to ISU's program. You have to be a master salesman. I don't know if you can continue to bring in freshman and keep them in the program for 4 years and build around that. Maybe you can, but these have to be some top freshman. I'm just shooting from the hip, because there are a lot of unanswered questions. Go Bengals!
 
Coach Kramer indicated during the coaches show that he will not be recruiting JC players and will not be obtaining any step down players from D1A programs in the future. He will only offer scholarships to high school players and only offer scholarships to walkon players that have good grades so he does not run into any APR problems in the future.
 
Didn't JT just say last year that Idaho HS teachers do not prepare kids well enough for college? So should we take our local HS kids off the list?

And APR isn’t just about grades. It is a point system that looks at if you are eligible and are you still on the team at the end of the semester. You can be smart as a whip, but if the kid quits or is kicked off the team you will take a APR hit. You bring in a HS kid and tell him this is going to take a few years of getting beat by 60 pts he may decide the hell with it. Now you got kids leaving, points coming off APR and your right back in the same pickle.

Also NCAA in some sports (not sure if football is doing this) but to transfer from JC to NCAA you must have a GPA of at least a 2.5 so it looks like if a JC kid is eligible to go NCAA he would have at most 25-50% of his college classes taken and a GPA of min 2.5. I would see a two year kid as less risk of quitting than a four year. And JC kids do transfer, if they do its for 1 year and most schools don't want to touch that.

I hope like many of you Coach Kramer is given at least 5 years to fix this. This is a perfect example of why coaches shouldn't have been given 3 year contracts like ISU has done in the past citing fiscal reasoning. If you want to fix it right we need to give the coaches the time it takes to fix it. When Z was highered he was given 3 years, and IMO and Kramer would it sounds like from his press conference agree you can't fix this in a couple of years.
 
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