Monday, March 3, 2008 (Show summary by uhwarriors)
Coach Mack was quite interesting tonight. I was a little preoccupied during the show, but here’s what I recall:
Craig Stutzman is a graduate assistant but Coach considers him the receivers coach.
Chris Brown will be a student manager on scholarship and will be working on earning his degree. He is one of Coach’s favorite players.
David Aranda is a “genius” with computers and they will use computers to help teach the players.
He’ll be coaching the defense but Cal Lee will take over when he is focused on the offense or other things.
George Lumpkin is very valuable to him because he has been around for 32 years and knows everything about the school and how to do things.
Rich Miano is really sharp and is coordinator/head coach material. The secondary was the most improved part of the defense last year.
He believes in and has had teams that ran the run and shoot. Mouse Davis, June Jones and Ron Lee are the best at running the offense. Ron Lee’s offense will be a little more back to basics . I took that to mean more like the Mouse Davis version.
The football offices need to be completed for recruiting purposes. They need state of the art video equipment to aid teaching. Cooke Field needs new turf. They need it to practice on rainy days and recruits wonder about the program that doesn’t have a turf field.
Bianca Tokumoto, who runs the football operations is very valuable. So much so she is like a coach. June Jones tried to get her to go to SMU with him
He has been given approval to hire a recruiting coordinator and is advertising the position now. He also needs to hire a video coordinator since Lopaka Ornellas left to go to SMU.
He likes to play his “friends”. He has friends at BYU (Robert Anae and the head coach) and would like to play them. Similarly he would like to play SMU and Arizona State (he coached with Erickson at Miami and Seattle). Unfortunately the schedule is pretty much set for the next four years.
He has told David Veikune and John Fonoti to get into great shape because they are really good and we’re somewhat thin at DE.
Mana Lolotai is going to be a good one. He played on special teams last year.
If a true freshman is ready, he will be given a choice of whether to play or redshirt. Paipai Falemalu may be in this situation this year.
He prefers to recruit and build the program with high school recruits, but he wants to win this year too so he brought in a lot of JC players who could be impact players. Ryan Mouton, Keenan Jones and JP Davies are good corners, but he “didn’t want to take a chance” and brought in JC corners. Similarly we have some good receivers who didn’t play much last year, but he again “didn’t want to take a chance” and brought in 5 JC receivers who can also be kick returners. Also because QB is so important in our offense, he brought in Rausch and Alexander who are two of the best JC QBs in the country to compete with the returning QBs for the job.
They didn’t recruit Bo Mitchell because we don’t need a high school QB this year. He’ll be a good one for SMU.
We’re aggressive on offense and defense and he wants to be aggressive on special teams too. He’ll try to block kicks.
Daniel Libre and Kealoha Pilares will be moved to SB but will also play RB in certain situations. They are going to do things that always gave him problems as a defensive coordinator such as getting the RB into pass patterns and putting the RB in motion creating 5 receiver situations. Libre and Pilares are really good in the open field.
Leon Wright-Jackson is a “stud” and needs chances to run the ball.
The Haa is part of who we are and will continue.
There will be scrimmages on the last three Saturdays of spring practice.
Next call the coach show will be on 4/21.
Join the discussion: Call the Coach Show with Greg McMackin