Didn’t have the chops to be the top dawg. Better suited for a coordinator. As are many coaches.
That about nails it.
I’m surprised it’s taken this long to see a thread like this. I’m sure we will see more. Maybe not as many as Louisville during the Kragthorpe era but whatever.
So first of all, welcome. Glad you thought enough of our program to stop by. We’ve had a lot of coaches move on and do great things, so we see a lot of these threads.
He wasn’t fired just for losing. He was fired because he was losing, ticket revenue declined every year, and his players struggled in the classroom. We have kept plenty of losing coaches. We don’t tolerate ones that don’t emphasize academics and have the gravitas to force players to perform in the classroom.
It definitely wasn’t that he couldn’t get a good DC. For most of his tenure, he had the legendary Bill Young and the guy that was responsible for TCU making the playoff. And hired them for less than you pay position coaches.
The offense is incredibly simple. There’s no playbook it’s so small. I’m not exaggerating. There’s like 12 plays total. I’m not kidding. One of those plays has 3 WR on the field but the only read is the TE. You guys have already seen these plays because Kendal Briles has made a fortune grafting those plays into other playbooks around the SEC.
The offense emphasizes a power running game. It didn’t fit our conference or identity as a school that emphasizes cutting edge passing attacks going back more than 100 years. The offense struggles to recover from 3 TD deficits or more. It will remind you of the wishbone in that way but also because it borrows heavily from the 1960’s Houston offense that used veer and option concepts and continues to use the same terminology to this day.
Montgomery clearly had favorite players and only played experienced players. His son played all four years at WR despite an undistinguished high school career ant a tiny school and clearly better talent on the bench.
His teams were a shambles in the class room and undisciplined on the field. Fights during or after games became not just routine but expected and gathered significant national media attention. Portions of your fan base will likely approve of the urge to punch Mississippi State players, but our program has a self image as a throwback school where academics, sportsmanship and Christian values are front and center. Our aging donor base demands nothing less. Seeing our entire bench clear in a bizarre minutes long melee after a meaningless bowl game shocked a lot of people. And it happened several times. We spent a large part of our limited budget on FBS football so we can project a positive image of the school and town. His repeated failure to control his teams and instill in them the consequences for putting the school and city in a negative light was maddening. For about a year, if you typed Tulsa into Google or YouTube the first auto suggestion that popped up added “Mississippi State fight”. That didn’t go over well with our monied gentry.
People had real problems with his delay of game penalties, refusal to give up play calling, and poor clock management. I had a problem with these issues never seeming to improve. He was not charismatic on camera and did little to change the way he presented himself to the media. It held our program back. Oklahomans want to see Barry Switzer and Mike Gundy on TV. I’m short, he demanded his players improve the skills they could develop but he didn’t do that himself. He don’t come close to projecting to the public that he was trying to get better. At times, towards the end, his public facing attitude and body language projected that he thought the school was holding him back.
He bills himself as some kind of expert with QB’s but every QB he recruited to TU was a bust or a transfer from Baylor left out after a coaching change. The best QB he recruited to TU out of high school took three years to develop and left the program.
We were shocked when you hired him. Most people thought he’d end up in the Texas high school ranks, maybe as an assistant. How he got what some people would consider a promotion moving to Auburn defies explanation.
