Check the Journal Sentinel Badger Blog first thing this morning and find almost nothing but bad news since logging off last night:
-Ike is leaving for the NFL.
-Wes Kemp de-committed and committed to Missouri.
-Mike Hankwitz has seemingly been fired.
Will discuss more after work
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Yikes - bad morning
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4 comments:
It's been a rough 24 hours for the Badgers program.
Looking at the glass-half-full side, Hankwitz's firing may end up being the right thing to do given the defense's performance this year. Kemp de-committing is likely less impactful than it could have been other years since it's at WR, a position the Badgers have OK depth right now.
Ike's departure, well, I can't come up with a glass-half-full situation for that one. That stings.
As for the coaching moves, it's interesting to see how Bielema handles it. The last regime did not go through a ton of shuffling, my guess is that this will be the status quo with Bielema. He's more likely to get guys that are not "lifer" assistants (see Palermo, Hueber, etc). Not that one is worse than the other, just different.
That said, there does have to be some continuity for recruiting reasons.
Good points, Schwib. I'm not sure there will be many "lifers" in college football in the future, with the money and pressure that is out there that results in more coaches getting hired/fired.
We've talked about the St. Louis/Missouri pipeline and recruiting before. You had to figure that if Missouri got its program on track, that getting players out of the state would be more difficult.
There has to be something more to the Hankwitz situation, right? Granted, the defense didn't play very well this season, but the Badgers were not exactly Nebraska either. But it sounds like Doren is ready to make the step up to full coordinator.
I think Doeren taking over as DC was the plan all along, so I really don't see that being a big change at all when I expect it to happen. Since he was dismissed so early in the offseason, my speculation is that this was in the works for a while. I really don't know how the co-coordinator thing works, but it seems odd to me. Doeren was responsible for recruiting and the defense, while Hank's main responsiblity was jus the defense. If I were Doeren I don't know that I'd like that split of duties.
I think Palcic was probably a surprise and will be tougher to replace.
Not to dominate the discussion, but I will...
I liken a lot of these internal changes to a lot of companies or workplaces where we spend our days: You hear of changes and immediately the gossip mill starts up. HR will never come out and say why someone left for obvious reasons. Sometimes it turns out to be just what it is whether it's job performance, another better job, etc.
The big difference is that this is in the public eye.
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