As red4z noted in yesterday’s post, it is too easy to simply write a “Fire Groh” post. But given that William & Mary sealed Al Groh’s fate, let’s get into the real question of the hour: why is he coaching against TCU? To me, it’s sort of the opposite of what Harry told Sally: when you figure out you don’t want to spend your Saturdays with someone, you want to stop spending your Saturdays with that person as soon as possible.
Groh coaching Saturday creates a lose-lose situation for both Groh and Virginia. If TCU and Southern Miss beat Virginia, it’s expected and the long march to December continues, tension mounting with each loss for when the hammer will drop.
If Virginia somehow manages to beat TCU or Southern Miss, it raises the possibility of Groh doing just enough to keep his job but not enough to actually get the program out of neutral, and puts off the inevitable for another year or two. The entire season becomes defined by the Groh Death Watch, which is a horrible way for the year to play out and does the school no public relations favors.
If, say, Ron Prince (the uninspiring but obvious choice) gets a battlefield promotion, and has the exact same best-case-scenario season that Groh would have had, it is a cause for excitement. Littlepage gets the chance to evaluate a candidate on the job, things start getting pointed towards the future a little earlier. If team stinks, it is not like anyone would have expected that results would have been far better WITH Groh, so there really is very little opportunity cost.
To be clear, losing to William & Mary IS a firing offense. Don’t give me any them-be-the-breaks, that’s-how-the-ball-bounces, they’re-a-I-AA-playoff-team bull. Yes, losing to I-AA teams happens. To badly-coached teams.
Virginia has much more talent in both quality and quantity than William & Mary. This is not an argument. There is a massive advantage in the number of scholarships a I-A team has versus a I-AA team, and it is incredibly unlikely that any player on William & Mary would have gone there if Virginia had offered an opportunity.
Now, I would not doubt that a half-dozen players on William & Mary are better than many players on Virginia’s roster, maybe even a dozen players are better. But even if those players are perfectly distributed in impact positions (quarterback, receiver, offensive and defensive backfield, left tackle, right end, etc.), Virginia’s overall superiority in talent should have persevered in the end. With relative ease.
Or, think about it this way: if Virginia and W&M are remotely equal in talent, that means that Groh is either INCREDIBLY deficient at recruiting and/or developing talent, OR that William & Mary’s coaching staff is VASTLY superior tactically than Groh. Either way, it’s damning.
The “Virginia has turned things around before” chorus is not a good counterpoint. Any program that has this much experience at “turning things around” from terrible starts has some serious problems. The argument of “We Play Better with Our Backs Against the Wall” implies that a team gets its back to the wall often enough to have a well-established track record there---and I’m looking at you, Washington Capitals. Good teams don’t do that. Good teams win enough not to constantly put themselves in the position of needing to win.
Also, it’s not like Virginia isn’t bound to play better after playing so poorly. Virginia played terribly on Saturday, and it will play better at some point in the near future simply because the Cavaliers are not truly THAT bad, just as they weren’t as bad as they looked against Wyoming and Directional Michigan and USC and even Richmond and all the other craptastic early season performances in years past. Regression towards the mean dictates that teams tend towards their true ability in the long run, and by starting out poorly year after year, Virginia really has nowhere to regress but up.
So, Virginia WILL play better, and it will have little to do with Groh; it’ll play better because it IS a better team than it looked like. (Additionally, some amount of randomness went into that turd of a performance last Saturday, though not enough to compensate for the loss). This natural tendency to “improve” only increases the danger of Groh winning six or seven games and creating a narrative that gives Littlepage cover to keep Groh.
This is not a Steinbrennerian (Snyderian?) spur-of-the-moment decision. Groh’s been coach FOR EIGHT YEARS. Freshmen and sophomores in high school don’t remember George Welsh coaching Virginia. If those freshmen and sophomores happen to run a sub-4.5 40-yard-dash, they can use a reason to pay attention.
It’s not hasty to fire Groh now, even if it’s in midseason. It’s set against a backdrop of questionable and alienating moves since almost day one, ranging from the not-go-for-two decision against Wisconsin (which was perhaps the first step on the slippery slope to where we’re at) to the bizarre scheduling choices, to the losses to the teams scheduled in the bizarre scheduling choices, to the problematic drain of talent both of coaches and player off-field issues. Any semblance of a relationship with the fans is gone, setting up a perverse incentive to root against a sixth win (were there to be a miracle and Virginia to reach that point) to ensure that Littlepage can’t rehire him without facing a riot.
Groh has defenders, not supporters, at this point.
The two most similar decisions that leap to my mind (though others I’m sure are out there), are Frank Broyles firing Jack Crowe after Arkansas lost to the Citadel in an opener in the early 1990s and Clemson canning Tommy Bowden after a month last year. The Citadel was similarly I-AA, and while expectations are presumably higher at both programs (they’ve both won national titles, after all), Bowden had a similar path of success (even slightly superior) to Groh, mixed with a reputation for arrogance and aloofness from the fanbase.
Crowe’s firing didn’t end up working out so well for Arkansas---they were stuck for awhile in the mud, but again, it’s not like anyone was lamenting the Jack Crowe era afterwards. Bowden’s firing so far has seemed to work out for Clemson---the Tigers found value in a lost season, removing the interim tag from Dabo Swinney’s job description last December after the Tigers turned things around.
More than anything, firing Groh now gives hope, perhaps fleeting, of better Saturdays to come, even this year. If nothing else, it gives certainty to a situation that has needed it for three years, and avoids the biggest problem of all: Groh winning more games.
