Holy Crap! RC reassigns Dino Babers, puts in new offensive coordinator

Wow! Pretty bold move by RC. If you read the article it sounds like he got really snippy with reporters, kind of implying the offense was not his fault, and that he would have called different plays. I just find it hard to believe that RC isn't sticking his nose in the offense somehow, because the offense has looked the exact same and sucked the exact same through several OC's. It just looks to me like RC is feeling the heat!!!

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http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/sports/1589395

<b>Sumlin replaces Babers as coordinator</b>
By NEIL HOHLFELD
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle

The revolving door of Texas A&M offensive coordinators spun again Tuesday, this time with an air of intrigue.

Three games into the season, Dino Babers was reassigned, and Kevin Sumlin will take over as the Aggies' fifth coordinator since 1996. Coach R.C. Slocum refused to explain the reasons behind the switch in a testy exchange with reporters after Tuesday's practice.

Babers was in his second season as A&M's offensive coordinator. Slocum said Babers will coach the quarterbacks the rest of this season. Sumlin, also in his second season with the Aggies, had been the wide receivers coach. Sumlin also holds the title of assistant head coach.

"Monday morning, I reorganized my offensive staff," Slocum said in a statement released Tuesday. "I have relieved Dino Babers of his responsibility for play-calling and overall direction of the offense. Those duties will be assumed by Kevin Sumlin. Coach Babers will continue to devote his time to developing the quarterbacks.

"I have been concerned and disappointed with the production of our offense. I am hopeful that these changes will help us move the offense in a more positive direction."

After Tuesday's practice, Slocum became upset when asked about the shake-up and refused to elaborate.

"I've got a statement that you should have," Slocum said. "The statement is self-explanatory. I have no follow-up answers. The statement -- I stand behind that. Now, I've got things to do. You've got the statement I sent out to everybody. The statement is very direct and self-explanatory.

"I said in the statement that I'd like to help move our team forward. I'm not talking about the coaching change with you or anyone here. I've not called a press conference."

Sumlin and Babers declined to comment on the changes.

Another surprising element of Babers' demotion was that the release from the Texas A&M sports information department quoted Slocum as saying he made the shift on Monday morning. The Aggies hold their weekly news conference beginning at 11 a.m. Monday.

According to that information, the shake-up already had taken place before Slocum and Babers talked with the media, but no announcement about it was made. Slocum and Babers went through the media session as if nothing had transpired.

In 1 1/4 seasons, the offense under Babers was consistently inefficient. The Aggies ranked No. 106 among 117 Division I-A teams last year and are ranked No. 106 again this year. The offense averaged 307 yards last season and 287 this year.

The offensive problems were never more obvious than in the Aggies' 13-3 loss Saturday to Virginia Tech. The Aggies (2-1) gained 156 total yards and prompted Slocum to second-guess the play-calling by Babers.

Two days after the loss, Slocum was uncharacteristically blunt in his analysis of a staff member. He said the 24th-ranked Aggies should have passed more early in the game and bemoaned the fact there weren't more passes called when the Hokies packed the line of scrimmage with eight and nine players.

"It always puzzles me that I'm the one that gets the blame for being conservative," Slocum said Monday. "If I were calling the plays, I'd throw that sucker 40 times if you played me like that (defensively)."

However, when Slocum was asked if it would be fair to say the disparity between the Aggies' offense and defense, which is ranked No. 2 in the nation, was due to better coaching on the defensive side, he said: "No, I don't think that would be fair."

Last season, Babers was cut some slack because the Aggies suffered through an inordinate number of injuries to offensive players. This year, however, there seemed to be mass confusion concerning what the Aggies were trying to accomplish on offense.

The quarterback situation was in a state of flux almost from the opening kickoff, which was surprising since senior Mark Farris entered the season as a two-year starter who had passed for nearly 5,000 yards in his career.

After suffering from elbow tendinitis during fall practice, Farris was on a short rope once the season began.

Farris was yanked after struggling in the first half of the first game in favor of untested sophomore Dustin Long. Farris returned for the second half of that game, a 31-7 victory over Louisiana-Lafayette. Late in the game, highly touted freshman Reggie McNeal entered the game, expanding the quarterback equation.

In the next game, Farris was pulled in the first half against Pittsburgh in favor of Long and did not return. Long started against Virginia Tech, with McNeal playing three series without much success.

Babers and Farris had what many people believed to be a contentious relationship last year. Babers openly criticized Farris for a fumble after the quarterback was hit from the blind side in the closing minutes of a 31-21 loss at Colorado. Farris was 30-of-49 for 334 yards and three touchdowns in that game.

"Some guys get blindsided and lose the ball, and then there's other guys who get blindsided and don't lose the ball," Babers said after the Colorado game. "I like those guys who get blindsided and don't lose the ball. We'll work to have one of those guys and not one of the other guys."

The frustration with this year's offense was clear in the remarks by some of the A&M players. Wide receiver Jamaar Taylor, the leading pass catcher last year, talked Monday about the lack of intensity, focus and execution by the offense.

"It comes back to our focus. We haven't been focused," Taylor said. "There's no excuses. The only thing I can see right now is the focus. We can't hang our heads. Some guys might hang their heads and go, `Oh, it's never going to be right here.' If you look back, I mean, when has A&M had a high-potency offense? It's never been.

"So what we have to do is keep our focus and help the defense out. That's the strength of our team -- the defense. In order for us to win games, we're going to have to put points on the board. The defense can't do it all."

Taylor also said part of the problem the offense is having might be due to a lack of intensity at practice.

"It goes back to practice," he said. "We need to practice more up-tempo. We need to pick up our practices in order to get into the game tempo. We've got to accelerate our practice speed to get used to the game speed."

The junior receiver didn't try to downplay how ineffective the Aggies have been on offense. He also warned of what might be a long season if there were no improvement.

"Obviously, it's serious," Taylor said. "If we don't get it fixed, we don't win games, period. The defense can only do so much. The special teams can only do so much. If the offense isn't there, we can't win, especially in big games.

"We need to come out as a group and really take it to them and bring back some swagger to the offense. Right now, we're just kind of floating around."

Taylor also seemed to wonder about the lack of long passes this season, especially when an opposing defense jams the line of scrimmage and covers receivers one-on-one. Taylor has 14 receptions in three games for an average of 13.4 yards. His longest reception has been for 33 yards.

"We took a couple shots (against Virginia Tech). It's going to come," Taylor said. "If there's nine (defensive players) in the box, you have to throw the ball. We haven't had many deep balls thrown this year."

Does Taylor find that surprising?

"We just play the game," he said. "We don't coach it. They call the plays, and we run them."

As of Tuesday, there is a new coach calling the plays on the offensive side of the ball.

Calling the plays

Offensive coordinators at Texas A&M under head coach R.C. Slocum:

Years Coordinator
2002 Kevin Sumlin
2001-2002 Dino Babers
1998-2000 Steve Kragthorpe
1997 Steve Marshall
1997 *Mike Sherman
1993-1996 Steve Ensminger
1989-1993 Bob Toledo
*Accepted job in December 1996; resigned in March 1997 to accept assistant coaching position with Green Bay Packers

 

http://www.chron.com/content/story.html/sports/herskowitz/1589445

And another piece about it in the Chronicle.

<b>A&M has been down this road before</b>
By MICKEY HERSKOWITZ
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle
When the Texas A&M Aggies replaced their offensive coordinator this week, it was the equivalent of overhauling an engine during the 125th lap of the Indianapolis 500 -- while the car was still racing.

Bless the Aggies, for they are an endless source of puzzlement, debate and occasional celebration. At no school in college football do the fans cheer louder or choose up sides faster.

The Aggies are coming off a 13-3 loss to Virginia Tech in which their offense was about as menacing as banana pudding. They put up three points in a game that might have catapulted them into the upper strata of the national polls. But they couldn't pass, couldn't run and couldn't catch.

They wasted a defense Saturday that kept coming onto the field after turnovers had forced the Aggies to defend their own goal line. They stopped what many were calling the best one-two running punch in America. They sacked the quarterback. They had one missed tackle, and it cost them a touchdown, which has been A&M's fate the past few years.

But the defense, led by Ty Warren, is of national championship caliber, except that the Aggies are in danger of wearing out the "Wrecking Crew." Of even greater concern, they are in danger of making it irrelevant.

So Dino Babers was stripped of his clipboard and demoted to coaching the quarterbacks, which is a tad strange itself. There are many who believe Babers took a decent passer and active leader in Mark Farris and turned him into a zombie.

The job now belongs to assistant head coach Kevin Sumlin, formerly the receivers coach, and if he finds a spark that can ignite the A&M attack, the second-guessing isn't likely to subside. Was Babers not open to suggestion?

R.C. Slocum is going to catch some flak over a move that has the look of distress and the dismal showing of an offense that looked as if the game plan was to sit on a 3-0 lead. Of course, coaches often have felt like a lobster dropped into the broiler, and Slocum is accustomed to facing the heat, or he would not have lasted 14 seasons in his present job.

If R.C. needs any comfort -- and it can't hurt -- he can consult the history books. There he will find that an imperial fellow named Paul "Bear" Bryant once had a similar problem.

Way back in 1957, in the dawning of mankind, the Aggies had a heroic defense that suffocated their opponents. On offense, they were studded with talent like a ham with cloves, but they went through a stretch when John David Crow, a picture-book runner, was getting only seven or eight carries.

When the media asked the Bear if John David were injured, Bryant said of his future Heisman Trophy winner: "There is nothing wrong with John David that giving him the ball won't cure."

This so surprised the media that no one thought to ask Bryant if there was anything in his power he could do to fix this terrible dilemma. Wouldn't a coach, even one as shy and timid as Bryant, have a say about who gets the ball?

When the subject of play-calling came up in another context, Bryant said, with a growl, half-joking: "We leave it to the quarterback. It's too big a job for a mere coach."

There is nothing to be gained from comparing the mysteries of one A&M era to another. The Aggies were No. 1 in the nation in 1957. They haven't been a contender for national honors since they won 12 games in 1992.

There is speed and power in this year's backfield, but nobody seems to know what to do with it. When Bucky Richardson was weaving his magic in 1990 and '91 and Slocum had his Lion Backfield with Greg Hill and Rodney Thomas in '92 and '93, the Aggies made big plays, blew out an occasional scoreboard and won lots of games.

R.C. fired Bob Toledo, who had a sense of adventure, after the Aggies lost to Notre Dame 28-3 in the 1993 Cotton Bowl. He had begun to doubt, he said, that Toledo could take A&M to that exotic and elusive place called "the next level."

In the strange way fate sometimes works, Toledo is today the head coach at UCLA and happy as a toad in Hugh Hefner's pool. The Aggies have been living with that decision ever since, and they turned Monday to their seventh offensive coordinator in 11 seasons.

The players are fond of Sumlin, which may or may not be an advantage. But he will gain countless new admirers if he merely tempers the A&M obsession of recent years with the handoff to a back who then runs into his center.

The exception was Ja'Mar Toombs, who had the ability to move the entire line of scrimmage. But when Toombs skipped his senior year, the Aggies made a commitment to pumping up their passing game and succeeded mainly in making their ground game disappear.

The demoting of Babers may or may not qualify as a symptom of panic on the banks of the Brazos. On the other hand, why shouldn't it?

 

After thinking about this a little more, I have become totally pissed off, and I wish I was back at A&M just so I could organize a protest in front of Kyle Field! RC is a frickin' coward and an embarassment to the university. A&M should give him the boot this instant before he does any more damage. He's making the football program look like its run by a bunch of amateurs. Putting all the blame on his assistant coaches?!?!? This is probably the first time I have ever heard of anything like this. What ever happened to the head coach taking the blame? Huh, RC? You freakin' coward!

And how are Aggie players supposed to buy into any type of system when the the coaches display such a level of incompetency? Why would anyone high school kids want to to go to a school that doesn't seem to have any stability, direction, or clue on how an offense should be run? And I'm sorry if I'm not excited that the Receiver's Coach of all people is now the new Offensive Coordinator. Boy, that really gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, doesn't it? Who the hell is this guy, anyway? Has he been an offensive coordinator before? Does he have a lot of years of experience? Whatever.

Sorry...I'll stop now... had to get that off my chest...all better.