(06-21-2015 11:33 PM)HogDawg Wrote:  

(06-21-2015 09:17 PM)Afflicted Wrote:  

(06-21-2015 03:34 PM)b0ndsj0ns Wrote:  I still can't get used to not seeing USM on ECUs schedule. That was the one constant for my entire lifetime as a fan. I hope USM gets back to being the program I remember them being. They were the standard that all other CUSA programs measured themselves against for pretty much the entire life of the league.

Hindsight vision is always 20-20, but USM should have never run off Jeff Bower. His teams played a very tough and physical brand of football.

Indeed they did. And Bower was COMMITTED to USM, which meant you never had to worry about him leaving Hattiesburg. And of course, that means USM never had to worry about coaching turnover and the "down years" that typically result from the transition.

Firing Bower will go down in history as one of the greatest mistakes USM's leadership ever made.

Firing Bower was only dumb because we didn't keep Fedora long enough to make a real difference. Alternatively, we could have promoted one of his assistants, or just hired someone who wasn't an incompetent old hillbilly.

Bower never quite figured out the new teams that were coming into CUSA: Rice, TCU, etc. His last team was painfully mediocre, and all indications were that the game had passed him by, and he was unwilling to bring in someone with fresh ideas. I'd be very curious to see how Jeff would do somewhere else. I'm not saying he'd crash and burn, just that he wasn't well-suited to the challenges faced by USM in 2008.