Collins Promoted to DC, Wilson Gone to UGA

On Friday morning it was announced that Co-DC and LB coach Geoff Collins would be promoted to defensive coordinator and Co-DC and DL coach Chris Wilson would be demoted to just DL coach. Late Friday night, Chris Wilson took the D-line coaching job at Georgia.

In my unconnected opinion, I think we hired Collins to eventually take that DC role.  Wilson is a good position coach, but he isn’t the elite game planner like Manny Diaz was, or like Collins is/could be.  I think Mullen sees quite a lot of value in Wilson, mainly as a recruiter and motivator, but maybe just not enough to maintain that top DC spot.  He did alright last year, but we were owned by the spread this season.  And if you look at the number of opponents we’ll play next year that run a successful spread O, we’re in trouble if we don’t adapt (Auburn, OkSt, OM, A&M).

Part of our inability to defend well, I believe, is our inability to sustain offensive drives (with exception to the UT game where the D just got mauled). Our third down conversion % in games that mattered (and also vs Troy) was pathetic, in addition to our stall in the Red Zone.  You saw us leave points on the board against NW, OM, LSU and Bama.  State had 15 trips into the red zone during those games, only scoring 8 times…with two of those being field goals – the touchdown rate was only 40%.  So I don’t think it’s ALL on Wilson, but the fact that we got no pressure on the QB all year is really concerning.  Hell, we won the UPig game big if you only saw the scoreboard, but that was because they turned it over 4 times in the second half.  They gave that one to us.  They were moving the ball well on us the entire first quarter, and we got zero pressure on Wilson.  Luckily we got up a couple easy scores and they abandoned the run game and got one dimensional.

Now onto that poor 3rd down conversion rate and red zone struggles..  Is it just me, or does our play-calling seem to get bizarre?  Why do Malcolm Johnson and Marcus Green disappear for stretches at a time?  Maybe it’s Russell missing his reads, but we just seem to do weird stuff at times.  I don’t know much about play-calling, I’m just saying it gets weird how we make players appear and disappear.  We need an OC that is capable, or Mullen needs to take over play-calling. We’ll see if anything happens there.

But back to Wilson leaving – the biggest concern here is probably our prized recruit from Houston, MS, Chris Jones. But after the news of Wilson leaving he was asked about it and said, “I can adjust to the coaching change, it doesn’t really affect me”. He went on to say Chris Wilson wasn’t his primary recruiter, which is contrary to what we’ve heard from recruiting services.