After the pitiful effort the IU football team displayed yesterday, I'm convinced that all of the criticism Bill Lynch has taken this year is justified. Coach Lynch has no right to be at the helm of a Big Ten football team, not even a Division I school. He should be sticking to high school duties - perhaps my little brother's Pee Wee team.
Coach Lynch has a knack of running teams and programs into the ground. He did it at Ball State and is another blowout loss away from it at Indiana. Lynch got his start back in 1985 coaching Butler University for five years and produced an overall record of 36-12-3. Not bad huh? Except Butler was playing in the Horizon league against a bunch of schools I didn’t even know had football programs.
He then got the break of a lifetime nabbing the job at Ball State, a program ready to make the turn into a MAC powerhouse and stacked with loads of talent. Lynch went 15-8 in his first two years, won a conference championship and made it in the Las Vegas bowl. Sound familiar to his situation at Indiana? In this nearly parallel situation, Lynch inherited a team that was loaded with talent and ready to make the turn coming off a bowl appearance.
Here's where the trouble just knocks you off your feet: The next three years at Ball State, Lynch went a whopping 6-27! Lynch ran the program into the ground. He should have been fired there, but survived another three years going 16-18.
Back to Indiana. Coming off a season that was largely seen as a historic stepping stone in restoring the program, IU finished 3-8, including losses to two MAC schools and huge, embarrassing losses to Michigan State, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Purdue.
Know this: Lynch is not a recruiting guru. Indiana has continued to overhaul its team with mediocre talent hoping to find another diamond in the rough like Kellen Lewis, James Hardy, and Randle-El. This is not the pragmatic way to go about building a consistent, successful football program. When recruits are picking IU over small MAC schools, there's usually a ceiling of play they will hit and that ceiling can’t compete with the other Big Ten football programs.
All that really doesn’t matter either, since Lynch doesn’t know what to do with talent anyways when he has it. Kellen Lewis, who has been regarded as a first-team All-American (if he played for any other team), has performed terribly under the sole direction of Lynch. Greg Middleton … who? I forgot he even played anymore. A former consensus first rounder coming off his 16 sack season had three this year. Yes, three.
Yesterday, against a struggling and down 3-7 Purdue team, Lynch couldn’t even get his boys to compete at the base skill level that should be expected in Big Ten football. But we've said that after every game. Lynch is absolutely lost. The offensive game is pathetic. We have Marcus Thigpen, who may be the fastest player in the Big Ten, and Billy and Matt Canada, IU’s offensive coordinator, continue to run him between the tackles. What are we thinking?
We are also one of the only programs in the nation who don’t utilize the I-formation. All those rally-killing 3rd and short plays that we couldn’t make have been deadly this year and could be eliminated if we would utilize the fullback or at
least the linebacker.
Coach Lynch is a joke - an absolute joke - who has no right to lead a Big Ten football team. Of course, there is no way IU will fire Lynch, given the new extension, the Sampson debacle, the new AD hire, and the overall financial mess that our Athletic Department is in.
So all that I ask of Bill now is to please step down. Please. Please. Please. If you care about IU football or Indiana in general you will step down so we can get someone in here who is capable of coaching and leading a program. I can’t go much longer with your sad attempt to coach. You are an embarrassment to IU football and where we were going. You are an embarrassment to all of us. Please step down. Please.