Beaty's future probably depends largely on what the adidas conveyor can deliver. Those that argue that shoes don't matter in football as much as in basketball appear to be ignoring a 900 pound gorilla and a 500 pound gorilla with shoe contracts with athletic departments in D1.
If it is remotely like adidas' basketball conveyor, we can at least infer it is very likely a smaller talent pool than available to Nike schools, however the system may in fact work. There was a time when naivety ruled about PetroShoeCo impacts on basketball, too. Now we know better, because as basketball fans we have discussed the issue and posted data and links to stories that appear to refute the naive notions of the past regarding shoe influence on basketball. Because most here are KU basketball fans first and foremost, the PetroShoeCo network in football has not been explored nearly as much, and so my hunch is that perceptions of PetroShoeCo influence remain in a naive state. I know I have not taken the time to explore the legacy of Big Shoe in football yet. And I have not read any posts here that suggest that anyone else has either. If they have, I certainly hope they begin sharing the mechanisms and dynamics of what appears a plausible PetroShoeCo-Agent complex shaping football talent distribution in a likely different way than in basketball.
And for many years now I have intentionally avoided much discussion of football out of a moral objection to the game that I have held, since brain scanning research made clear that almost any impacts in football likely cause brain damage. I have argued that football ought not be being played by schools, when school officials, athletic directors, and coaches, are apparently aware that the sport is apparently triggering brain damage to one degree or another in almost all that play the game.
But the reality is that football is such a big money attractor on so many levels (note: I did not say money maker, because it appears that a number of programs perhaps lose money, depending on how revenues and costs are defined and accounted for in the apparently near Hollywood-like accounting systems of D1 501.c3 athletics) that it is not going away any time soon. Further, the 501.c3 economics of football and basketball seem hopelessly (perhaps tragically so for basketball) intertwined. And so to continue on in naivety about football's PetroShoeCo dynamics is to imperil basketball indirectly, because the funding dynamics of both sports appear to be intertwined. For example, and on the most naive level, going to alumni and corporations to raise money for buying out failed football coaches contracts appears to reduce, or at least delay, to some degree or other the ability to go to those same alumni and corporations to raise monies for basketball needs. Thus, if we are to do right by the KU Basketball program and legacy, then we as basketball fans unfortunately have to begin to understand how football programs ought effectively to be run, and advocate for such, rather than continuing to let recent apparent incompetence reign in football management. In infer in the beginning, rightly or wrongly, getting KU football on more effective footing must be important from a basketball point of view, or Bill Self, a busy basketball coach apparently fighting a lot of fires of his own in what appears the PetroShoeCo influenced recruiting wars, would not waste his time with the football issue.
Until football is either dropped on moral-medical grounds, or gotten on more effective footing, as a point of naive beginning, my hypothesis is: Beaty is not just trying to dig out of the hole that Zenger and Weis created, for whatever reasons they deeply augured the hole. Rather, Beatu is also trying to do it dipping into a likely smaller pool of Power 5 grade players that can be difference makers than coaches not at adidas schools.
It appears rather like climbing the rock face of El Capitan in Yosemite with one hand tied behind his back; this I suspect may underly part of why Weis threw in the sponge and tried the juco approach. He perhaps figured the available PetroShoeCo talent pool for him to recruit was so small that it would perhaps take ten years, not five, to dig out. And Weis probably saw no ten year horizon to his career. So, still hypothetically speaking: maybe he and Zenger got together and talked real politik about the situation, and decided that the only win-win for both KU and Weis was for Weis to try loading up on jucos to see if Weis could get one .500 record and announce he was leaving to spend more time with his family, which decoded to another assistant's job somewhere, or maybe another head job at some small school somewhere without any pressures--the kind that Turner Gill went to after KU appeared to run him.
By doing this, maybe then the program might have been made a little more attractive to Beaty, who had perhaps been lined up by that time of real politik discussions. In a best case scenario, Beaty would have a little bit of momentum to build on, and a season to start adding his 4 year recruits-- Beaty being early enough in his career to follow a long term building program. And in a worst case scenario, there would have been no lasting influence of Weis that would obstruct Beaty's long term rebuilding plan either. Alas, the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray and we got the worst case scenario came to pass. Woe is Beaty. But at least he didn't get stuck with a bunch of inadequate four year players that had to be carried as dead weight, or run off in an unsightly act.
Thus, the positive, hypothetically speaking, is that this team, bad as it is likely to be this season, and perhaps worse next season, has an appropriately aged coach with recruiting connections to appropriate regions of the country, to make the 7-10 year slog to normalcy that KU must make. And no one needs to have any illusions that any short cuts are there to be found. This is the football equivalent of a twelve step fan. KU football is now sober for a few months. Winning is ONLY defined in staying sober one day at a time. Winning is something that comes only with long term sobriety.
Bill Snyder did not start the rebuild of Kansas State. I happen to know this, because in childhood I was a closet KSU football fan even as I rooted for my Jayhawks. My father had graduated from KSU, so I wanted to connect with him some how regarding KSU and football was something that seemed to do no harm to KU.
Doug Weaver was probably the guy that started turning KSU football around. He was there for a decade, or so. They were terrible, because back in those days you really had to cheat to recruit players and cheating involved hard cash under the table, or used cars sold cheap, not just a pair of shoes. KSU and Weaver were in no position to cheat, so Weaver had a chance to imprint some character and stability on the KSU program and at least an awareness of what would be required in football to become successful. Weaver's long term failure made clear to KSU leadership and alumni that good intentions and intelligent coaching were not enough to win in big time college football. You had to have facilities, and you had to have lots of players and a franchise quarterback. The stadium would cost a lot. The players would not come cheap. And you had to get very, very lucky on the franchise player.
Enter Vince Gibson a defensive coordinator from University of Tennessee and one of the most thoroughly southern football types I ever say. He approached the KSU problem the southern way. He was willing to do whatever it took with the rules, the alumni, and the players. His practices were previously unthinkablely savage to northerners, but were quite routine in the south. Gibson was actually flabberghasted that Kansans were appalled at his spitting on his players and having them crawl under chicken wire from opposite directions and fight past the oponent. But they gave him his football stadium. And he got them the players. And some how Lynn Dickey was drawn to Manhattan and Gibson turned the program around to .500, even getting a trophy win or two, before being run out for being a sadist. But it was Gibson that really showed the foundation of what it took to win at KSU. After Gibson, if I recall correctly, there was a restoration of properness with old KSUer Ellis Rainsberger, who proved there was no going back. Football was dirty business. It was a harsh world and the successful in it were largely NOT the kind of men you wanted to meet your mother, or your sister. You didn't even want them to meet your pals on the golf course. Football coaches--not the window dressing types, but the ones that actually got down in the face masks of the players on the practice fields, and went out and lied to the players and parents about what was in store for them in college, these were a hard and even revolting breed to university types. This was not the days of Tom Harmon and Fielding Yost. These were the times of the long shadow of Bear Bryant who nearly killed players in a patch of desert outside College Station just to develop a reputation as the meanest sunnuvabitch that ever blew a whistle. These were the times when head coaches like Dr. Tom "albino" Osborne were beginning to pretend to be learned gentlement, or at least buttoned down corporate types in public, while looking the other way at Caliban-like assistants feeding their players every kind of performance enhancing steroid they could find and feeding them raw meat and protein shakes, paying them bounties for injuring opposing players. and lining up borderline co-ed nymphonmaniacs for visiting recruits. This was how it really was. This is what Pete Gent briefly tried to blow the whistle on that was then deftly washed down the football media memory hole to be replaced with the pasteurized, homogenized horse shit that passes for sports reporting ever since. But I digress.
Bill Snyder is the guy that walked into Manhattan prepared for him by Weaver, Gibson and Rainesberger, from the corrupt Hayden Fry Iowa program experience at North Texas State and knew the time was ripe in Manhattan for the gentlemanly approach with brass knuckle staff and the ag and oil driven recruiting scheme. Don't get me wrong. Bill Snyder is the leper with the most fingers among this class of coaches. He is now almost a dinosaur. This class of coaches that dawned the scholarly demeanor, like Bill Walsh, or the business suit and Brooks Brothers coat of Tom Landry, or the "Dr." of Tom Osborne, and maintained the "whatever it takes" assistant coaches,were all the vogue for a time.
Snyder had to have what had happened at KSU before he got there to make it work. KSU had to be savvy and willing to put on the gas masks to achieve what they achieved.
One question today for KU is has anything happened in the past to lay a foundation for a Bill Snyder type?
Another question for today is: Is David Beaty KU's Doug Weaver, or Bill Snyder?
Still another is: Where is KU on the evolutionary time line?
And another: how can it play the PetroShoeCo politics and economics in recruiting to begin moving forward?
And a final one: when are we KU basketball fans going to wise ourselves up about the football Big Shoe dynamics, so that we can better advocate for basketball? I don't want to do any more digging. I am old and tired of digging. But I am going to see if I've got any juice left in the battery and at least start.
