Catsrback76 said:
From what can be discerned, Ash refused to adjust his staff/decisions to bring more unity and cohesiveness to the team and that was likely the straw that broke the camels back. IF you watched his demeanor and listened to his comments during the last 3 games it was clear he knew he was under the gun to adjust, and was likely to face some FaceTime with the higher ups. I don't think he thought he would be fired, but I think he knew it was a possibility.
In talking with colleagues at MSU, and hearing the general grapevine, Coach Ash was very "hands off" in terms of "team" development. You listen to somebody like Urban Meyer or John Wooden, and these guys are as much sociologists and philosophers as they are "coaches." Coach Ash is the opposite. Meyer hears every word. Ash closed the door.
The last year for Denarius McGhee was just awful for the Cats as whole. When McGhee came off the field after his very last throw of his Cat career, and Ash refused to even acknowledge him, I thought "oh wow, this is even worse than I had heard." It was unimaginable to me for a coach to respond like that. And Ash was the responsible party there.
So, this was really a long time coming. Seeing a prima donna like Prukop, in tandem with somebody like Cramsey, it was a perfect storm of personalities combined with the whole Jamie Marshall/defense woes, that somebody like Rob Ash was completely unprepared to deal with. He wanted to coach football. In his own way, he was stubborn about it. He thought he could command McGhee to quit the fraternity. Well, no, coach, the fact that McGhee didn't see the team as his natural fraternity didn't start with McGhee. The fact that Prukop is marketing himself far and wide demonstrates that Prukop likewise does not view his team as his natural fraternity.
That's a failure, and it is entirely a coaching failure. This is the 21st century, and coaching has become more complex in terms of team management, coaching science, public relations, player psychology and so forth. And it may not be that coaching is more complex per se, it may be that the tools available are better identified and more sophisticated. The "science" of coaching is improved immensely.
When team management gets out of control, as it has in Bozeman the past five years, the results are inevitable. Jake Bleskin would likely have been the better
program choice for starting QB than Prukop; the problem there was Cramsey, who had nothing to gain personally from Bleskin, and so made the call in favor of Prukop. And yet the fanbase saw Cramsey as the strong part of the "program," not the one really responsible for its failure as
a program.
The first rule of coaching is that you can't lose your team. And "management," whoever that is, has to always be on the lookout for those signs when coaches, out of passivity or arrogance, start to lose that control by interfering with team loyalties, by bad position choices, by the way kids are cut, or just lack of the personality to incite loyalty over skepticism.
