FIX THIS

Obviously, we’re stuck with the failure Head Coach Pete Mangurian for another season at least. So our only hope for a win in 2014 is if he learns the following three lessons:

Keep Dumping  the Ideology on the Offensive Line

Mangurian came to Columbia with the same insane “go real light” agenda that earned him the hatred of players like All Pro Jumbo Elliot and almost got him into fistfights with his fellow coaches when he was with the NY Giants. This sad ideology was in place well before he even evaluated the CU player personnel and it just doesn’t work at any level. Mangurian will never admit this, but our complaining about the lightweight O-line was a big reason why he’s now changing his policy about it and allowing some more weight gain. Had we not complained or highlighted the issue here, he would have skated by and blamed the team’s total lack of success on something else.

But this is not the time to stop. Mangurian needs to continue getting deprogrammed out of the Jenny Craig School of Coaching before somebody, like our potentially great QB Brett Nottingham, gets killed.

A general lesson Mangurian needs to learn is to look at what works in this league and copy and improve on that. Harvard and Penn routinely have the best O-line in the league, so copy what they’re doing from recruiting to conditioning on down the line. Find out what you need to do to beat them in the recruiting competition for those guys and do that. It’s fine and recommended to sometimes look for the players and methods no one else is going for and using, but Mangurian is doing that way too much,  

Stop with the Pocket Passing Only Offense

Let the damn QB’s run, even just a little. Teach them to scramble while you’re at it too. We know that Sean Brackett was severely punished back in 2012 for leaving the pocket, thus neutralizing one of Columbia’s best offensive weapons. In addition to not scoring as much, Brackett got the snot knocked out of him half the time.  

Take a look at the successful teams in this league. With the exception of Brown, they have all used very mobile QB’s. That’s because the realities of the league require it. Mangurian’s steep learning curve about this remains as he didn’t bring any running QB’s at all in this class.

The results will be predictable. Columbia’s offense will be predictable. Lion QB’s will predictably be badly beaten up.

The only hope is that Mangurian wakes up to this reality at some point. Perhaps he will allow junior WR Scooter Hollis to take some snaps at QB just to mix things up as he was a stellar running QB in high school. That’s just one thought, but something has to change here.

Hire Better Coordinators

Mangurian’s predecessor Norries Wilson's promising potential was destroyed at Columbia by his bad hires at the coordinator slots. OC Vinny Marino was a disaster and after DC Lou Ferrari left early in Wilson’s tenure, the defense was never quite good enough either.

Mangurian knows how to do this right, but he seems to have forgotten. He got it right when he hired the stellar Kevin Lempa to be his DC for his first season at CU in 2012.

But when Lempa left the following spring, (and we’ll never know if the “going home to Boston College” excuse was the real deal), Mangurian went considerably down market with current DC Chris Rippon.

Mangurian has never shown an ability to get the OC job right as he continues to stand behind Jaime Elizondo.  If Elizondo was worth a darn, he would never have stood for the insane lighter O-line strategy or the “keep the QB in the pocket” rule. Neither have worked.

It’s particularly egregious that not only wasn’t Mangurian fired, but he wasn’t even forced to dump his coordinators in a ceremonial, “make some changes” edict from A.D. Dianne Murphy. You would think after the Marino debacle killed Wilson’s tenure at CU, someone would have demanded this.