This whole thing is a mess.  First off, I never really liked the idea of hiring Embree in the first place.  Anytime you hire a coach under the circumstance of “lets find someone with ties to CU so that we can continue to totally underpay a BCS head coach,” you’re bound to fail.  So there’s that.  But to then turn around, pull the plug after 23 months and say you’re going to find a new coach for 3.5 times the salary?  That’s poor management.  And the administration is making it worse by not just coming out and saying what we all know:

We were awful. Not just 1-11, but like the Charlotte Bobcats of the NCAA awful.  We played the generals to Chip Kelly’s globetrotters.  The only reason we didn’t set a record for most points given up ever this season is because most teams were three deep at every position by the fourth quarter  Even in games where we were competitive for the first half, we ended up getting smoked, which tells me we’re not just physically over-matched, we also don’t have any mental endurance.  Let’s be honest, we were a joke.  So purely as a result of that, and the general impatience of the current college athletics world, I’m totally okay with Embree getting fired. Don’t give me this, “You don’t know anything about football so you don’t understand what it takes to turnaround a broken team”.  I saw the same secondary that played against CSU continually out of position for the next 11 weeks.  I saw a running game go for negative 21 yards against Stanford in week 9. I saw five turnovers against a sub-par Utah team in the last game of the year. Not only were we bad to start with, but there wasn’t a single area of improvement over the course of the season. The numbers don’t lie:

There isn’t a major coach in a big conference that would keep his job with numbers like this, no matter if it was year 1 or year 20.  It gets worse when you look at rush/pass defense numbers. Is there any reason Embree should have been kept around? What’s your take on this malarkey?

Oh yeah, and David Stern is a tool.

Wow.  A lot to digest here- as that athletic department, especially the football team, is a complete clusterf*ck.  We’ll break this up into 3 parts (might wanna print this out- I’m pretty fired up).

1. Did Embree deserve to be fired?  My initial reaction?  Give the guy a fair shake and at least see what he brings to the table next year.  Apparently Bohn went all Cushman and assured him he would be retained just days prior to canning him.  If Jerry Maguire taught us anything, it’s to always get it in writing (and that the human head weighs 8 lbs).  Bohn’s word, it seems, is not stronger than oak.  Anyway, two years to try and stomp out the flaming bag of dog poo that Dan Hawkins left on his doorstep seems somewhat unreasonable (to that point, pretty stoked to find out that Hawkins ignored Heisman finalist and all-American dreamboat Collin Klein because we had his gunslinger of a son on the roster.  But hey, 5-9″ QBs always pan out in D-1 college football… Dan Hawkins, the gift that keeps on giving).  Hawkins’ heralded recruiting class of 2008 (ranked 15th nationally) that was supposed to put us on the map (John Henderson of the Denver Post broke it down beautifully) flamed out so badly that it left us playing 13 true freshmen this year.  Now, are those true freshmen any good?  Maybe not… but I’d have given him (Embree) at least another year.  One thing that was more than obvious after all of this is that every kid on that team loved Embree and wanted to play for him. But, as you point out, results are results, and we sucked.  At one point, we dropped six in a row with an average score of 55-11. It’s like we were Nic Cage, and every week we played on Wicker Island, and the opposing teams kept the bees. Also, as you’re well aware, I’m a degenerate gambler.  Vegas couldn’t make these lines high enough, and teams were still covering. Consider these spreads that CU opponents covered- and most of these teams had third-stringers in by the half:

• Oregon -47, won 70-14 (most points ever scored against a division opponent)
• USC -40.5, won 50-6
• Stanford -28, won 48-0 (first home shutout since 1986… on homecoming)
• UCLA -21, won 42-14
• Fresno St -15.5, won 69-14 (up 55-7 at half)

So yeah, I probably would’ve given him another year, but I completely understand the decision to move on.

2.  Should we have hired Embree in the first place? How much of this falls on Bohn and the Athletic Department?  This, to me, is a much bigger issue.  To Bohn’s credit- when CU landed Hawkins, he was the hottest girl at the dance.  Turns out Chris Petersen was the brains of that operation, and Hawkins was just a hell of a salesman, but we had no way of knowing this.  That hire was universally lauded as a total coup for CU.  When that imploded, the outcry (as you mention) was that we needed a ‘Buff’.  Someone to take us back to the glory days of Macartney raiding talent from inner LA.  By all accounts, and I’m sure you know more inside-info than me, Bohn buckled to the will of the booster community, and we ended up low-balling a salary to a guy that had NEVER BEEN A HEAD COACH ON ANY LEVEL.  When he was hired, I had the same reaction as every Buff fan I know- who the f*ck is Jon Embree?  If the ‘keep it in the family’ direction was what we really wanted, go the K-State route, hire Macartney, and let Embree and Bienemy be groomed as coordinators to later battle each other for the seat at the head of the table.  Embree should NEVER have been given the keys to a BCS football team, and I completely blame Bohn for this.  Now here we are in a new search, and when Butch Jones comes to town, the Denver Post reports that George Solich, our biggest booster, will be in the room with the rest of the search committee.  So we have all this PAC-12 TV money to throw $2.5MM at a coach, but we still have a booster seemingly calling the shots.  We seem to have hit a home-run with Tad Boyle and men’s hoops, so that notwithstanding, the athletic department needs an overhaul.  I like the advice of our good friend Gary ‘She was a terrible kicker’ Barnett: bring in an outside audit of the entire department.  Not sure Bohn makes it out of that process with a paycheck.

3. Moving On.  I’d rather walk in on my girlfriend with Bob Sapp than ever think of the last seven years of Buff football, so let’s just agree to never speak of this again.  What are your thoughts on Butch Jones?  Personally, I’m drinking the shit out of that Kool-Aid… I love Bill Macartney and grew up on the Buffs of the 90s, but we have to move on, and ol’ Bill seems to have completely lost the plot.

3.A. yes, Stern is a dick.  And a fascist.  but that’s a whole nother story.

At least Embree taught us to never question the heart of a Buffalo...

Haha, love the Wicker Island reference.  I’ve decided every movie that requires traveling to a remote island is solid gold (Lord of the Flies, Cast Away, Shutter Island, etc.).  Seriously, find me one that sucks (except rom-coms don’t count).