It is perplexing that no one seems to know what happened last year. Even going back to week 7 of 2012 season. It has been a decline that I would have thought was impossible. The program was built the right way with integrity and a strong foundation. Good people with great values are associated with our football program.
I hope we can start to get our mojo back, starting this week.

I wonder if last year was Solich's first real introduction to this current generation of athlete. (And their helicopter, know it all parents.) It can be a complete nightmare and ruin coaching careers. (Already has here at OU.)

Given that, do you think there were some things NOT left on the field last year?

The tailspin at the end of 2012 I think was due to a lot of injuries, with some mental fatigue rounding things out. I remember the debacle at Ball State being the worst of it all.

Last year's loss to Buffalo took whatever was left in the tank and poured it all out. It will go down in my book as one of the more bizarre and frustrating seasons in school history. I have a hard time believing that every player gave everything he had in every game. I know several did, but there are some others who I do not think did. The effort against Kent State was the saddest sack of you know what I had seen an OU team put out in a long time. That was an evenly matched opponent who the team allowed to just emasculate them. A loss would have been a little easier to swallow if I felt they played hard.

It can be easy to want to wonder and try and guess what happened but we will probably never know for sure and I try my best to not dwell on it. I will say it was not the way I envisioned Tyler, Beau etc. to go out after the MACC appearance, Potato Bowl in etc. early in their careers.

Here's the thing that bothers me about this: I imagine the issues were primarily player-based. Did any players suffer punishment for the difficulties? Was anybody benched? That frustrates me if a coach talks about how difficult times were, likely referring to players, and doesn't really understand how much blame may fall on him.

I watched the whole press conference, and I came away with a positive feeling about where the program is heading. Frank's emphasis throughout was how this team is learning to get better and learning from their experiences and their mistakes. This really fits with the impression I've always had of Frank that he is happiest when he can play the role of teacher-coach and not just disciplinarian-coach or manager-in-chief-coach. I think those latter two roles were needed at the end of last year, and that he may now be second-guessing how well he filed them.

I thought the key quote in that section on last year was when he talked about how groups of players came to him at the end of the season and were upset and wanted changes. I got the impression that he was pleased that this was coming from the team, rather than something that he had to enforce as an edict. Taking this together with what I already knew about some of the interactions among certain players last year and I concluded that Ohio had a *very* disruptive locker room last year. And, while TT's attitude may have been part of the problem, it was not the one that I heard about that was so cancerous. Listening to Frank talk on this video I can read between the lines and feel how much his heart was aching about his inability to deal with these locker room tensions. That being said, I think very few college head coaches could have dealt with those situations any better than Frank did.

Ending on a positive note. Things are obviously much better in the locker room this year. And, I believe, that will show up on the field as the season progresses. Go OHIO!