Johnson could have been the pinnacle. He had a ho-hum view of recruiting that was based in his outlook that scheme controlled all and he could plug whoever he got and beat people with his playcalling. Also in line with recruiting, his dour demeanor did not sell things. For example, when the locker room was complete, I heard him say in an interview that it was more or less like what everyone else has. It would have been too easy to just say something like it’s awesome, our donors knocked it out of the park, etc.
Most of this is fair, I think. I think Paul Johnson was an outstanding coach for us and achieved some amazing things, but I think he would agree that we had a lot of extremely frustrating things happen that kept us from being as consistent or reaching as high as we could have. If you would have told me after 2009 that we'd have CPJ through 2018, I would have thought we'd have at least 3 ACC titles and probably 2-3 top 10 finishes. 2010-2013 was frustrating and made me question that, but then 2014 happened and it validated my belief that CPJ could make us an elite team. But since then we've become anything but elite again.
I still contend that CPJ is not as ho-hum on recruiting as many of y'all think. His consistent comments about Jimmies and Joes winning football games would back that up. He's just even keel with his comments to the media. WRT to the locker room, I interpreted that comment as frustration that it took so long to get our locker rooms done.
Regardless, I still can't figure out what the hell happened when I look back. We should easily be 9-3 this year if we don't absolutely blow the games against USF and Pitt, even with a ööööing RB playing QB and a garbage defense. Speaking of a RB playing QB, if we had managed to field even a baseline competent QB over the past couple seasons, I think we'd be looking at back-to-back ACCCG appearances. It's easy to blame that on recruiting, which is probably fair, but we signed guys like Jay Jones, Lucas Johnson, Christian Campbell, Jaylend Ratliffe - all relatively highly touted prospects for us that should have been experienced enough to play in 2017 and 2018. How the hell were NONE of them able to contribute a single meaningful minute? I know the individual reasons for each, but why does it always seem like that öööö like that happened to us pretty consistently over the last 10 years?
It's weird to think about. While I highly doubt that we will get a better coach than Paul Johnson anytime soon, I disagree with the notion that our onfield results from 2008-2018 are the pinnacle of anything. They're pretty solid overall, but too inconsistent with too many glaring unsolved problems.
