Overall, Dana Dimel's tenure here at UTEP was a failure. There were, however, a few positives during his time here. The most obvious positive is that he did give us our first winning season in seven years when we went to the NM Bowl. The other positive thing he did here, at least in my opinion, was to significantly improve the roster. I believe that this is a huge positive, yet his overall tenure here was a failure. I believe that there are three key reasons for this:
- Despite the fact that he upgraded the overall roster, he never recruited a good college quarterback.
- He insisted on calling plays on offense, even though he did a very poor job at it.
- His time management sucked.
Had he done a much better job at recruiting quarterbacks, hired a competent offensive coordinator and let him call the play, and learned to both value timeouts and act with a sense of urgency at the end of halves/games, he could have had a very successful tenure here.
This brings us to Walden.
On paper, he is a very good recruiter. While we won't truly know how good this class is until three or four years from now, there is a chance that he might improve the roster more significantly than Dimel did. Hopefully he has recruited his quarterback. I haven't noticed his time management being anywhere near as bad Dimel's. But he shares a
huge weakness with Dimel: he insists on calling the plays and offense, and so far he isn't any good at it. If he can wake up, realize this, and hire a good offensive coordinator he can succeed here, provided his recruits turn out to be what we hope they are. If he continues to call plays we can expect the next few years to look a lot like the last six years. A competent AD, having seen the failures of the previous head coach, might point this out to his new young coach. Too bad we don't have a competent AD.
