After a humiliating 10-point loss to an FCS team at home, UConn football is looking… well, it’s looking as bad as it has looked, consistently, all the time, since David Benedict fired Bob Diaco and replaced him with Randy Edsall back in 2016. The team has made no discernible progress in this, Edsall’s fifth year back in charge of the program, after he first embarrassed UConn by quitting on the team back in 2011.
Bob Diaco was a bad coach, and he, like Paul Pasqualoni before him, needed to go. And I certainly understood the rationale of bringing Edsall back at the time, as he did preside over the best stretch of football UConn has ever played, with four straight bowl appearances, culminating with an appearance in a BCS bowl.
But in the interim, Edsall had run off to Maryland, where he’d been badly exposed. There were UConn fans at the time, including sisters of authors of this piece, who loudly denounced the move to bring Edsall back after his failures in the Big Ten.
In either case, at this point, it’s clear that Edsall is not the man for the job. The program is going nowhere, and the fans are being humiliated every week. Even the most delusional optimists following the program were praying for five wins on a very weak schedule. If this is the best level of engagement that UConn football can provide, then why have a team at all? If we think the program is capable of more, then it’s time to move on from Edsall, who seems to have moved on from the job in his own mind to the extent that he was ever engaged with it at all.
It certainly doesn’t feel like Edsall is trying to accomplish much of anything (other than running out the clock until his pension fully vests) as the team continues to run the same ineffective offense out over and over again. And why would the offense be effective? Recruiting takes work that Edsall has no intention of doing, and finding an innovative offensive coordinator? That would require a search, and Edsall avoided that by just handing the job to the first person he saw, who happened to be offensive line coach Frank Giufre, who again proved himself to be in over his head.
Speaking of in over his head, quarterback Jack Zergiotis appears to have regressed significantly since his true freshman season. His inability to hit open receivers was probably the second-biggest problem for the Huskies against Holy Cross, after the completely overmatched secondary.
I hate to come off as attacking the players, as I’m sure these guys are doing their best. But they are substandard recruits for an FBS program being coached by a substandard staff. That this could be eluding anyone in the athletic department defies belief. David Benedict, who acted so decisively in parting ways with Kevin Ollie and replacing him with Dan Hurley, a huge upgrade which has turned the program around, certainly must be aware that Edsall isn’t getting the job done, unless the job is to destroy all enthusiasm for UConn football, justifying cutting the program entirely.
If that’s the goal, then just go ahead and do it. No one is going to miss this. But if Benedict doesn’t want UConn to succeed, then the rest of his behavior doesn’t make much sense. Benedict and his staff have put together a remarkable football schedule over the next several seasons, with several home-and-home series against P5 programs and appealing G5 programs. So if Benedict wants the program to win, then he needs to find a leader to run it, because Randy Edsall absolutely isn’t one.
