Should Jack go?
It must be nice to be just two seasons removed from an Ivy championship and just a year removed from a damn impressive 9-1 season...and still feel so strongly that your school deserves better in a head coach that you can publish an editorial calling for his ouster!
The editorial makes some good points, but the premise that Yale recruits the "best" athletes at just about every position is a little questionable.
The piece also ignores some relatively recent history. When Jack Siedlecki took over, Yale was at the bottom of the Ivy football ladder. The Elis had suffered through five straight non-winning seasons coming into Siedlecki's first season in 1997.
They had lost three straight to Columbia, five out of six to Princeton, and two straight heartbreakers to Harvard. Even Handsome Dan was having accidents on the clubhouse carpet.
Since then Yale has had some struggles, especially against Harvard (Siedlecki is 4-7 against the Crimson but once suffered through a very rough five-year losing streak to Harvard), but the team has won two titles and hasn't even come close to revisiting the Ivy cellar since Siedlecki's first season, when they went 0-7 in the league.
The biggest beef with Siedlecki in Eli-Land is the fact that Yale has blown a number of second-half leads in crucial games in recent years. As gut-wrenching as that can be, I know that every Columbia fan would take a few losses in return for a long string of winning seasons.
You also have to admire what Siedlecki has done by working to the strengths of the team to win. After years of using a rush-oriented attack with running QBs, he modified the team nicely when QB Jeff Mroz came on the scene and got him the receivers he needed to break some school passing records.
Then Siedlecki adjusted quickly again when Mike McLeod proved to be a super runner and restructured the team into a ball-control squad.
The kinks have come into the picture with injuries (McLeod is clearly not 100 percent and surely wasn't by the end of last season) and the increasing difficulty for every Ivy team to recruit good linemen. Not that it was ever easy, but getting big, fast offensive and defensive linemen is harder than ever before in the Ivies.
I'm not an apologist for Jack Siedlecki by any means. I too thought the 2006 loss at the Yale Bowl for Columbia was just ugly, with borderline unsportsmanlike conduct from Siedlecki and McLeod to go along with some very bad calls by the refs.
But I really don't think he should be fired right now. Forcing him to hire a new offensive coordinator seems like a better move.
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