Rivals and Joe Schad report that Chad Morris accepted the offer and will join the staff at Clemson as expected.
I've been watching Tulsa games most of this week since the BCS games ended and tried to look beyond the statistics that they've put up in their conference, which don't tell me as much as actually seeing them play fundamentally sound football.
What I see is that they do play well, and their QB G.J. Kinne (former backup to Colt McCoy at Texas) is a smart, talented player. Morris lets him throw it and he lets him attack all levels of the defensive coverage, plus he can scramble when he needs to. Many comparisons have been made to Gus Malzahn's offense and with just one season to watch,I would say its very close.
I should point out that Tulsa's defense is hot garbage....like Michigan-bad....so Morris has had to throw more and it affects the impression of his offense as a more pass-happy system than Malzahn's, but it is balanced and the play-calling made sense. He has a skill player talent advantage over his opponents too at Tulsa. Their WRs didn't play as crisp and as sound as TCU's, but they played more fundamentally sound football than ours have.
Their OL is quite short and pretty small, and they move their feet well but you can see there is not very much talent up front, which tells me that Morris can do quite a bit with less talent. People have made a big deal of our personnel and coaching up front to teach such a system, but zone blocking is zone blocking no matter what and you don't need a line coach that has experience under this offense to properly teach the offensive line technique. Then again, Brad can't coach, so who knows how we'll be up front with this. I worry more about conditioning of our front than who coaches it though.
As far as his resume, I think the argument that he's inexperienced does hold water. We just fired a guy where the major knock was inexperience. Morris has been a HS head coach for 16 years before going to Tulsa, going 169-38 with 3 state championships in Texas. Malzahn was basically the same situation for Arkansas when he moved up. We don't know if he'll be as successful as Malzahn with one year of college experience. HS experience does not translate into college experience necessarily, but I do think this hire is a good one. I like the system and its going to be fun to analyze each week for us.
Hopefully Dabo will give him full control so we can really evaluate him.