2021 G5 Preview: Troy Sure Did Hire Chip Lindsey
I hope you all weren’t having too much fun reading about good teams, because today is Troy day
ICYMI: This is a part of The Outside Zone’s full 2021 G5 preview series, which last looked at Ball State. You can find a master list for all of the previews here.
I have not been shy about my affection for the Sun Belt. Of the five conferences that this newsletter prefers to focus on, the Sun Belt was easily the most entertaining last season thanks to the rise of Coastal Carolina, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t watching the Sun Belt closer than any other league entering this season. It has three of the best G5 teams, several stellar young coaches, and a ton of depth, going about eight teams deep before I run out of nice things to say.
Somehow, No. 9 has made it all the way through the summer without me training my sights on it, primarily because Troy managed to go 5-6 last season. I don’t know how that happened. It wasn’t especially good at anything – the offense struggled to move the ball down the field consistently and the big plays were nonexistent and the defense rates as “fine” at best – but managed to get the job done almost as often as it didn’t regardless.
A large part of that is likely due to schedule. Troy beat a bad MTSU team, a bad Texas State team, FCS Eastern Kentucky, a bad Arkansas State team and a bad South Alabama team, while losing badly to BYU and Appalachian State, and coming up short against MTSU (they played twice), Georgia Southern and Georgia State. Troy’s close encounter with Coastal Carolina was deeply bizarre, but I have trouble thinking of that as representative. I think that more likely than not, this team slipped through the cracks by getting a friendly schedule draw and has gone without the spotlight on it for a few years now after the departure of Neal Brown and the rise of some new powers in the Sun Belt.
No longer. It’s time to talk about Troy as a program at large, Troy as it stands under its new management, and Troy as a football team entering 2021.
The Program
It’s very hard for me to get a good feeling for what Troy should be in the modern Sun Belt. This is not an Appalachian State or even a Georgia Southern caliber of program, given that it made its move to the FBS ranks much longer ago and wasn’t dominant on that level prior to its rise in the way that those two were.
Troy (Troy State at the time) was good in the 80s and 90s, but only good enough to claim a few conference titles, as it never advanced beyond the FCS semifinals. Then-head coach Larry Blakeney did a fine job moving the team up a level and built a pretty strong program into the late 2000s, but lost his touch and passed the program off to Neal Brown.
The Brown era is what makes it so hard for me to get a good feeling for what Troy should be, because after one season, Brown’s Trojans absolutely exploded. They won 10 games, 11 games and 10 games before he departed, riding an efficient offense and a kickass defense to a conference title and a runner-up spot in the East in his final year, behind an awesome App State team.
Brown proved immediately that Troy could be so much more at the Sun Belt level, serving alongside Appalachian State at the top of the East while Louisiana camps out in the West.
The recruiting is never going to be amazing, but with an exciting young coach and an interesting scheme, this is a team that can draw fans and win a whole bunch of games.
New Management
So naturally, after experiencing the best years of the program under a young former coordinator, who had moved up the ranks under a pair of really good coaches in Mike Leach and Mark Stoops and brought more in ability than he did in natural ties to the area, Troy hired… Chip Lindsey.
I’m not going to go in on Lindsey in the way that I did with Terry Bowden at ULM. He’s not an awful coach, he’s not a true SEC good ole boy and I don’t think he’s the worst possible person that Troy could have hired. I understand the sentiment behind the move, at least.
However, with two years of room to speak from, we can safely say it: Lindsey is not the guy for Troy. I’m not sure that he’s built to be a head coach (or a major P5 coordinator at all). The Trojans have dropped off significantly on both sides of the ball, the recruiting is poor, and Lindsey really isn’t doing much of anything that I have any interest in.
There were a lot of young coordinators or FCS guys that really would have liked this job, and Troy went with the failed Auburn offensive coordinator, who was about to take over as the OC at Kansas under Les Miles.
This Year
That brings us to this season, which I really don’t have much to say about, because I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea and accidentally watch this team.
Quarterback Gunnar Watson is… fine, I think? It’s hard to say because he pretty much only throws screens. There are so many goddamn screens in this offense.
The running game has a few interesting wrinkles, and I like Kimani Vidal quite a bit (here’s a fun twist on split zone, with a halfback delivering the backside block on the isolated end), but… I just cannot get past the screens. It works well enough against slower or poorly coached defenses, but it’s such a miserable brand of football to watch, and Troy is absolutely trying to win by being "the screen team.” This is a newsletter that wants to find the fun, and there isn’t any here.
I can only assume that the defense is going to get worse the further we get from Brown, and the offense is so lacking for any creativity that there’s really not anything here that I think is worth paying any attention to. Let’s hope that Troy does better on its next hire.