The truly one bright spot on that hire is that he gave us Dave Aranda, who changed the defense from a bend-don't-break 4-3 to a very aggressive 3-4. Wilcox and now Leonhard embraced it.
The second best bright spot is he left after only 2 years. He'd have run the program into the ground. Barry knew this, and would have let him go anyway. This way, no buyout. It worked very well for UW.
This is the fascinating thing, because his tenure was one where the good was actually pretty good, but the bad was deeply weird.
The good
-The aforementioned 3-4
-The offenses at the time felt kinda underwhelming, but in retrospect, that might've sold them short. UW wast 32nd in offensive points per drive in 2013, and had maybe the most consistent Joel Stave (he had good play-makers). The next year's offense was a mess passing and ended up 17th in points per drive despite the third-best offensive play-maker being a RB who was injured late in the year, and the fourth-best being a change of pace QB.
And the OC, a journeyman with a weird rep, turned around and got Vandy kinda spicy on offense and now Utah. And he was a compromise hire because Barry wanted pro-style, and there's like six total OCs that fit that bill. And that went better than it should have.
-He was a breath of fresh air from Bert who was a party boy early, oft-standoffish and abrasive and even when he was nice kind of a weirdo. I'd been told Anderson seemed like a much more normal chatty guy, at least in public settings.
-His recruiting has a bad rap, but looking back, those two-ish classes he had produced a pretty good set of players
The bad
-He turned out to be a weirdo. He insisted on a QB who couldn't throw, which managed to piss off everyone on the roster. Kids always love the backup, and in this case, they were fighting for the limited game manager starter. That led to a fight with Melvin Gordon mid-LSU game, a de facto benching and an inability to explain it. Then of course he quit suddenly after a terrible game, which wasn't even like a planned Barry push out (it was coming, but the timing was weird)
-He had that insistence on wanting JUCO kids and kids with troubled backgrounds. Not even superstars. To a degree I get it, but I never got picking it as a hill to die on.
-His staff had issues with recruiting injured linemen and not developing the batch he was left. That staff actually recruiting some good ones, but they also left a not super group for Chryst.
-The RB acquisition was poor and the WR acquisition was just OK, though the late Bert staff had the latter problem. QB additions were a BIG issue as well.
At the time, I didn’t necessarily think he was gonna run the program into a ditch because I think Barry’s stewardship is big. But now, with how things blew up in his last two spots, I’m notably less certain. He feuded with his boss (I heard the new guy is often not thrilled, but he knows how the world works), and while his last two lost jobs have been at super hard to win places, they’ve come in weird and ugly ways. In general, I’m happy with what UW got from him long term and a little sad he couldn’t keep things together to be the coach I hoped he could be