Excellent. Agree gameplanning is job 1 for OC. And quite different from playcalling. You do it all within your philosophical framework. Having a clear identity is important.
(12-11-2017, 09:39 AM)stupac2 link Wrote:I've had this kicking around in my head for a few days, this seems like as good a place to put it as any.
What do you want from an offensive coordinator in college football? Here's my list:
1) Analyze the team's collective strengths and the opponent's collective weaknesses and put the team in the best place to succeed (and the opponent in the best place to fail).
If you gave me a potpourri of traits and had me pick one and only one, it would be this. The other stuff down the list is nice, but ultimately what you want is someone who can design a gameplan (and make in-game adjustments, though you might call that a separate talent) that puts the team in the best possible spot. Note that this is sometimes nontrivial, IIRC we switched from man to zone blocking along the OL after the Northwestern debacle in 2015 and it worked out pretty well. It would've been nice to be able to make that call before the season, but it is what it is.
The problem here is that this is going to be nearly completely opaque to outsiders. Gameplanning is a team effort, and it's going to get lost in a blizzard of more readily observable things (ie the reverse that gets stuffed in Q1 but leads the MLB to bite on a fake in Q4 for a big gain). Nonetheless, I think this is the most important thing.
2) Developing/coaching talent to its fullest potential.
Closely related to #1, good coaches don't just get the best out of their players, they help them to improve on their best. This is going to be split up between position coaches and the OC, but the OC needs to be able to teach the scheme and get players to where they don't have to think, because thinking is slow. There are going to be many different ways to accomplish this, but you want to see players getting better over their tenure, rather than staying the same or regressing. (And, by and large, I believe we see this.)
3) Recruit
I don't follow recruiting closely, but getting the best possible players onto campus is obviously incredibly important. That said, a good coach can beat more talented teams by out-scheming and out-developing the opponent (ie Petersen at Boise).
4) Call good plays
You might say that this is just #1, but I don't think so. I think there's a difference between playcalling and gameplanning, akin to being a good tactician or a good strategist. Tactics are important, for sure, but a great tactician is going to lose a lot of battles if he's a poor strategist. Similarly, you might catch an opponent off-guard with a clever playcall, but there are only so many clever playcalls. It's more important to know the weaknesses you're trying to exploit, and the strengths you're playing with. Playcalls flow from that, but there are many different ways you could use that analysis to attack the enemy, and I don't think that choosing the exact play in a given moment is as important as choosing the right set of plays to focus on that week.
I think people tend to overrate this because it's visible, the proverbial tip of the iceberg. But that's a separate discussion.
You could sum this up as time periods:
1) During the season, Sunday-to-Friday.
2) Spring/Fall camps.
3) Summer/winter when not with the team.
4) 3 hours on Saturday.
How well does Prichard fit these criteria? I have no idea. How well does any other coach fit them? I have no idea. I think no one else has any idea either. I find it interesting, on this board but more so on reddit, how completely confident fans are that a given coordinator is a schlub because... reasons. He just is. They just know. It strikes me as hubris.