[msqueri]

I appreciate your analysis Matt, which is as thorough as always, but I would caution against extrapolating from the COVID season one way or another.  Aside from the fact that the Sagarin ranking is not “connected” because the PAC-12 didn’t play any non-conference games and the fact that at 6 games, Sagarin is not as precise a model as it would be with a full season, there is also the fact that COVID wreaked havoc on how teams performed.  In our case, we had Davis Mills and some others out with a false positive on our first game, we were on the road for the last five weeks, and we were practicing in a friggin park.  Other teams were, of course, affected as well, meaning that comparing team performance in that bastardization of a season, even if you use more advanced metrics than win/loss, is kind of futile, because everything, including Sagarin’s ratings would have looked different, perhaps dramatically so, after a full season in a hypothetical world without COVID.



All that being said, as I said in both 2019 and 2021, and which looked to be the case in 2020 as well, our defense qualitatively underperformed compared to recruiting expectations.  Some of it is, I believe, position-specific holes.  It is telling, I think, that Fisk was moved from tight end to defensive lineman, and, wound up being a contributor in one season at that position.  That betrays a criminal lack of depth.  Pekola’s absence from the team maybe could not be anticipated,  but it could have been reasonably anticipated looking at the two deep that if we lost a player like Pekola, we would have been screwed.  Going back to your list from 2019 (Paulson Adebo, Curtis Robinson, Thomas Booker, Michael Williams, Dalyn Wade-Perry, Andres Fox, Joshua Pakola, Stephen Herron, Ryan Johnson, Salim Turner-Muhammad, and Tristan Sinclair) Adebo and Booker were great, Robinson shined when he was finally in the right position, Williams and DWP were contributors at a weak position, and the rest were MIA.



The question, going forward, is whether that was an unlucky confluence of factors (injuries, recruiting misses, mispositioning players, and lack of depth at the positions that could least afford it) or if it represents an ongoing or worsening pattern.  It is worth mentioning that this coaching staff was able to put good to great defenses on the field.  As recently as 2016 (2 years after Mason left), we were giving up 1.57 points per drive (it’s my preferred metric because it doesn’t benefit from our slow pace of play, but otherwise captures the defense’s ability to prevent other teams from scoring).  That was good for 16th in the country.  But from then we went to 2.1 ppd in 2017, 2.0 in 2018, 2.6 in 2019, 2.9* in 2020 (the COVID season), and 2.8 this year. So the question is whether that pretty good 2017 defense benefited from having been mostly recruited by Mason and the juniors and seniors learning their fundamentals under him, which would imply that the situation is unlikely to reverse itself. On the other hand, if the 2916 team’s defense can at least partially be credited to Lance Anderson, and the recent problems were due to things like a self assessed scholarship reduction (at one point, I think we had 75 players who had actually been recruited to a scholarship, plus a handful of walk ona who were awarded one because we had extra), and temporal gaps in recruiting certain position groups (ie, recruiting four defensive linemen one year and then going two years with one Dl between them), both recruiting issues that we appear to have fixed with our most recent recruiting class, then the future of the defense (if current recruiting trends continue) is better.  But that’s why you see me hammering the lack of defensive linemen recruiting in the thread.  After the last two classes, we should be fine once our current recruits get a couple years under their belts, but only if we don’t take a year off from recruiting at that position.



BC

Thanks for the thoughtful response, BC.

You make good points about the limitations of Sagarin in 2020 as well as the perils of a small sample and the weirdness of 2020. But one of my points in going through that analysis was that it actually doesn't matter whether the 2020 team was a 4/5/6/7/8-win caliber team. No matter what one extrapolates from the 2020 season - unless it's 9+ wins, which I would find extremely unreasonable given the quality of team we saw even in our best games in 2020 - it doesn't change that over a three year span Shaw has been in the bottom few coaches in Power Five football. My use of Sagarin perhaps obscured the point: no matter what one thought of our 2020 season (unless it was an extremely unreasonable take like we had a top 25-caliber team) the picture of this team 2019-2021 is clear. As I said, debates about 2020 are a distraction.

I think position-specific holes and under-performance of individual players can only go so far in explaining our defensive futility. There are many teams nationally with defensive linemen worse than Booker, Wade-Perry, Johnson, Williams, Swann, Schaffer, and Fisk (the group we drew on 2019-2021). Our 2021 roster had four 4-star defensive linemen on it. There are probably around 20-25 programs in the country that could say that. There are nine Power Five teams nationally that have failed to have a top 75 scoring defense three years in a row and among that group we had the most 4-star DL of any of them and more than double the number of 4-star front seven players as the next closest. [An analysis I just did on those nine worst defenses in Power Five football and what each has done to hold its coaching staff accountable is super interesting and I will probably post it here soon, but I'm still getting used to this forum's etiquette for thread drift, new threads, etc.]

I think it's inescapable looking at the facts that Stanford has a massive defensive coaching problem and that the problems have more to do with that than personnel. I think it's telling that your example of a good defense is 2016. That wasn't recent. That was six teams ago. Looking over the sweep of our defensive coaching staff's career it's pretty clear the track record is bad and the trajectory is horrible. My preferred metric is FEI, in part for the reason you mention that we need to focus on advanced metrics that adjust for pace of play, as the way Shaw runs this railroad has tended to make traditional stats make the offense look worse than it is and the defense look better than it is. FEI strikes me as a good stat because it is a per possession stat and adjusts for home field, strength of competition, situation, etc. Here are what Anderson's Defensive FEI rankings have been over time:

2014: #8
2015: #43
2016: #15
2017: #52
2018: #42
2019: #79
2020: #111
2021: #94

There's no question in the pattern at this point. Two good defenses in eight years and both of those were when he was dealing with what he inherited (and all of this looks much worse when you consider that on paper every team Shaw/Anderson have ever coached has had top 25 talent nationally). Once he owned it and, crucially, had to operate without Shannon Turley and Randy Hart making him look good, it's been absolute carnage. Again, one of nine Power Five teams nationally to not crack top 75 defenses once in the last three years. And six of those teams have crushingly less talent than we do. We have the most talent in the bunch, including on defensive line.

[msqueri]

I appreciate your analysis Matt, which is as thorough as always, but I would caution against extrapolating from the COVID season one way or another.  Aside from the fact that the Sagarin ranking is not “connected” because the PAC-12 didn’t play any non-conference games and the fact that at 6 games, Sagarin is not as precise a model as it would be with a full season, there is also the fact that COVID wreaked havoc on how teams performed.  In our case, we had Davis Mills and some others out with a false positive on our first game, we were on the road for the last five weeks, and we were practicing in a friggin park.  Other teams were, of course, affected as well, meaning that comparing team performance in that bastardization of a season, even if you use more advanced metrics than win/loss, is kind of futile, because everything, including Sagarin’s ratings would have looked different, perhaps dramatically so, after a full season in a hypothetical world without COVID.



All that being said, as I said in both 2019 and 2021, and which looked to be the case in 2020 as well, our defense qualitatively underperformed compared to recruiting expectations.  Some of it is, I believe, position-specific holes.  It is telling, I think, that Fisk was moved from tight end to defensive lineman, and, wound up being a contributor in one season at that position.  That betrays a criminal lack of depth.  Pekola’s absence from the team maybe could not be anticipated,  but it could have been reasonably anticipated looking at the two deep that if we lost a player like Pekola, we would have been screwed.  Going back to your list from 2019 (Paulson Adebo, Curtis Robinson, Thomas Booker, Michael Williams, Dalyn Wade-Perry, Andres Fox, Joshua Pakola, Stephen Herron, Ryan Johnson, Salim Turner-Muhammad, and Tristan Sinclair) Adebo and Booker were great, Robinson shined when he was finally in the right position, Williams and DWP were contributors at a weak position, and the rest were MIA.



The question, going forward, is whether that was an unlucky confluence of factors (injuries, recruiting misses, mispositioning players, and lack of depth at the positions that could least afford it) or if it represents an ongoing or worsening pattern.  It is worth mentioning that this coaching staff was able to put good to great defenses on the field.  As recently as 2016 (2 years after Mason left), we were giving up 1.57 points per drive (it’s my preferred metric because it doesn’t benefit from our slow pace of play, but otherwise captures the defense’s ability to prevent other teams from scoring).  That was good for 16th in the country.  But from then we went to 2.1 ppd in 2017, 2.0 in 2018, 2.6 in 2019, 2.9* in 2020 (the COVID season), and 2.8 this year. So the question is whether that pretty good 2017 defense benefited from having been mostly recruited by Mason and the juniors and seniors learning their fundamentals under him, which would imply that the situation is unlikely to reverse itself. On the other hand, if the 2916 team’s defense can at least partially be credited to Lance Anderson, and the recent problems were due to things like a self assessed scholarship reduction (at one point, I think we had 75 players who had actually been recruited to a scholarship, plus a handful of walk ona who were awarded one because we had extra), and temporal gaps in recruiting certain position groups (ie, recruiting four defensive linemen one year and then going two years with one Dl between them), both recruiting issues that we appear to have fixed with our most recent recruiting class, then the future of the defense (if current recruiting trends continue) is better.  But that’s why you see me hammering the lack of defensive linemen recruiting in the thread.  After the last two classes, we should be fine once our current recruits get a couple years under their belts, but only if we don’t take a year off from recruiting at that position.



BC

Thanks for the thoughtful response, BC.

You make good points about the limitations of Sagarin in 2020 as well as the perils of a small sample and the weirdness of 2020. But one of my points in going through that analysis was that it actually doesn't matter whether the 2020 team was a 4/5/6/7/8-win caliber team. No matter what one extrapolates from the 2020 season - unless it's 9+ wins, which I would find extremely unreasonable given the quality of team we saw even in our best games in 2020 - it doesn't change that over a three year span Shaw has been in the bottom few coaches in Power Five football. My use of Sagarin perhaps obscured the point: no matter what one thought of our 2020 season (unless it was an extremely unreasonable take like we had a top 25-caliber team) the picture of this team 2019-2021 is clear. As I said, debates about 2020 are a distraction.

I think position-specific holes and under-performance of individual players can only go so far in explaining our defensive futility. There are many teams nationally with defensive linemen worse than Booker, Wade-Perry, Johnson, Williams, Swann, Schaffer, and Fisk (the group we drew on 2019-2021). Our 2021 roster had four 4-star defensive linemen on it. There are probably around 20-25 programs in the country that could say that. There are nine Power Five teams nationally that have failed to have a top 75 scoring defense three years in a row and among that group we had the most 4-star DL of any of them and more than double the number of 4-star front seven players as the next closest. [An analysis I just did on those nine worst defenses in Power Five football and what each has done to hold its coaching staff accountable is super interesting and I will probably post it here soon, but I'm still getting used to this forum's etiquette for thread drift, new threads, etc.]

I think it's inescapable looking at the facts that Stanford has a massive defensive coaching problem and that the problems have more to do with that than personnel. I think it's telling that your example of a good defense is 2016. That wasn't recent. That was six teams ago. Looking over the sweep of our defensive coaching staff's career it's pretty clear the track record is bad and the trajectory is horrible. My preferred metric is FEI, in part for the reason you mention that we need to focus on advanced metrics that adjust for pace of play, as the way Shaw runs this railroad has tended to make traditional stats make the offense look worse than it is and the defense look better than it is. FEI strikes me as a good stat because it is a per possession stat and adjusts for home field, strength of competition, situation, etc. Here are what Anderson's Defensive FEI rankings have been over time:

2014: #8
2015: #43
2016: #15
2017: #52
2018: #42
2019: #79
2020: #111
2021: #94

There's no question in the pattern at this point. Two good defenses in eight years and both of those were when he was dealing with what he inherited (and all of this looks much worse when you consider that on paper every team Shaw/Anderson have ever coached has had top 25 talent nationally). Once he owned it and, crucially, had to operate without Shannon Turley and Randy Hart making him look good, it's been absolute carnage. Again, one of nine Power Five teams nationally to not crack top 75 defenses once in the last three years. And six of those teams have crushingly less talent than we do. We have the most talent in the bunch, including on defensive line.