(03-18-2022, 05:07 PM)BostonCard Wrote: I think you’ve made a reasonable case that the coaches have underperformed; that case is not necessarily strengthened by the fact that other teams fire coaches, other than in a normative sense.
I still think poor recruiting has been a contributor to poor performance, and again, I don’t say that to absolve the coaches, who have been here long enough to have recruited everyone. We have always done pretty well in terms of recruiting on the high end. I’m old enough to remember that Buddy Teevens recruited Julian Jenkins, probably our highest rated defensive lineman ever. The issue for Stanford has generally been recruiting quality depth so that it can withstand attrition or recruiting disappointment (Michael Craven, anyone). It is compounded by the fact that transfers in are rare and opportunistic; we generally can’t just say “hey, we have a hole at d-line, let’s see who is in the portal”. In a nod to Samuel, I’ll note that we don’t even try. But the bottom line is that the number of 4* players recruited over a certain span is not the be all of how good a defense should be.
BC
Regarding the normative picture the data I presented paints, I think the norm is for major college football programs to want to win and to hold coaches accountable when they have manifestly failed. The point of the rundown on other failing defenses shaking things up is to show how complacent and extraordinary (in a bad way) Stanford is. We've failed at a level and duration that serious programs tend to view as an emergency. We are not treating it as an emergency.
I also recall Julian Jenkins (my classmate) well but that's a false equivalence with the state of Stanford recruiting in recent years. Julian's class had only a few top 1000 defensive players. Shaw's 2016-2019 classes (the ones most relevant to our recent failed defenses) averaged eight top 1000 defensive recruits per year. He has had five or more every year after the bad 2013 class. One of the recruiting calling cards for Shaw has been the depth of classes compared to what Stanford experienced prior to Shaw. When I say Anderson has always coached top 20-30 defensive talent, I am not referring only to the number of 4-star players recruited over a span of time. I am referring to overall talent, including depth. The 4-star metric I used was just a heuristic because I'm not aware of another ready way to evaluate defensive talent. But I am aware of the 247 talent composite, which looks at all talent (not just 4+ star players) across all the rosters. In that metric, the worst talent our coaches have ever had was this past season, #25 in the nation. Accounting for the fact we recruit offense better than defense would drop that a few spots in a defense-only ranking, but probably not much further than the #27 I determined for 4+ star talent.
I guess what I would be interested in is your guess of how many teams in the country had better defensive depth than Stanford from 2019-2021. For the reasons I've highlighted, I think it's no more than 30 or so. It's the delta between that and where our defense has actually ranked that makes it impossible to chalk this up to recruiting.
I sense DL depth is what you may be focusing on as the problem. That is certainly a problem for 2022. But I struggle to see how that can explain our recent past. Take 2021. We ran a nickel base defense that only used two interior defensive linemen on most plays and to fulfill that need we drew on 4-stars Thomas Booker, Dalyn Wade-Perry, and Ryan Johnson as well as high 3-star Tucker Fisk. We had a 4-star true freshman in Aaron Armitage as well as a few other young guys. Notably, the three primary guys played in every game, a track record of DL health that has been the norm for us (a previous analysis I did showed that between 2011-2020 Shaw's primary DL missed only two percent of all games, and we've now gone three straight years in which none of the top three DL missed a single game). Moreover, the four top guys were three fifth year players and a fourth year player. I would have preferred to have a few more usable DL but having these four players to man the fronts we run was not all that badly lacking for depth, at least not in a meaningful sense (e.g., compared to the depth other mediocre or worse Power Five teams have at DL).
The real issue with the DL was the level of play we got out of this quartet. It was four highly-regarded prospects very deep into their career, a situation that on paper very few programs in the country would turn down. One of them was a returning all-conference player (and subsequently he was invited to the NFL combine, where he tested as one of the quickest 300 pound DL in NFL history) and two of whom are at least hoping for a sniff from the NFL. Yet their performance in 2021 was miserable. This wasn't talent but rather a damning indictment of the scheme, position instruction, and strength and conditioning that didn't put them in a position to succeed. In other words, coaching. 2021 DL is actually a great example not of gaps in our recruiting but of failures in all the other aspects of coaching. Most disturbingly, this was an extension of a pattern from other recent years in which the DL hampered the defense. Our DL development has been a horror show since the departures of Randy Hart and Shannon Turley.
Looking forward one has to shudder. A coaching staff that has failed miserably with DL even when it had a fair number of promising recruits (2016-2018 had Michael Williams, Thomas Schaffer, Jovan Swann, Bo Peek, Ryan Johnson, Dalyn Wade-Perry, Thomas Booker, and Andres Fox, surely one of the better on-paper three year spans of DL recruiting in Stanford history) now gets to show what it can do with a pipeline worse in both volume and average star-rating than the group that just failed (2019-2021 had Joshua Pakola, Tobin Phillips, Lance Keneley, Aaron Armitage, Zach Buckey, and Anthony Franklin).
