[Goose]

The decline of our OL has occurred so insidiously we failed to notice.  McCaffrey and a healthy Love in 2017 helped to obscure the problem, but it was there.  Love's absurd runs particularly helped to obscure the fact that Stanford, relatively speaking, had a very ineffective running game.  The feast was mammoth, the famines were long.

The problem started in 2014.  It started with me screaming at Murphy and Caspers for false starting, two different guys for costly chop blocks, and a surge in sacks allowed.  I took to keeping a file called "OL Mistakes," a number the peaked at 11 in the Washington game.  The OL settled a bit in the latter part of the season, but the decline had begun.

<snip>


This is not the Tunnel Workers Union and we are not the Home of Intellectual Brutality--and haven't been for years.  And if we have an OL coaching or recruiting problem, of both, that isn't new either, imo.

Very true. We have people on this board blaming this coach or that coach, but the problem has been years in the making. What we seem to lack on the OL (IMnSHO) is at least in part, leadership and a killer instinct. These guys are big enough and athletic enough, at least on paper. They just don't move people. It is not that they occasionally don't move people. They basically never move people. The few effective runs we have seen this year are almost all due to the defense making a mistake and going the wrong way (or something similar). It is not because we made a big hole, it is because the defense vacated the hole.
The TWU had an ethos and an internally based leadership structure that set expectations and ensured they were met. Who is doing that today? It seems no one is. Our team's OL plays soft. Our opponents know it and revel in it after so many years of getting pushed around. We can't be the team Shaw wants us to be until this is fixed. Period.
Yes, coaching matters. However, I don't think it can explain our lack of results on the OL. If we had a bunch of questionable bodies who were too small and too slow, then our only hope would be some kind of a coaching miracle to solve the problem. That is not the case. We have guys that are big enough and fast enough that they should at least some of the time win the battle in the trenches on running plays. We don't see this.

[Goose]

The decline of our OL has occurred so insidiously we failed to notice.  McCaffrey and a healthy Love in 2017 helped to obscure the problem, but it was there.  Love's absurd runs particularly helped to obscure the fact that Stanford, relatively speaking, had a very ineffective running game.  The feast was mammoth, the famines were long.

The problem started in 2014.  It started with me screaming at Murphy and Caspers for false starting, two different guys for costly chop blocks, and a surge in sacks allowed.  I took to keeping a file called "OL Mistakes," a number the peaked at 11 in the Washington game.  The OL settled a bit in the latter part of the season, but the decline had begun.

<snip>


This is not the Tunnel Workers Union and we are not the Home of Intellectual Brutality--and haven't been for years.  And if we have an OL coaching or recruiting problem, of both, that isn't new either, imo.

Very true. We have people on this board blaming this coach or that coach, but the problem has been years in the making. What we seem to lack on the OL (IMnSHO) is at least in part, leadership and a killer instinct. These guys are big enough and athletic enough, at least on paper. They just don't move people. It is not that they occasionally don't move people. They basically never move people. The few effective runs we have seen this year are almost all due to the defense making a mistake and going the wrong way (or something similar). It is not because we made a big hole, it is because the defense vacated the hole.
The TWU had an ethos and an internally based leadership structure that set expectations and ensured they were met. Who is doing that today? It seems no one is. Our team's OL plays soft. Our opponents know it and revel in it after so many years of getting pushed around. We can't be the team Shaw wants us to be until this is fixed. Period.
Yes, coaching matters. However, I don't think it can explain our lack of results on the OL. If we had a bunch of questionable bodies who were too small and too slow, then our only hope would be some kind of a coaching miracle to solve the problem. That is not the case. We have guys that are big enough and fast enough that they should at least some of the time win the battle in the trenches on running plays. We don't see this.