[Maple Leaf]

It will be interesting to see if any non-corners can get all-conference for Stanford this year. Williamson, Fields, McGill, and Wyrick may be the best or one of the best safety/nickel (however you want to refer to non-corners) groups in the conference. Can anyone be a stud? I'm less confident in that, but Akina has more material to work with here than he has in many recent years (and the carousel at safety has been a result of shortcomings for which he bears some responsibility).

Separately, I have an emerging pet issue which is that it appears to be a best practice in college football these days to have two defensive back coaches rather than just one. This makes sense for several reasons. First, nickel is the real base defense so DBs are 45 percent of a defense. A really big responsibility for one coach, in the same way OL is a very big responsibility for one coach and TE coaches often serve as secondary OL coaches. Second, many astute football observers have called DB coaching one of the most important coaching positions on a staff, so there can be a logic to doubling up on it. Third, corner back and safety are quite different positions so there can be specialization to be gained from having different coaches for the two.

The choice Stanford makes is a) take a precious coaching spot and dedicate it exclusively to special teams (which I think is defensible but we should be cognizant of opportunity cost) and b) to have three different coaches for the front seven. Given long-term trends in college football it might be worth considering whether it would be preferable to have two front seven coaches and two DB coaches. I'm just throwing that out there as I believe (as with any decision) there would be tradeoffs/opportunity cost.

By the way, in case anybody thinks I'm making this up, when I analyzed this last year Nick Saban, Lincoln Riley, Brian Kelly, Dabo Swinney, Mario Cristobal, Jimbo Fisher, and Mike Gundy were among the coaches who separated safeties and corners. That speaks volumes to me.

Cal has two DB coaches, one of which is Terrence Brown, former starting Stanford DB.

[Maple Leaf]

It will be interesting to see if any non-corners can get all-conference for Stanford this year. Williamson, Fields, McGill, and Wyrick may be the best or one of the best safety/nickel (however you want to refer to non-corners) groups in the conference. Can anyone be a stud? I'm less confident in that, but Akina has more material to work with here than he has in many recent years (and the carousel at safety has been a result of shortcomings for which he bears some responsibility).

Separately, I have an emerging pet issue which is that it appears to be a best practice in college football these days to have two defensive back coaches rather than just one. This makes sense for several reasons. First, nickel is the real base defense so DBs are 45 percent of a defense. A really big responsibility for one coach, in the same way OL is a very big responsibility for one coach and TE coaches often serve as secondary OL coaches. Second, many astute football observers have called DB coaching one of the most important coaching positions on a staff, so there can be a logic to doubling up on it. Third, corner back and safety are quite different positions so there can be specialization to be gained from having different coaches for the two.

The choice Stanford makes is a) take a precious coaching spot and dedicate it exclusively to special teams (which I think is defensible but we should be cognizant of opportunity cost) and b) to have three different coaches for the front seven. Given long-term trends in college football it might be worth considering whether it would be preferable to have two front seven coaches and two DB coaches. I'm just throwing that out there as I believe (as with any decision) there would be tradeoffs/opportunity cost.

By the way, in case anybody thinks I'm making this up, when I analyzed this last year Nick Saban, Lincoln Riley, Brian Kelly, Dabo Swinney, Mario Cristobal, Jimbo Fisher, and Mike Gundy were among the coaches who separated safeties and corners. That speaks volumes to me.

Cal has two DB coaches, one of which is Terrence Brown, former starting Stanford DB.