09-22-2022, 07:51 PM
I think it is interesting that you (Matt) call out Shaw’s decent to good recruiting as a negative. If you are what your record says you are, does it matter that you got there by recruiting bad players and coaching them well or recruiting good players and coaching them poorly?
Because Shaw has shown he can coach good players to excellent results (2011 to 2017), I probably would be more concerned if the story was that after Harbaugh left, recruiting went in the toilet, and Shaw did the best he could with what he had, surviving for a few years on Harbaugh’s recruits before the poor recruiting caught up with him.
I have some issues with Shaw’s recruiting, especially in the years where we chronically recruited too few players for the trenches, leaving us vulnerable to injury or too dependent on one or two players. That seems to be better now, but I think many people, including yourself, have commented that while Shaw has recruited players that, from a ranking perspective look good on paper, that he has not recruited the intangibles well, and thus the culture of the team has suffered. It’s a plausible theory, but one that still relies on a subjective assessment of the number of “renaissance men” versus football-first players. So, I’m not 100% convinced that the players Shaw has recruited over the past few years are comparable in quality to those over his first 7 or so years, but I’m also not convinced that a generic replacement coach could do better. I think you have to go all the way back to Walsh II to find comparable quality recruiting if you base it on rankings, but I am willing to be convinced that a different coach would be better at “shaping” the team with his recruiting to enable success.
The alternative to a decline in recruiting is that what we’ve experienced is a decline in coaching the recruits we have (this includes player development and in game coaching) as an explanatory variable. I presume Shaw hasn’t forgotten how to coach, but I think a reasonable case can be made that the coaching staff, as a whole, is inferior, and, specifically, the transition from Derick Mason to Lance Anderson in 2014 has coincided with a substantial decline in the defense.
Obviously a new coach gets us a new DC, so if you believe that Shaw’s problem is his unwillingness to fire anyone, then this is a roundabout way to solve the problem.
BC
Because Shaw has shown he can coach good players to excellent results (2011 to 2017), I probably would be more concerned if the story was that after Harbaugh left, recruiting went in the toilet, and Shaw did the best he could with what he had, surviving for a few years on Harbaugh’s recruits before the poor recruiting caught up with him.
I have some issues with Shaw’s recruiting, especially in the years where we chronically recruited too few players for the trenches, leaving us vulnerable to injury or too dependent on one or two players. That seems to be better now, but I think many people, including yourself, have commented that while Shaw has recruited players that, from a ranking perspective look good on paper, that he has not recruited the intangibles well, and thus the culture of the team has suffered. It’s a plausible theory, but one that still relies on a subjective assessment of the number of “renaissance men” versus football-first players. So, I’m not 100% convinced that the players Shaw has recruited over the past few years are comparable in quality to those over his first 7 or so years, but I’m also not convinced that a generic replacement coach could do better. I think you have to go all the way back to Walsh II to find comparable quality recruiting if you base it on rankings, but I am willing to be convinced that a different coach would be better at “shaping” the team with his recruiting to enable success.
The alternative to a decline in recruiting is that what we’ve experienced is a decline in coaching the recruits we have (this includes player development and in game coaching) as an explanatory variable. I presume Shaw hasn’t forgotten how to coach, but I think a reasonable case can be made that the coaching staff, as a whole, is inferior, and, specifically, the transition from Derick Mason to Lance Anderson in 2014 has coincided with a substantial decline in the defense.
Obviously a new coach gets us a new DC, so if you believe that Shaw’s problem is his unwillingness to fire anyone, then this is a roundabout way to solve the problem.
BC