[msqueri]

I don't think it's a coincidence the offense became more pass-centric as Bloomgren departed and Pritchard rose. It's long been obvious that with Bloomgren gone, Pritchard relatively ascendant, and Kennedy on staff, the center of gravity on the offense tilted toward the passing game. No coincidence there.

It's much more debatable to tie this evolution to the decline of the offense. There's a real correlation is not causation problem with a lot of the analysis on this board. I don't rule out some causal relationship there, but it's not clear. A Jessies and Joes explanation carries just as much stock - Stanford's offensive line recruiting and running back recruiting fell off as wide receiver recruiting took off. There's an argument we were adjusting to personnel. Those who pined for smash mouth football identical to earlier years were not really acknowledging that David Yankey, Cameron Fleming, and Tyler Gaffney were not walking through that door. In thinking about the causal arrows, I gravitate much more toward explanations blaming a disastrous 2015 OL class, mediocre 2016 OL class, small 2017 OL class, catastrophic on galactic scales 2018 OL class, and loss of both Bloomgren and Turley amidst all of that.

Looking at the sweep of the data, Shaw/Pritchard/Kennedy/et al may have been making chicken salad out of chicken feathers in orchestrating the change to the offensive personality so many of you lament. The fact is our recruiting left them holding the bag without good options from 2018 and on. We had extremely poor OL recruiting from 2015-2018, lost the position coach for that group starting in 2018, and lost the strength and conditioning honcho starting in 2019. Very misguided in my view to blame Pritchard for this. If you need to blame anybody, blame Bloomgren and what he was doing his last several years before then leaving others to clean up the mess.

[msqueri]

I don't think it's a coincidence the offense became more pass-centric as Bloomgren departed and Pritchard rose. It's long been obvious that with Bloomgren gone, Pritchard relatively ascendant, and Kennedy on staff, the center of gravity on the offense tilted toward the passing game. No coincidence there.

It's much more debatable to tie this evolution to the decline of the offense. There's a real correlation is not causation problem with a lot of the analysis on this board. I don't rule out some causal relationship there, but it's not clear. A Jessies and Joes explanation carries just as much stock - Stanford's offensive line recruiting and running back recruiting fell off as wide receiver recruiting took off. There's an argument we were adjusting to personnel. Those who pined for smash mouth football identical to earlier years were not really acknowledging that David Yankey, Cameron Fleming, and Tyler Gaffney were not walking through that door. In thinking about the causal arrows, I gravitate much more toward explanations blaming a disastrous 2015 OL class, mediocre 2016 OL class, small 2017 OL class, catastrophic on galactic scales 2018 OL class, and loss of both Bloomgren and Turley amidst all of that.

Looking at the sweep of the data, Shaw/Pritchard/Kennedy/et al may have been making chicken salad out of chicken feathers in orchestrating the change to the offensive personality so many of you lament. The fact is our recruiting left them holding the bag without good options from 2018 and on. We had extremely poor OL recruiting from 2015-2018, lost the position coach for that group starting in 2018, and lost the strength and conditioning honcho starting in 2019. Very misguided in my view to blame Pritchard for this. If you need to blame anybody, blame Bloomgren and what he was doing his last several years before then leaving others to clean up the mess.