[Goose]

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.

I agree with the idea the "staff" was making the best of what they had. I am also convinced the "poor recruiting" on the OL was and is connected to a change in demographic. Bloomgren and the rest didn't suddenly forget how to recruit. If it was just him, replacing him should have "fixed" the problem. However, the OL coaches that followed him have not generated notably better OLs. It is possible that the new "tunnel workers" are out there and the recruiting methods Stanford used were the wrong ones. It also may be that Stanford should have taken more 3 star guys that fit the model than 4 star guys who didn't.

However, I think the very strong trend in high school football toward more "spread" offenses has led to a much shallower pool of OL that want to/can play power football. Since Stanford was already recruiting from a shallower pool academically, we have been disproportionately affected by this change. This has also affected our ability to recruit "power" running backs. CMac was a "freak of nature" in that he can run inside much better than one would expect. However, he isn't a prototype power runner and he wasn't exactly hard to recruit. Obviously ditto BL, even more so not a power back. Scarlett was more in the mold of a power runner but after he got hurt, he had inadequate speed. We haven't had a "real" power back for quite a while. Some would say Gaffney, but he spent a lot of time running outside. This is not to say we haven't had some guys with lots of talent, but they have not been in the Toby school of power backs.

Obviously Stanford needs a better OL than we have had recently, and hopefully TT can make it happen. I think it is pretty clear that while he values the run game he too expects to run a more spread offense possibly not so theoretically different from what we were already trying to do than many would expect.

[Goose]

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.

I agree with the idea the "staff" was making the best of what they had. I am also convinced the "poor recruiting" on the OL was and is connected to a change in demographic. Bloomgren and the rest didn't suddenly forget how to recruit. If it was just him, replacing him should have "fixed" the problem. However, the OL coaches that followed him have not generated notably better OLs. It is possible that the new "tunnel workers" are out there and the recruiting methods Stanford used were the wrong ones. It also may be that Stanford should have taken more 3 star guys that fit the model than 4 star guys who didn't.

However, I think the very strong trend in high school football toward more "spread" offenses has led to a much shallower pool of OL that want to/can play power football. Since Stanford was already recruiting from a shallower pool academically, we have been disproportionately affected by this change. This has also affected our ability to recruit "power" running backs. CMac was a "freak of nature" in that he can run inside much better than one would expect. However, he isn't a prototype power runner and he wasn't exactly hard to recruit. Obviously ditto BL, even more so not a power back. Scarlett was more in the mold of a power runner but after he got hurt, he had inadequate speed. We haven't had a "real" power back for quite a while. Some would say Gaffney, but he spent a lot of time running outside. This is not to say we haven't had some guys with lots of talent, but they have not been in the Toby school of power backs.

Obviously Stanford needs a better OL than we have had recently, and hopefully TT can make it happen. I think it is pretty clear that while he values the run game he too expects to run a more spread offense possibly not so theoretically different from what we were already trying to do than many would expect.