(11-22-2020, 12:05 AM)BostonCard Wrote: The irony is that given his long tenure and historical success, Shaw's coaching tree is fairly limited (a "coaching shrub" to quote slide). So, it would have been easy to argue that his limited coaching tree reflects poorly on Shaw (though there are other, alternate explanations). However, because some people want to hyperbolize and pretend that no assistant coach has ever left Stanford for a higher position elsewhere, we are wasting our time fact checking instead of actually discussing whether more turnover might not be better.I agree about the need to inject new ideas. Opposing defenses have now had a decade to understand how to defend our system. Shaw seems to think that if we execute well enough, it does not matter that the opposing defensive coordinator knows how to defend us. And that is true if we really are perfect in execution.
The better argument was the immediate effect that Northwestern firing Nick McCall and hiring Mike Bajakian has had. I will notice, however, that McCall was fired after being Fitzgerald's OC 12(!) years.
https://athlonsports.com/college-footbal...oordinator
Quote:Northwestern finished the regular season ranked 126th out of 130 FBS teams in total offense (297.1 ypg) and 127th in scoring offense (16.3 ppg). At second to last in the scoring offense in the Big Ten, it was the worst showing for a Wildcats offense since landing dead last (14th) in 2015, albeit at 19.5 points per game. And that season, Northwestern finished higher on the FBS leaderboard (114th) compared to 2019 as well.
Worth noting that Stanford's total offense last year was 80 yards and a touchdown better than NW's, and this was not McCall's first time with a putrid offense, as the article makes plain. Of course, I don't want our offense to fall to <300 yards and <20 points before we fire our OC, and, as I have mentioned previously, while I think Pritchard will eventually be a good OC and potential head coach, both he and Stanford would benefit significantly if he spent some time learning another system. While I think Shaw's loyalty is admirable, it has some very significant drawbacks, the largest of which are that we don't inject new ideas into the system fast enough. The offense these days seems way too much like it is being run by someone who has seen the offensive concepts on film and has a general idea of how they are supposed to work, but hasn't really lived them.
BC
But most of the time college students are not perfect in their execution, nor will we always have superior talent to the other team. I think part of our early success under Harbaugh and Shaw was that everyone else had abandoned the power run game and so we presented truly unique preparation challenges to our opponents. Plus they had been recruiting different kinds of defenders to defend against everyone else's spread offenses--who were not always well suited to stopping us. But after more than a decade and hundreds of defensive game plans designed to stop Stanford, everyone knows much better what works to stop us than they did when in our glory years.
This is a long way of saying that I agree that we need a new offensive coordinator. I think it is time to become more Walsh-like and do a better job of keeping the opposing defensive coordinator guessing. How to do that I am not sure. Certainly our play book is big enough--but somehow we need to be running plays that defenses cannot key on and predict, especially on 3rd downs. Creativity not so much in the design of plays, but in the timing of when they are called.
As for defense--not having played the game, I don't understand it nearly as well as many of you, and so my opinions on that side of the ball are not as well informed. My instinct tells me that the problem there has little to do with scheme and more to do with recruiting and injury. For decades it was always harder for Stanford to recruit on defense than on offense and we seem to be returning to that kind of "normalcy." I am not sure how we managed to recruit so well on defense for the better part of a decade, or how to get back to that level. But clearly defense remains our biggest problem, just as it did in 1977, just as it did in 1999.
It was easier to be a Shaw fan and supporter when we were winning. It is hard right now that we are losing and seem to be on a downward trajectory. I have enormous admiration for him but agree with many of the criticisms--I think every human being has weaknesses but head coaches are just subjected to enormous scrutiny. I guess what I would say is that I believe it is far more difficult to find a good head coach for Stanford than for almost any other university--because we are truly a unique program that genuinely values academics and also has aspirations for great football success at the highest level. I don't think there is another program like that--neither the Ivies nor Notre Dame nor any of the big state institutions come close to having expectations that high on both sides of the equation. In the past, when we have chosen coaches who fit the academic profile (Dartmouth's Buddy Teevens) they were not top-flight on the football side, and when we have chosen creative footballers (Jack Elway) they could not sustain success on the recruiting/academic side. Even Walsh, while nicknamed "The Professor" due to his demeanor, really hated recruiting and in both stints worked his magical X's and O's mostly with other people's recruits (Jack Christianson's for Walsh I and Denny Green's for Walsh II.) You can't really look at coaches before the 1970s when academic standards for Stanford--while always high--really began to skyrocket.
And so a significant part of me cries out that somehow reforming the program under Shaw is a far, far better alternative to finding a new head coach. I think it likely that trying to find a new head coach might require that we go through two or three terrible new coaches--as we did in the 2000s--until we hit upon someone with the unique characteristics to be successful at Stanford. Does that make me a Shaw-pologist? I'll accept any labels you want to dish out.
