SWC75
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2015 vs. 2016
Scott Shafer went 4-8 in his last year. Dino Babers went 4-8 in his first year. Here are the common opponents and our results against them:
Opponent Shafer Babers Advantage
Wake Forest 30-17 9-28 Shafer +32
Pittsburgh 20-23 61-76 Shafer +12
Florida State 21-45 14-45 Shafer +7
Louisville 17-41 28-62 Shafer +10
Clemson 27-37 0-54 Shafer +44
NC State 29-42 20-35 Shafer +2
Boston College 20-17 28-20 Babers +5
Total 164-222 160-320 Shafer +102
This doesn’t necessarily mean Shafer was a better head coach, (I don’t believe he is). I see three reasons beyond the abilities of the head coach that could account for these numbers.
1) Shafer was working with players he had recruited for his style. Babers was working with mostly Shafer’s players to play his style, which is very different on both sides of the ball.
2) Shafer’s 2014 team was racked by injuries, particularly in the offensive line but his 2015 team was comparatively healthy. Baber’s year was another injury leagued one, particularly in the defensive backfield. 3) The Atlantic Division was a beast in 2016. We were the only team without a winning record. Even the teams we feel we are at the same level as, Wake Forest and Boston College, both went 7-6 and won bowl games. Meanwhile at the top of the standings were three legitimate national championship contenders. The other team, NC State was on the verge of a big move upward which they may make this year.
Still, those numbers are disturbing and we need to make a significant improvement this year for the optimism over Coach Babers to continue.
When I asked Coach Babers on his show last year how he was going to overcome the advantages the southern teams have and deal with the multiple national title contenders in our division, he said that our style of play will allow us to compete. The problem with that is that college football has already absorbed and adjusted to what Baylor and Babers have been doing. Even Alabama has played in “hurry up” mode. Schools like Clemson, Florida State and Louisville have been doing what we want to do for some time and they do it with better athletes than we have. If we’d tried something like this even ten years ago, it might have had a dramatic impact. I made a comparison last year to a NASCAR race, where two dozen cars will drive in formation, two by two, with the front cars burrowing a hole in the air for the others and the cars behind them reducing turbulence so they can all go faster than they normally would. They come upon a slower car, to the side of the group and pass him easily because he’s fighting the air all by himself. That driver might floor it to try to stay ahead or to keep up with them but it’s hopeless. The driver then gives up and gets in line behind the others, in 25th place. That’s what I feel we did: go to a fast-paced, pass-happy offense years after most of college football had already done it and now we are getting in line behind the others, rather than setting the pace.
Last year there was one game where we wore the other team out with our offense: the Virginia Tech game. In that game we were able to do so because we moved the chains and kept the ball. Pace of play does nothing if you can’t get first downs. Otherwise, you’re just punting faster. You will wear out your defense - not theirs.
Last year’s team had three anomalies. Scott Shafer’s favorite play was a punt. Dino Babers hates to punt. We punted 67 times in 2015. We punted 80 times in 2016. Babers doesn’t like to run his quarterback: they get injured too much. Shafer had quarterback runs as part of his offense. In 2015, Eric Dungey, Zach Mahoney, Terrell Hunt and Austin Wilson carried the ball 134 times. That includes 21 sacks so that’s 113 actual running plays, (some of which were scrambles). In 2016 Dungey, Mahoney and Wilson had 171 carries, which minus 38 sacks is 133 actual running plays, (including scrambles). Our offense in 2015 ranked 118th in the country with 320 yards a game and 77th in the country with 27.3 points per game. Our offense in 2016 improved to 42nd in the country with 441 yards per game – but fell to 90th in the country with 25.7 points per game.
The main reason for these anomalies was that we had no running game to speak of. That meant that we couldn’t gain first downs in short yardage situations and that we had trouble punching the ball into the end zone in the “red zone” where the area the defense has to cover shrinks. I remember seeing our quarterback in an “empty” backfield on the 1 yard line as we had no goal line package. That gave him five receivers but they were covered by 7 players and had only 11 yards to find an open space. Strangely, Jordan Fredericks, who, as a freshman had led the team with 607 yards rushing at 5.7 a clip was third string hand only got the ball only 28 times. He managed 5.0 yards per carry. He’s now gone, having transferred out. His replacement as feature back was Dontae Strickland, who gained 566 yards but at only 3.5 yards per carry. The alternative was speedy but slight Moe Neal, who ran 42 yards for a score against Colgate on his first carry and averaged 5.3 on 68 carries. But he wasn’t strong enough to be a feature back and will apparently be more of a runner/receiver hybrid this year, a role he seems more suited to.
The ineffectiveness of the running game could be traced, in part to the total lack of any versatility in the scheme of the running game. We had basically one play we ran seemingly every time: a draw play with a fake pass at the end of it. I thought it was very clever when I first saw it. I’d never seen that before. I’d seen draw plays but I hadn’t seen the quarterback carry out the fake to that extent. Later I did see some other teams running that play. I guess it was a “trendy” play. Besides the fact that it seemed to be our only running play, we never seemed to actually pass from it, (I recall seeing one pass all year). It reminded me of those drop back passes from the Pasqualoni Era: we always faked the handoff to the running back but never actually gave it to him. We would even do this on a Hail Mary at the end of a half. If you never run something, it does you no good as a fake. The fake needs to be real, probably at least once a game. This draw play would have been a dynamic play if the defense didn’t know whether we were going to run or pass. But we just ran and the play typically went nowhere.
Here comes my annual pitch for a two back backfield. Have a look at this clip. It’s national champion Michigan walloping Southern California in the 1/1/48 Rose Bowl:
This is old-fashioned football but it has some virtues. There are four guys in the backfield. All can run, block, throw and catch passes, (some better than others). But the defense doesn’t even know who’s going to get the snap, much less who is going to wind up with the ball. There are multiple lead blockers. Players can hand off to each other or fake handoffs and give to another back or pass it. The backs shift into different positons. It’s a very complex package and a load for the defense to prepare for. I’m not saying we should go back to this type of football, although Auburn had success with something not dissimilar to this to get to the 2013 national championship game. Coaches prepare for what they are used to seeing and something different can have success if it hasn’t been used in a while.
What happened in the years after the above clip is that teams that liked to pass the ball more, like the Cleveland Browns and LA Rams in the pros, split out one of those backs to give them an extra wide-out. I’ve always thought the classic pro set was the best, most balanced formation for an offense: a quarterback to call the signals and do the passing, a fullback to block and run between the tackles, a halfback to run to the outside and catch passes, two wide-outs and a big tight end to make the hard catches over the middle. Give me Unitas, Ameche, Moore, Orr, Berry and Mackey. If we want to throw 50 passes, we can. If we want to grind it out and work the clock, we can. We can convert short yardage plays and get first downs and touchdowns. The quarterback can fake to one back and give it to the other. Reverses don’t have to be slow-developing end arounds. We can run line plunges, traps, draws, off tackle plays and sweeps. We can get big plays from either the pass or run games. if we want an extra receiver on third down, we can split the halfback or sub a receiver for the fullback.
But coaches wanted to pass more and more on every down. It gave them plenty of receivers, (who were still outnumbered by the defenders). The defense has to cover the whole field and all the receivers and this stretches them out. They have no way of knowing who will get the ball. Hopefully, that opens things up for the running game. But when you get it down to one running back, the defense knows who is going to get the ball on any running play. And when you run the same play over and over again, you won’t have any running game at all, (especially if your best runner is third string). When you look for an alternative, the only one is to have the quarterback run the ball, which puts them in harm’s way.
I think Strickland and Neal would be much more effective as an fullback-halfback type tandem. Strickland is no Alan Ameche but he would be a better Strickland if the defense didn’t know if he was going to get the ball or not or what hole he was going to hit. And Neal would make an ideal combination runner and receiver. Like Lenny Moore, he has the speed to not only catch short passes but also go deep from the HB spot. And we could switch to three wide-outs or even an empty backfield whenever we wanted to. If the defense decides whether it’s going to be a run or pass based on our formation, we are set up to surprise them. But we’ll likely see Strickland or Neal in there alone, running the same draw play with the fake pass into the waiting arms of people like Clemson’s 6-5 340 Dexter Lawrence. I hope I’m wrong but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Babers finally resorted to running his quarterback because the handoffs to Strickland weren’t working and Dungey was the only alternative. We did pass a lot but there the scheme was limited, too. It was mostly look deep for Amba Etta-Tawo (94 catches) or short for Erv Phillips (90 catches). Also, almost all the passes were either deep or to the sideline. The middle of the field was unexplored. (I still remember how Ryan Nassib, Alec Lemon and Marcus Sales carved up teams over the middle in 2012.) With all those receivers running around out there we need to keep the defense guessing.
I’m hoping we will have more balance in both the running and passing attack this year and that, in the second year of the Babers era, we will see the team use a greater variety of plays as well. He’s said that the 4th to 6th week of the second season is when the offense clicks in. That’s NC State, Pittsburgh and Clemson. Hopefully we’ll see something dazzling then. Last year had its moments but the other team’s defense didn’t always look dazzled. Hopefully we just saw part of the offensive package last year and we’ll be dazzling more teams this year.
Baber’s schemes on both sides of the ball seem heavily dependent on the lines. That’s nothing new in football but it’s a problem here because we don’t tend to have dominant lines here. We get occasional superior individuals like Justin Pugh or Art Jones but we don’t get entire lines of players like that. Last season Coach Babers said on his show that he wants more strength on the offensive line to get his running game going. Matt Park interpreted strength as ‘size’ and quoted the heights and weights of our next opponent as what we have to shoot for. I looked up their heights and weights of our starting offensive linemen and they were actually bigger than that. (I’d actually prefer lighter, quicker linemen: the Denver Broncos have had great success with 280 pounders for years. If you get there furstest, you’ll have the moistest.) I called in about that and Dino said it’s not about heights and weights. He wants both lower body strength and also quickness. That’s an infrequent combination and guys with both those qualities are a lot more likely to wind up at Ohio State or Alabama than Syracuse.
Defensively, he wants all the pressure he needs on the other team’s backfield to come from the front four so the ‘back seven’ and cover passes and converge on running plays. Scott Shafer was a “bring the house” guy. By the end of the season, Babers, (through his DC, Brian Ward), was starting to use more and more blitzes to get defensive pressure. I think we need to maximize our offensive versatility and deception to make up for the fact that not every one of our linemen will be a Justin Pugh. And I think we need to be willing to “bring the house” on defense to disrupt the offense and create big plays, even if we might give some up as well. But apparently, we will continue to go with the straight-ahead, one back running game, hoping the pass will open it up. If we use more receivers and throw to all parts of the field that might happen. And we will continue to circle the wagons and converge on the play on defense. I hope it works better in year 2 of the Babers Era than it did in year 1.
Scott Shafer went 4-8 in his last year. Dino Babers went 4-8 in his first year. Here are the common opponents and our results against them:
Opponent Shafer Babers Advantage
Wake Forest 30-17 9-28 Shafer +32
Pittsburgh 20-23 61-76 Shafer +12
Florida State 21-45 14-45 Shafer +7
Louisville 17-41 28-62 Shafer +10
Clemson 27-37 0-54 Shafer +44
NC State 29-42 20-35 Shafer +2
Boston College 20-17 28-20 Babers +5
Total 164-222 160-320 Shafer +102
This doesn’t necessarily mean Shafer was a better head coach, (I don’t believe he is). I see three reasons beyond the abilities of the head coach that could account for these numbers.
1) Shafer was working with players he had recruited for his style. Babers was working with mostly Shafer’s players to play his style, which is very different on both sides of the ball.
2) Shafer’s 2014 team was racked by injuries, particularly in the offensive line but his 2015 team was comparatively healthy. Baber’s year was another injury leagued one, particularly in the defensive backfield. 3) The Atlantic Division was a beast in 2016. We were the only team without a winning record. Even the teams we feel we are at the same level as, Wake Forest and Boston College, both went 7-6 and won bowl games. Meanwhile at the top of the standings were three legitimate national championship contenders. The other team, NC State was on the verge of a big move upward which they may make this year.
Still, those numbers are disturbing and we need to make a significant improvement this year for the optimism over Coach Babers to continue.
When I asked Coach Babers on his show last year how he was going to overcome the advantages the southern teams have and deal with the multiple national title contenders in our division, he said that our style of play will allow us to compete. The problem with that is that college football has already absorbed and adjusted to what Baylor and Babers have been doing. Even Alabama has played in “hurry up” mode. Schools like Clemson, Florida State and Louisville have been doing what we want to do for some time and they do it with better athletes than we have. If we’d tried something like this even ten years ago, it might have had a dramatic impact. I made a comparison last year to a NASCAR race, where two dozen cars will drive in formation, two by two, with the front cars burrowing a hole in the air for the others and the cars behind them reducing turbulence so they can all go faster than they normally would. They come upon a slower car, to the side of the group and pass him easily because he’s fighting the air all by himself. That driver might floor it to try to stay ahead or to keep up with them but it’s hopeless. The driver then gives up and gets in line behind the others, in 25th place. That’s what I feel we did: go to a fast-paced, pass-happy offense years after most of college football had already done it and now we are getting in line behind the others, rather than setting the pace.
Last year there was one game where we wore the other team out with our offense: the Virginia Tech game. In that game we were able to do so because we moved the chains and kept the ball. Pace of play does nothing if you can’t get first downs. Otherwise, you’re just punting faster. You will wear out your defense - not theirs.
Last year’s team had three anomalies. Scott Shafer’s favorite play was a punt. Dino Babers hates to punt. We punted 67 times in 2015. We punted 80 times in 2016. Babers doesn’t like to run his quarterback: they get injured too much. Shafer had quarterback runs as part of his offense. In 2015, Eric Dungey, Zach Mahoney, Terrell Hunt and Austin Wilson carried the ball 134 times. That includes 21 sacks so that’s 113 actual running plays, (some of which were scrambles). In 2016 Dungey, Mahoney and Wilson had 171 carries, which minus 38 sacks is 133 actual running plays, (including scrambles). Our offense in 2015 ranked 118th in the country with 320 yards a game and 77th in the country with 27.3 points per game. Our offense in 2016 improved to 42nd in the country with 441 yards per game – but fell to 90th in the country with 25.7 points per game.
The main reason for these anomalies was that we had no running game to speak of. That meant that we couldn’t gain first downs in short yardage situations and that we had trouble punching the ball into the end zone in the “red zone” where the area the defense has to cover shrinks. I remember seeing our quarterback in an “empty” backfield on the 1 yard line as we had no goal line package. That gave him five receivers but they were covered by 7 players and had only 11 yards to find an open space. Strangely, Jordan Fredericks, who, as a freshman had led the team with 607 yards rushing at 5.7 a clip was third string hand only got the ball only 28 times. He managed 5.0 yards per carry. He’s now gone, having transferred out. His replacement as feature back was Dontae Strickland, who gained 566 yards but at only 3.5 yards per carry. The alternative was speedy but slight Moe Neal, who ran 42 yards for a score against Colgate on his first carry and averaged 5.3 on 68 carries. But he wasn’t strong enough to be a feature back and will apparently be more of a runner/receiver hybrid this year, a role he seems more suited to.
The ineffectiveness of the running game could be traced, in part to the total lack of any versatility in the scheme of the running game. We had basically one play we ran seemingly every time: a draw play with a fake pass at the end of it. I thought it was very clever when I first saw it. I’d never seen that before. I’d seen draw plays but I hadn’t seen the quarterback carry out the fake to that extent. Later I did see some other teams running that play. I guess it was a “trendy” play. Besides the fact that it seemed to be our only running play, we never seemed to actually pass from it, (I recall seeing one pass all year). It reminded me of those drop back passes from the Pasqualoni Era: we always faked the handoff to the running back but never actually gave it to him. We would even do this on a Hail Mary at the end of a half. If you never run something, it does you no good as a fake. The fake needs to be real, probably at least once a game. This draw play would have been a dynamic play if the defense didn’t know whether we were going to run or pass. But we just ran and the play typically went nowhere.
Here comes my annual pitch for a two back backfield. Have a look at this clip. It’s national champion Michigan walloping Southern California in the 1/1/48 Rose Bowl:
This is old-fashioned football but it has some virtues. There are four guys in the backfield. All can run, block, throw and catch passes, (some better than others). But the defense doesn’t even know who’s going to get the snap, much less who is going to wind up with the ball. There are multiple lead blockers. Players can hand off to each other or fake handoffs and give to another back or pass it. The backs shift into different positons. It’s a very complex package and a load for the defense to prepare for. I’m not saying we should go back to this type of football, although Auburn had success with something not dissimilar to this to get to the 2013 national championship game. Coaches prepare for what they are used to seeing and something different can have success if it hasn’t been used in a while.
What happened in the years after the above clip is that teams that liked to pass the ball more, like the Cleveland Browns and LA Rams in the pros, split out one of those backs to give them an extra wide-out. I’ve always thought the classic pro set was the best, most balanced formation for an offense: a quarterback to call the signals and do the passing, a fullback to block and run between the tackles, a halfback to run to the outside and catch passes, two wide-outs and a big tight end to make the hard catches over the middle. Give me Unitas, Ameche, Moore, Orr, Berry and Mackey. If we want to throw 50 passes, we can. If we want to grind it out and work the clock, we can. We can convert short yardage plays and get first downs and touchdowns. The quarterback can fake to one back and give it to the other. Reverses don’t have to be slow-developing end arounds. We can run line plunges, traps, draws, off tackle plays and sweeps. We can get big plays from either the pass or run games. if we want an extra receiver on third down, we can split the halfback or sub a receiver for the fullback.
But coaches wanted to pass more and more on every down. It gave them plenty of receivers, (who were still outnumbered by the defenders). The defense has to cover the whole field and all the receivers and this stretches them out. They have no way of knowing who will get the ball. Hopefully, that opens things up for the running game. But when you get it down to one running back, the defense knows who is going to get the ball on any running play. And when you run the same play over and over again, you won’t have any running game at all, (especially if your best runner is third string). When you look for an alternative, the only one is to have the quarterback run the ball, which puts them in harm’s way.
I think Strickland and Neal would be much more effective as an fullback-halfback type tandem. Strickland is no Alan Ameche but he would be a better Strickland if the defense didn’t know if he was going to get the ball or not or what hole he was going to hit. And Neal would make an ideal combination runner and receiver. Like Lenny Moore, he has the speed to not only catch short passes but also go deep from the HB spot. And we could switch to three wide-outs or even an empty backfield whenever we wanted to. If the defense decides whether it’s going to be a run or pass based on our formation, we are set up to surprise them. But we’ll likely see Strickland or Neal in there alone, running the same draw play with the fake pass into the waiting arms of people like Clemson’s 6-5 340 Dexter Lawrence. I hope I’m wrong but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Babers finally resorted to running his quarterback because the handoffs to Strickland weren’t working and Dungey was the only alternative. We did pass a lot but there the scheme was limited, too. It was mostly look deep for Amba Etta-Tawo (94 catches) or short for Erv Phillips (90 catches). Also, almost all the passes were either deep or to the sideline. The middle of the field was unexplored. (I still remember how Ryan Nassib, Alec Lemon and Marcus Sales carved up teams over the middle in 2012.) With all those receivers running around out there we need to keep the defense guessing.
I’m hoping we will have more balance in both the running and passing attack this year and that, in the second year of the Babers era, we will see the team use a greater variety of plays as well. He’s said that the 4th to 6th week of the second season is when the offense clicks in. That’s NC State, Pittsburgh and Clemson. Hopefully we’ll see something dazzling then. Last year had its moments but the other team’s defense didn’t always look dazzled. Hopefully we just saw part of the offensive package last year and we’ll be dazzling more teams this year.
Baber’s schemes on both sides of the ball seem heavily dependent on the lines. That’s nothing new in football but it’s a problem here because we don’t tend to have dominant lines here. We get occasional superior individuals like Justin Pugh or Art Jones but we don’t get entire lines of players like that. Last season Coach Babers said on his show that he wants more strength on the offensive line to get his running game going. Matt Park interpreted strength as ‘size’ and quoted the heights and weights of our next opponent as what we have to shoot for. I looked up their heights and weights of our starting offensive linemen and they were actually bigger than that. (I’d actually prefer lighter, quicker linemen: the Denver Broncos have had great success with 280 pounders for years. If you get there furstest, you’ll have the moistest.) I called in about that and Dino said it’s not about heights and weights. He wants both lower body strength and also quickness. That’s an infrequent combination and guys with both those qualities are a lot more likely to wind up at Ohio State or Alabama than Syracuse.
Defensively, he wants all the pressure he needs on the other team’s backfield to come from the front four so the ‘back seven’ and cover passes and converge on running plays. Scott Shafer was a “bring the house” guy. By the end of the season, Babers, (through his DC, Brian Ward), was starting to use more and more blitzes to get defensive pressure. I think we need to maximize our offensive versatility and deception to make up for the fact that not every one of our linemen will be a Justin Pugh. And I think we need to be willing to “bring the house” on defense to disrupt the offense and create big plays, even if we might give some up as well. But apparently, we will continue to go with the straight-ahead, one back running game, hoping the pass will open it up. If we use more receivers and throw to all parts of the field that might happen. And we will continue to circle the wagons and converge on the play on defense. I hope it works better in year 2 of the Babers Era than it did in year 1.
