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Message: [QUOTE="Scooch, post: 38835, member: 628"] With all the talk of systems and talent... This pre-dates my following of SU football, but I've heard it said by several folks that our resurgence under Coach Mac really took off when DeLeone came onboard to run the O. A few questions: 1) Is that true? 2) When did he become OC? 3) Did he radically change the offensive system we were running previous to that? 4) Did our recruiting approach change? These are all sincere questions, and here's why I ask: I've long held that SU's success in the 80s and 90s was due to 2 things. The first being that we took a Moneyball approach to offense. Keep in mind that Moneyball is not about getting guys with high OBP, it's about exploiting undervalued players. In our case, that meant recruiting athletic, African-American QBs -- there were literally only a few programs that were recruiting those kids in the 80s and early 90s to play QB (us, WVU, Nebraska, Houston... that might be it). We also recruited for speed in an era when a lot of teams were still stuck in a Big Ten philosophy of recruiting for size. The second was that we benefitted from a relative lack of competition in the northeast. That advantage is probably gone forever, but I think the former always exists in some way, if you're innovative enough. Now I don't know what Marrone's offensive approach is at this point, to be honest. He says he wants to run the Saints system, and I don't know what that means. I'm not saying it's good or bad, I simply don't know. Since he's a Mac guy though, I'm curious what history he's working from, hence the questions about DeLeone. Did we need a few years to get decent production in his offense? Did it take a few years of recruiting the appropriate talent for the system? Just kinda curious. [/QUOTE]

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