SWC75
Bored Historian
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I decided that now that we have completed the football season, I’d look back at what I said in my season preview and talk about how things worked out. I’ll focus on the players and my discussion of various departments of the team.
THE COACHING STAFF
Then:
The smartest thing Doug Marrone did in his tenure here was to hire Scott Shafer as his defensive coordinator. He had a wealth of experience, having been in that position at Northern Illinois, Western Michigan, Stanford and Michigan. He’d lost the Michigan job when he clashed with Rich Rodriguez over the type of defense he wanted to run, which made him available for Marrone. Shafer believes in aggressive defense: disrupt the play and meet ‘em at the point of attack. He’s willing to give up the occasional big plays if he can manufacture more of them for his team. It was a refreshing change from years of “read and react” defense under Pasqualoni and Robinson, (to be fair to Coach P, we did have an “attack” defense for a time in the 90’s and had great success with it but then backed off of it). The fans love his approach and his passionate, enthusiastic personality.
He repeatedly uses a phrase that was Ben Schwartzwalder’s favorite phrase: “hard-nosed”. He described the entire community as “hard-nosed”, (I guess you’ve got to be that way to live here). He has the look of a veteran of a lot of goal line stands, (although he was a quarterback when he played). He’s not an alum but neither was Schwartzwalder, or Maloney or MacPherson or Pasqualoni or Robinson. Most coaches aren’t but successful ones can still become legends at a school and pillars of a community. And if he prefers to move on someday, we won’t be hurt by it because our illusions about that no longer exist. He seems very down to earth. One of Marrone’s problems may have been that he had illusions about the job and couldn’t deal with it when they got destroyed. Coach Shafer seems to know exactly what is involved in the job and what he has to do to do it well. Of course he’s never been a head coach before. He may be someone who like Robinson, was promoted beyond his level of competence. But Marrone had never been a head coach and neither had Maloney or Biggie Munn, (or Jim Boeheim for that matter). Schwartzwalder, MacPherson and Pasqualoni had been head coaches but not at this level. We haven’t had someone who had already been a head coach at this level come here since Ossie Solem in 1937. Shafer notes that only once as a coach has he spent the game on the sidelines, rather than in the booth. We have no idea what game day skills he’ll have as a head coach. We probably won’t know everything we need to know about Scott Shafer until he has faced adversity as Marrone did. Until then, we should allow us ourselves some optimism about his tenure here.
Shafer coached under Jim Harbaugh at Stanford and often makes reference to that experience. Obviously, if he can coach us like Harbaugh coached Stanford and the 49ers, we’ll be in great shape. He’s been asked if he will be a “hands on” head coach, taking a big role in planning and calling the defenses and offenses or is he going to be a CEO type coach, running the program but letting his coordinators run the team. Marrone was seen as a CEO type and Shafer says he’s going to do it the same way but with his personality, I suspect he’ll be more hands-on, which means our defense will continue to be aggressive and opportunistic. The fact that he’s hired his long-time friend Chuck Bullough to be his defensive coordinator underscores that, (and I suspect they will be spending a lot of time together talking about the defense, rather than having Bullough simply report to his CEO).
The history of rebuilding projects at SU is that coaches tend to put their best athletes on defense to hold down the score and keep the team in the games. Then they try to recruit to catch up the offense before those athletes graduate. Frank Maloney tried that and went from 2-9 in 1974 to 6-5 the next year. He went out and got Bill Hurley, Art Monk and Joe Morris. But by the time they were ready to get going, the top defenders were gone and we went from a team that could stop people from scoring but not score much ourselves to a team that could score with anybody but couldn’t stop anybody from scoring. Coach Mac did the same thing. His early good teams were great defensive teams but impotent on when they got the ball. But he managed to keep the defense going until the offense caught up in a big way in 1987. That success, (along with the then-new Carrier Dome) carried us to that 14 year run of winning seasons.
Marrone’s 2010 team got to the Pinstripe Bowl largely through Shafer’s defense, which allowed us to win games with scores by scores like 13-9, 19-14 and 13-10. He had, surprisingly, a lot to work with. We had four senior defensive tackles, all round 300 pounds, Chandler Jones, who now plays defensive end for the Patriots, two all-conference linebackers, Derrell Smith and Doug Hogue, (both of whom had started out as running backs), and two strong defensive backs in Max Suter, (a former receiver), and Mike Holmes. Then we lost all those guys except Jones who was injured and missed half the 2011 season. Shafer’s reputation suffered somewhat as the defense could no longer keep us in games until the offense found a way to scratch out a win. Last year the offense exploded while the defense started to get better. We had the best team in the conference. The early games where we shot ourselves in the foot held us back from winning it outright. This year’s defense has grown up again and Shafer and McCullough will once more have plenty to work with.
Shafer then went out and got George McDonald to be his offensive coordinator and top recruiter. He’s coached at Minnesota, Miami and Arkansas as well as the Cleveland Browns, although he’s never been a coordinator. Like many on the new staff, he’s had a history with Shafer, having been on the Western Michigan staff when Shafer was there, (like Marrone, Scott was taking notes as he went along on who he’d like to work with when he became a head man).
Shafer, Bullough and McDonald seem like the type of guys you’d want on your side and we’ve got ‘em.
McDonald has already helped us recruiting down the Atlantic Coast, something we can now do since we are an ACC team. In the first class, they brought in four Florida players, one from Alabama, one from Georgia, one from Virginia and one from Delaware. In the one being put together now we’ve also got players from North Carolina and Tennessee. They are also mining the Midwest, (where most of these coaches come from). We’ve gotten players from Michigan, Illinois and Missouri, not normally our recruiting areas.
For years, we endured bad to mediocre offenses. Last year Marrone and his staff revamped the offense based on what they saw several different successful teams doing and the personal they had and we suddenly we finished 17th in the country with 476 yards per game, (up from 348 the previous year). After shooting ourselves in the foot early in the season we wound up averaging 30 points per game. We need to continue that offensive productiveness. We know McDonald is a good recruiter. Let’s see how he is at designing and offense and game day play-calling.
The task of Shafer, Bullough and McDonald will be to get both the offense and defense going at once without all the mistakes that plagued us in 2011 and early last year. That was the formula in 1987. They have got to do a good job. (THGTDAGJ)
Now:
Our staff was learning on the job and there were some serious bumps along the road. First they chose the wrong guy to be their quarterback. Hunt turned out to be better and more appropriate for our strength, (running the ball). He’s also the one with the future, with two more years of eligibility. I don’t know if we would won either of those first two games with Hunt but since he turned out to be “the guy it would have been better to start his development as early as possible.
Then there was the defensive backfield. I thought it would be a major strength with its combination of experienced plays and young, speedy back-ups. It turns out the back-ups were better and that we needed to go with tighter coverage. I credit Shafer and Bullough with recognizing that and making changes. By the end of the season, our pass defense had finally become a strength of the team, (with the exception of that fourth quarter vs. Minnesota).
Then there were the game plans against Georgia Tech and Florida State. We switched from a 4-3 defense to a 3-4 to try to stop the Yellow Jacket’s triple option. This despite the loss of top linebacker Dyshawn Davis for the game with an injury. The idea was that we could cover the field better with linebackers than linemen. I saw a piece in TV about how to defend the triple option and the coach who was doing it said that initial penetration into the backfield was the key. We sacrificed that to fan out and cover lanes like on a kick-off. The idea failed miserably as Tech gladly took 5 yards at a time, stretched us out and occasionally burned us with a big game on the way to a 0-56 thrashing. All their players looked like they had been diagramed on a blackboard because we did nothing to disrupt them. Tech made 26 first downs and faced only 8 third downs to do it, (and converted 5 of them). It was the same story against Florida State. We weren’t in the 3-4 but our guys had orders to “keep them in front of you” and State marched down the field throwing undefended 10 yard sideline passes, many of which became 15-20 yard plays because they were so strong and quick we couldn’t tackle them. Jim Boeheim has discovered that your greatest success comes with sticking with the defense you do best and I think Shafer and Bullough have discovered that, while you can make adjustments, you aren’t going to help your team by asking them to completely change their defensive philosophy for a particular opponent.
Offensively, I look at Auburn and wonder what we might have accomplished if, realizing that we had a quarterback in Hunt who is probably a better runner than passer at this point in his career, plenty of good running backs but a questionable receiving corps, we had gone to an old fashioned rushing attack with multiple running backs and a running QB and plenty of fakes and misdirection. I don’t think we’d have wound up playing for the national championship Monday but I think the results could have been a lot better than what we got. Instead we went for a balanced attack when we didn’t have a balanced team. It’s been argued that you have to go with the offense you eventually want to use in order to attract the talent you need to run it. I think winning attracts talent. Fortunately, we scrapped together enough wins to have a winning record. It will be interesting to see if Auburn manages to attract passing and receiving talent in the next couple of years or if they are turned off by their heavy emphasis on the run this year.
The most impressive thing about the coaching staff this year is simply the way they held things together through all the adversity. After losing those 27-48, 14-49, 0-56 and 3-59 games, we came back to win the
next game three times and lost the fourth by a single points. Then we rallied to beat Boston College in the final game and win the bowl game for a 7-6 record. The kids never gave up and the coaches kept the focus on the next game. And Coach Shafer won over the fans with his “tell it like it is” style and his competitive personality. He seemed like a guy you’d want your kids playing for and had us all rooting for him.
I think the staff learned as much this year as they will in the rest of their tenure here. The lessons will hold them in good stead in the future. I also think we have more balanced talent on offense next year and that offensive scheme they went with will become more productive. The defense will be good but a bit thin. I think the staff will be able to use this good start to get out and recruit the players that will be part of even stronger SU teams in the future.
THE COACHING STAFF
Then:
The smartest thing Doug Marrone did in his tenure here was to hire Scott Shafer as his defensive coordinator. He had a wealth of experience, having been in that position at Northern Illinois, Western Michigan, Stanford and Michigan. He’d lost the Michigan job when he clashed with Rich Rodriguez over the type of defense he wanted to run, which made him available for Marrone. Shafer believes in aggressive defense: disrupt the play and meet ‘em at the point of attack. He’s willing to give up the occasional big plays if he can manufacture more of them for his team. It was a refreshing change from years of “read and react” defense under Pasqualoni and Robinson, (to be fair to Coach P, we did have an “attack” defense for a time in the 90’s and had great success with it but then backed off of it). The fans love his approach and his passionate, enthusiastic personality.
He repeatedly uses a phrase that was Ben Schwartzwalder’s favorite phrase: “hard-nosed”. He described the entire community as “hard-nosed”, (I guess you’ve got to be that way to live here). He has the look of a veteran of a lot of goal line stands, (although he was a quarterback when he played). He’s not an alum but neither was Schwartzwalder, or Maloney or MacPherson or Pasqualoni or Robinson. Most coaches aren’t but successful ones can still become legends at a school and pillars of a community. And if he prefers to move on someday, we won’t be hurt by it because our illusions about that no longer exist. He seems very down to earth. One of Marrone’s problems may have been that he had illusions about the job and couldn’t deal with it when they got destroyed. Coach Shafer seems to know exactly what is involved in the job and what he has to do to do it well. Of course he’s never been a head coach before. He may be someone who like Robinson, was promoted beyond his level of competence. But Marrone had never been a head coach and neither had Maloney or Biggie Munn, (or Jim Boeheim for that matter). Schwartzwalder, MacPherson and Pasqualoni had been head coaches but not at this level. We haven’t had someone who had already been a head coach at this level come here since Ossie Solem in 1937. Shafer notes that only once as a coach has he spent the game on the sidelines, rather than in the booth. We have no idea what game day skills he’ll have as a head coach. We probably won’t know everything we need to know about Scott Shafer until he has faced adversity as Marrone did. Until then, we should allow us ourselves some optimism about his tenure here.
Shafer coached under Jim Harbaugh at Stanford and often makes reference to that experience. Obviously, if he can coach us like Harbaugh coached Stanford and the 49ers, we’ll be in great shape. He’s been asked if he will be a “hands on” head coach, taking a big role in planning and calling the defenses and offenses or is he going to be a CEO type coach, running the program but letting his coordinators run the team. Marrone was seen as a CEO type and Shafer says he’s going to do it the same way but with his personality, I suspect he’ll be more hands-on, which means our defense will continue to be aggressive and opportunistic. The fact that he’s hired his long-time friend Chuck Bullough to be his defensive coordinator underscores that, (and I suspect they will be spending a lot of time together talking about the defense, rather than having Bullough simply report to his CEO).
The history of rebuilding projects at SU is that coaches tend to put their best athletes on defense to hold down the score and keep the team in the games. Then they try to recruit to catch up the offense before those athletes graduate. Frank Maloney tried that and went from 2-9 in 1974 to 6-5 the next year. He went out and got Bill Hurley, Art Monk and Joe Morris. But by the time they were ready to get going, the top defenders were gone and we went from a team that could stop people from scoring but not score much ourselves to a team that could score with anybody but couldn’t stop anybody from scoring. Coach Mac did the same thing. His early good teams were great defensive teams but impotent on when they got the ball. But he managed to keep the defense going until the offense caught up in a big way in 1987. That success, (along with the then-new Carrier Dome) carried us to that 14 year run of winning seasons.
Marrone’s 2010 team got to the Pinstripe Bowl largely through Shafer’s defense, which allowed us to win games with scores by scores like 13-9, 19-14 and 13-10. He had, surprisingly, a lot to work with. We had four senior defensive tackles, all round 300 pounds, Chandler Jones, who now plays defensive end for the Patriots, two all-conference linebackers, Derrell Smith and Doug Hogue, (both of whom had started out as running backs), and two strong defensive backs in Max Suter, (a former receiver), and Mike Holmes. Then we lost all those guys except Jones who was injured and missed half the 2011 season. Shafer’s reputation suffered somewhat as the defense could no longer keep us in games until the offense found a way to scratch out a win. Last year the offense exploded while the defense started to get better. We had the best team in the conference. The early games where we shot ourselves in the foot held us back from winning it outright. This year’s defense has grown up again and Shafer and McCullough will once more have plenty to work with.
Shafer then went out and got George McDonald to be his offensive coordinator and top recruiter. He’s coached at Minnesota, Miami and Arkansas as well as the Cleveland Browns, although he’s never been a coordinator. Like many on the new staff, he’s had a history with Shafer, having been on the Western Michigan staff when Shafer was there, (like Marrone, Scott was taking notes as he went along on who he’d like to work with when he became a head man).
Shafer, Bullough and McDonald seem like the type of guys you’d want on your side and we’ve got ‘em.
McDonald has already helped us recruiting down the Atlantic Coast, something we can now do since we are an ACC team. In the first class, they brought in four Florida players, one from Alabama, one from Georgia, one from Virginia and one from Delaware. In the one being put together now we’ve also got players from North Carolina and Tennessee. They are also mining the Midwest, (where most of these coaches come from). We’ve gotten players from Michigan, Illinois and Missouri, not normally our recruiting areas.
For years, we endured bad to mediocre offenses. Last year Marrone and his staff revamped the offense based on what they saw several different successful teams doing and the personal they had and we suddenly we finished 17th in the country with 476 yards per game, (up from 348 the previous year). After shooting ourselves in the foot early in the season we wound up averaging 30 points per game. We need to continue that offensive productiveness. We know McDonald is a good recruiter. Let’s see how he is at designing and offense and game day play-calling.
The task of Shafer, Bullough and McDonald will be to get both the offense and defense going at once without all the mistakes that plagued us in 2011 and early last year. That was the formula in 1987. They have got to do a good job. (THGTDAGJ)
Now:
Our staff was learning on the job and there were some serious bumps along the road. First they chose the wrong guy to be their quarterback. Hunt turned out to be better and more appropriate for our strength, (running the ball). He’s also the one with the future, with two more years of eligibility. I don’t know if we would won either of those first two games with Hunt but since he turned out to be “the guy it would have been better to start his development as early as possible.
Then there was the defensive backfield. I thought it would be a major strength with its combination of experienced plays and young, speedy back-ups. It turns out the back-ups were better and that we needed to go with tighter coverage. I credit Shafer and Bullough with recognizing that and making changes. By the end of the season, our pass defense had finally become a strength of the team, (with the exception of that fourth quarter vs. Minnesota).
Then there were the game plans against Georgia Tech and Florida State. We switched from a 4-3 defense to a 3-4 to try to stop the Yellow Jacket’s triple option. This despite the loss of top linebacker Dyshawn Davis for the game with an injury. The idea was that we could cover the field better with linebackers than linemen. I saw a piece in TV about how to defend the triple option and the coach who was doing it said that initial penetration into the backfield was the key. We sacrificed that to fan out and cover lanes like on a kick-off. The idea failed miserably as Tech gladly took 5 yards at a time, stretched us out and occasionally burned us with a big game on the way to a 0-56 thrashing. All their players looked like they had been diagramed on a blackboard because we did nothing to disrupt them. Tech made 26 first downs and faced only 8 third downs to do it, (and converted 5 of them). It was the same story against Florida State. We weren’t in the 3-4 but our guys had orders to “keep them in front of you” and State marched down the field throwing undefended 10 yard sideline passes, many of which became 15-20 yard plays because they were so strong and quick we couldn’t tackle them. Jim Boeheim has discovered that your greatest success comes with sticking with the defense you do best and I think Shafer and Bullough have discovered that, while you can make adjustments, you aren’t going to help your team by asking them to completely change their defensive philosophy for a particular opponent.
Offensively, I look at Auburn and wonder what we might have accomplished if, realizing that we had a quarterback in Hunt who is probably a better runner than passer at this point in his career, plenty of good running backs but a questionable receiving corps, we had gone to an old fashioned rushing attack with multiple running backs and a running QB and plenty of fakes and misdirection. I don’t think we’d have wound up playing for the national championship Monday but I think the results could have been a lot better than what we got. Instead we went for a balanced attack when we didn’t have a balanced team. It’s been argued that you have to go with the offense you eventually want to use in order to attract the talent you need to run it. I think winning attracts talent. Fortunately, we scrapped together enough wins to have a winning record. It will be interesting to see if Auburn manages to attract passing and receiving talent in the next couple of years or if they are turned off by their heavy emphasis on the run this year.
The most impressive thing about the coaching staff this year is simply the way they held things together through all the adversity. After losing those 27-48, 14-49, 0-56 and 3-59 games, we came back to win the
next game three times and lost the fourth by a single points. Then we rallied to beat Boston College in the final game and win the bowl game for a 7-6 record. The kids never gave up and the coaches kept the focus on the next game. And Coach Shafer won over the fans with his “tell it like it is” style and his competitive personality. He seemed like a guy you’d want your kids playing for and had us all rooting for him.
I think the staff learned as much this year as they will in the rest of their tenure here. The lessons will hold them in good stead in the future. I also think we have more balanced talent on offense next year and that offensive scheme they went with will become more productive. The defense will be good but a bit thin. I think the staff will be able to use this good start to get out and recruit the players that will be part of even stronger SU teams in the future.
