scott shafer

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FORMATION NOTES: All gun.

Michigan was about 50% 2TE and 50% 3-wide, with a couple 3TE plays in short yardage and a couple 4 WR plays on passing downs. Note above that Eubanks is split wide, which he was on about half his snaps.

There was a fair bit of this, which goes in the chart as "Shotgun trips H":

H = tight end off the line of scrimmage. Combined with trips this necessarily means a covered slot receiver. MTSU seemed to have no idea what to do with this and continually dedicated a bunch of DBs out over the receivers, leaving wide open spaces. Your author is continually surprised this gambit keeps working both for and against Michigan.

SUBSTITUTION NOTES: QB was Patterson with a couple of goofy cameos from McCaffrey until the third quarter, when McCaffrey got three drives. Patterson actually got the last TD drive; Milton then got the last two. RB did indeed see all five guys get first-half snaps. Wilson, Haskins, and VanSumeren got a few snaps here and there. Charbonnet and Turner probably had 70-80% of the snaps between them.

WR was more rotation, with the default approach being Collins, Black, and Bell. With Black in the locker room temporarily and Collins on the sideline for no apparent reason, the two-minute drill was Bell, Cornelius Johnson, and Sainristil. Sainristil did not get much meaningful time outside of that.

Lots of two TE sets—about 50%—that were always McKeon and Eubanks. McKeon got almost all of the 1 TE snaps. FWIW, the first guy off the bench in backup time was Schoonmaker. All got a few snaps late as well. No Muhammad.

OL was Hayes/Bredeson/Ruiz/Onwenu/Mayfield. Second team was Barnhart/Filiaga/Vastardis/Korican/Honigford.

[After THE JUMP: arcs defended: 0.]

[DATELINE: THE BURNED OUT HULK THAT USED TO BE ANN ARBOR.]

CONNECTION SHAKY. MASS PANIC AND RIOTS. WHOLE FOODS RAIDED. SINGLE ENDIVE LEAF ALL THAT REMAINS. ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT BUNKERED IN WHAT IS LITERALLY FORT SCHEMBECHLER NOW. TAKING POTSHOTS AT PASSERS-BY THEY CLAIM ARE ZOMBIES. SOME ARE. SOME.

SEND DVDS OF 1997 SEASON. ALSO WATER.

IF… IF I DON'T MAKE IT TELL CHARLES WOODSON I LOVE HIM.

I kid you not, GIS for "looting" and this guy in an off-brand Michigan jersey shows up

Brian,

Let me know when I should start panicking. I am ready at your command.

Peter

Okay this is where I'm at. I've got a go bag ready. Passports, about 10k in cash, various fake mustaches and sunglasses. I'm up do date on all my vaccines. Are you up to date on your vaccines? I can be in Laos in 15 hours, never to be seen again. Rumors of the white tiger of the jungle will flourish. I will become known only in song and legend.

BUT: note that I am not already in Laos. I am sticking around to see what this season has in store, because weird things happen against Notre Dame and—and bear with me here—this game actually felt much less bad than some hammerings from last year. There are some obvious problems at cornerback and Gardner has to play better but when things went wrong it was mostly one thing going wrong, not eight. So it might get fixed. There is no reason to demand a coaching change right now. Let the season play out and see what happens. If Michigan does catch fire in the crappy Big Ten this game will be a footnote.

Meanwhile, there's no reason to assume a coaching change is coming unless you're literally 75% of my inbox…

A true Michigan Man keeps his promises about the Austro-Hungarian Empire circa July 1914.

Brian,

You may recall that I said I would never write to you about Michigan football again after the BW3 Bowl and my comparison of Michigan football to the Austro-Hungarian Empire circa July 1914.  Since the last part is still true, I won’t make this long.  But your entry today about coaching prospects caused me to think about my second school (the Syracuse Orange).

Here are a LOT of assumptions, but (a) assuming the tire fire rages, (b) Hoke is fired, (c) none of the few big names worth watching (i.e., Miles, the Harbros) is/are available, and (d) Syracuse goes 8-5 or better again this year with a mid to late-December victory, what about a guy like Scott Schafer?  He’s in his mid-40s.  He runs an attacking style defense.  He’s from the Midwest.  He favors an up-tempo offense.  He has to coach against Clemson, FSU, Louisville (and ND this year).  He picked up the pieces after Doug Marrone ran off to the NFL with half of his coaching staff last year.

Might he be someone to watch?  I know the experience as Rich Rod’s DC did not work out.  But given his success running the defense at SU (particularly following GROB), that seems like it was more an issue of Rodriguez trying to make him run a defense he didn’t want to run.  He left with grace and took the blame that may not have been 100% his.

Just a thought – I’m grasping at straws . . .

Dan G

UM ‘85

Syr. Law ‘88

I don't think Shafer has a track record to get excited about. He did improve the Syracuse defense upon his arrival but he hit a ceiling pretty quick. FEI rankings for his defenses at 'Cuse:

2009: 70th
2010: 38th
2011: 39th
2012: 39th
2013: 65th (as head coach)

In FEI there are a lot of schedule adjustments so 39th isn't nearly as good as it is in straight yardage rankings. Meanwhile he'd have two years of head coaching experience, the first a 7-6 season, and the second an 8-5 one. I liked Shafer and know for a fact he got a raw deal from Rodriguez's defensive assistants, and then Rodriguez himself. But even if you don't hold that against him his resume is thin.

He is a guy to track, since he is a poachable head coach not in the MAC. That he's worth tracking is a good summation of the available talent this year.

[After The JUMP: I REGRET TO INFORM YOU YOU WILL NOT STOP DRINKING.]

right: Will Moeller/Daily

Nine months ago Michigan fans were suspicious of both of their West Virginia coaching heists. Today one is sitting next to Billy Packer and Jason Whitlock in a suit; the other is a season away from establishing himself for the long haul. Both undertook program-changing measures after a disappointing start, but only one successfully delegated his way to success.

You know who is who. Rich Rodriguez:

• fired Scott Shafer after one year as defensive coordinator,
• hired retread Greg Robinson, and
• forced him to run a 3-3-5-ish defense that incorporated the 3-4 and 4-3 with freshmen everywhere.

He got the sad firing box.

John Beilein:

• literally fired or replaced every one of his assistants,
• hired two up-and-comers from smaller schools, and
• all but abandoned the 1-3-1 defense that was his trademark at West Virginia.

If he can wring the expected improvement out of his 46% freshman usage he'll have Michigan's basketball team in the Big Ten title picture for the first time since Fisher was run out of town.

Both coaches tweaked their specialty offense for different players. Rodriguez coaxed an NCAA-average performance out of true freshman Tate Forcier by relying on his scrambling ability in the pocket and using him as a decoy in the run game. (Or at least trying to—Tate had a bad habit of keeping the ball when his read said hand off.) He improved the offense further with sophomore-who-would-have-been-redshirt-freshman-if-Michigan-had-any-options Denard Robinson. Even the Robinson offense wasn't going back to the old Pat White well. Without a Slaton to put oomph in the read and with defenses far more prepared to deal with it these days, he implemented a rushing game that revolved around the quarterback instead of using him as a "gotcha" thunderbolt. He used the QB rushing staples to implement a terrifying play-action game that often saw receivers open by ten yards.

Terrible defense put Michigan in long-field situations (Michigan led the country in TD drives of more than 85 yards), there was no field goal kicking, and the inexperienced Robinson was a turnover machine. The thing was a bit rickety. It was erratic. It put too much load on Robinson's shoulders. It was also incredibly young and promised infinity when Robinson was old enough to cut out the turnovers. It finished #2 in FEI, which you know because I say it every ten seconds.

Beilein lost his only two upperclassmen from the immensely disappointing 2009 team and returned a collection of role players and youth. He had to know his best player was a point guard who couldn't shoot to save his life. He still had a perimeter four and a spread-the-court offense, but he implemented a ton of ball screens that gave defenses a choice between open threes from guys who shoot at a 38% clip or getting pick-and-rolled to death by Morris and Jordan Morgan. Morgan shot 63% as a result and Michigan vastly exceeded expectations.

This lived up to their rep. Both were regarded as innovators. "Genius" is definitely not a word you want to throw around when you're talking about coaches but their peers seemed to regard Beilein and Rodriguez as people you want to talk to. Beilein doesn't talk but gets the most votes when his peers are asked to judge solely on coaching acumen; Rodriguez does, so he pops up at Oklahoma and his coaches get snapped up two seconds after they're let go. Carr's coaching tree is Brady Hoke and Scot Loeffler, end of story. It's tough to throw a rock in college football without hitting someone inspired by or directly associated with Rodriguez.

But he's not here because he couldn't let go. Of all the numbers associated with his tenure at Michigan this is by far the most damning:

It's the 37 next to Syracuse in the FEI defense ratings. That is a schedule-adjusted, I-AA-ignoring measure of defensive competency featuring Scott Shafer and absolutely no talent a few spots off the defenses of Michigan State and Wisconsin. Last year (Shafer's first) they were 72nd, the year before that 80th when Greg Robinson was the head coach and functional DC.

Maybe that wasn't possible here what with Never Forget…

…and all that. But we do know Shafer, a very good MAC coordinator who Harbaugh picked up and then made Syracuse better than anyone thought possible very quickly, is a good coach. And we know he was undermined and pushed out. Evidence suggests Greg Robinson is a terrible coach but he was undermined, too, and instead of a vaguely worse defense than two BCS teams coupled with Denard Robinson—good for 8-4 at least—we got something that was literally the worst ever in various categories.

Beilein had already scrapped the 1-3-1 before the total program reboot and was rewarded with an uptick in his Kenpom numbers from 67th to 53rd. It's a lot harder to tell who's responsible for what, but Beilein seemingly felt everything was insufficient and blew it all to hell. He still teaches the 1-3-1 but only uses it on occasion; he's left the defense mostly to his assistants. His reward: 35th nationally this year. That's better than his previous three years at Michigan. It's better than he ever did at West Virginia, because he knew what he didn't know.

Rodriguez's problem was never his selection of defensive coordinators, it was his refusal to trust them to do their jobs. The thing about Hoke is this: he does. At SDSU he hired Rocky Long to run a 3-3-5; Rocky Long ran a 3-3-5, and it was pretty good, and now he's the head coach. He hired Al Borges to run a passing-oriented West Coast offense; Borges ran a passing-oriented West Coast offense that wasn't quite as good as Michigan's in FEI's eyes but was still top 20. If he "gets" anything it's that he's a former defensive lineman with a narrowly defined set of assets that does not include being a genius of any variety—he's never been a coordinator. So he's hired two guys with very long, very successful resumes to do that stuff for him. That's an upgrade over Rodriguez, who had one—himself. It's an upgrade over Carr, who had zero*.

When I am trying to be cheerful in the face of Hoke's indifferent record I think about the vagaries of MAC budgets and what Hoke did the instant he escaped them. Mattison is the third excellent hire Hoke's made. That's a trend, one that suggests he, too, knows what he doesn't know. Since I'm a Michigan fan I'm bracing for a fatal flaw, but at least it won't be the same one that sunk Rich Rodriguez.

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*[Ron English masterminded The Horror and does not count. Before his elevation at Michigan he had never been a coordinator. After he left he led the weak unit on the last Kragthorpe Louisville team and has started the slow process of dying at EMU. The only thing he's proven is that he can yell at several future NFL stars effectively.]

Title disclaimer: hate on Donald Rumsfeld all you want—just not here—but the bit about known knowns and known unknowns and unknown unknowns is a useful bit of language. Not intended to endorse or unendorse anything about Rumsfeld. Disclaimers uber alles.