Hello: Shannon Turley, Strength & Conditioning Comment Count

Brian

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First reported($) by 2016 OL commitment Erik Swenson to Scout and later confirmed by many places, including a lot of Stanford players: Shannon Turley, the Cardinal's Director of Football Sports Performance, is taking the same job at Michigan.

Turley has been at  Stanford for eight years, arriving with Harbaugh and staying on after his departure. He first met up with Harbaugh the year before they made the move to Stanford, with Turley taking an equivalent job at San Diego.

Turley is an ideal candidate. Stanford built its program by taking lightly recruited guys and turning them into half-hog, half-demon, all-man on both sides of the line. The first wave of Stanford NFL hits came from the two- and three-star ranks of Walt Harris's recruiting: after consecutive drafts that saw no Stanford players taken, Toby Gerhart was a second rounder in 2010 and a TE and FB went in the seventh round. Since, Stanford linemen and backs have been regular features—13 in the last four drafts, with few of them four-stars and exactly zero true blue-chippers (ie, top 50-ish players with a raft of offers).

Turley has been a large part of that success. Credited as an innovator whose techniques have drastically reduced Stanford's on-field injuries

From 2006, the year before Turley arrived on the Farm, as Stanford’s campus is known, through last season, the number of games missed because of injury on the two-deep roster dropped by 87 percent. In 2012, only two Cardinal players required season-ending or postseason surgical repair; this year, only one.

…Turley was named the 2013 S&C coach of the year and scored a New York Times encomium just over a year ago that described his Chip-Kelly-esque approach to making his players functionally strong and resilient:

His approach is grounded in physics, on the premise that low man wins on contact, that to get low requires mobility and stability and the ability to apply force in the opposite direction. His players bench press, but he cares more about how they lift — with hands closer together, without bouncing the bar off their chests — than how much. He wants them to bend all the way down when they squat.

Freshmen in Turley’s program do not lift weights upon arrival. Instead, for the first few weeks, they do “body work,” or push-ups and pull-ups and squats or lunges without weights; basically old-school, military calisthenics.

“You have all these different genres of training, and we steal from them all,” Turley said. “CrossFit. Bodybuilding. Power lifting. But ultimately, it’s none of those. It’s a system we’ve developed to train football players.”

Turley builds "real-world applicable man strength," and has done so at the place having the most success at doing so relative to recruiting expectations in the country; he has been doing it for eight years. He's young and innovative, but experienced. He's intimately familiar with Jim Harbaugh. He is currently the subject of an outpouring of well wishes mixed with regrets from current and former players on Twitter…

…and he's headed to Ann Arbor.

HIGHLIGHTS

We have some!

Here's a podcast featuring Turley as well, and an extensive Bleacher Report article that's worth your time.

PREDICTION BASED ON FLIMSY EVIDENCE

UPSHOT FOR REST OF COACHING STAFF

Well, with Stanford DC Lance Anderson suddenly a thing again despite the fact that DJ Durkin is, according to Sam, in town means many things are possible. Michigan's coaching staff is now this Sportscenter commercial:

RIP Stu Scott

We should know most of the names by tomorrow or Tuesday, with maybe two or three spots (RB, TE, DBs) still to settle.

Comments

dragonchild

January 5th, 2015 at 8:41 AM ^

After Wellman I was hoping for a guy who was a little more modern than obsessed with strength & weight.  Even got a fair bit of hate for it.  S&C is one of the most important jobs, and lately ours have been terrible.

BIGBLUEWORLD

January 5th, 2015 at 9:56 AM ^

At least Harbaugh knew enough to go after Shannon Turley over Kevin Tolbert.  That's a good sign.  

S&C is the backbone of a football program.