Mailbag, Because I Have To

Si?

It is mailbag time, and this necessarily involves talking about the various job securities of the various coaches on the staff. Apologies in advance for this.

I've followed the program pretty closely for the last few decades through friends, family, and former players. Wondering if your general opinion of Brady Hoke's competence as a head coach continues to reflect your 2007 assessment?

Go Blue,
Andrew Steketee

That 2007 assessment was a "Profile in Cronyism" at the dark point of the coaching search when reasonable options were thin on the ground and names like Hoke and Jim Grobe were getting thrown around, and it laid out the case that no reasonable Big Ten program, let alone Michigan, could possibly consider Hoke for a head coaching gig. At the time he was 22-36 at Ball State and had just finished his first winning season, that a 7-6 campaign. "Evidence suggests Hoke is outclassed in the MAC," I said at the time.

So of course Hoke immediately ripped off the best season in Ball State history, finishing the regular season before inexplicably losing to Buffalo in the MAC championship game. San Diego State hired him away, whereupon former Michigan offensive coordinator Stan Parrish took over. Parrish wasted no time impressing his indelible stamp on the program by losing 45-13. Hoke took over a 2-10 program; in his second year they're 8-4. Since the four losses have come against Missouri, BYU, TCU, and Utah and the biggest deficit was five points against TCU(though that game wasn't nearly as close as all that), his resume is now a plausible Big Ten resume…

…at Minnesota, where he's a rumored candidate. I know the emailer wasn't suggesting that Hoke would be considered for the Michigan job, but it's worth mentioning that Michigan's coaching search got so desperate in 2007 that a guy who put up a 12-2 season and has turned around San Diego State but still doesn't have a reasonable resume was getting kicked around.

Brian,

I know you briefly alluded to this on TWIS, but what are the chances that Randy Shannon could possibly come and be our defensive coordinator? There are SO many great reasons why:

- He graduates players (I believe he had one of the highest APR rates for a BCS school)
- Pipeline to the South, especially Florida, so we can get their recruits
- Much better than GERG
- Able to relate to all sorts of players with different backgrounds
- Players stayed out of trouble

The only thing is whether or not Rich Rod would be willing to forgo the 3-3-5 or if Randy Shannon can coach the 3-3-5.

Speaking of which – isn’t that the hinge question? Do we want someone who can actually coach the 3-3-5 or do we want someone to switch to the 3-4 or 4-3?

Jin Shi

I made a joking reference to Shannon in TWIS without thinking much other than "this is a defensive coach who is not Robinson," but… yeah, seriously. Unlike Robinson, Shannon has a track record of recent college success. His current team is 16th in total D and 22nd in scoring, seventh in sacks, first in TFLs, and third in pass efficiency D. FEI has them third nationally*.

Downsides: they got bombed by Florida State and gave up 31 to Virginia Tech—both games featured rushes of over eighty yards, and Shannon's had access to the steady stream of insane athletes that just hangs out at Miami Northwestern so his defenses probably should be pretty good.

Still, Wikipedia sayeth:

During Shannon's six years as UM's defensive coordinator, his defenses ranked as follows in total defense nationally:

• 2001 - 6th
• 2002 - 7th
• 2003 - 2nd
• 2004 - 28th
• 2005 - 4th
• 2006 – 7th

Dang. Once he got the top job at Miami there was some dropoff, as Shannon's Ds finished 33rd, 28th, 29th, and 16th in yardage. FEI has the Shannon defenses, 41st (2007),  65th (2008), 18th, and 3rd, which is really interesting since the conventional measure hardly differentiates between Shannon's first three years.

That's a full decade of defenses somewhere between bludgeoning and decent, mostly bludgeoning. And as anyone who's watched a Miami game in the last four years can tell you, Shannon is a great guy with a heartbreaking life story who graduated his kids and kept them out of trouble. He should help Michigan's Florida recruiting even further, as he's a guy respected across the state. If Michigan changes DCs again they could do much worse.

The 3-3-5 issue shouldn't come up. Shannon's spent his entire career playing and coaching Miami's basic 4-3 cover two; asking him to run anything else would be as nuts as hiring a guy who'd driven Syracuse into a crater and asking him to run a defense he doesn't know, and one of the preconditions to keeping Rodriguez around should be "no more transparently nuts decisions, okay?"

*(Guess who's #1: West Virginia. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU.)

On the inefficiency of the offense:

So I found out why we suck.  Turns out it isn't our defense.  The reason we cant win is because of the offense and whatever kicker we trot out there to kick FGs.  Look at the comparison between yards/game rank vs. points/yd rank among the top 30 offenses (total offense by total yards, not yds/game).  We rank #6 in yds/game but #26 in pts/yd.  So we move a ton of yards without getting much in return.  Well, i should say we don't get enough in return.  You'd think or expect our yd/game rank to be in the neighborhood of our pts/yd rank....but we have the worst differential among the top 30 offenses (total yards).  Who knows where we'd rank if I went to all FBS teams.

What's also interesting is who is at the top.  Teams with a high negative delta (pts/yd rank minus yd/game rank) get more points than they should be expected to.  This can be because of a number of factors--they don't turn the ball over, they don't miss field goals, and/or their defense forces turnovers and provides shorter fields for the offense.  In any case we now know why such a boring Wisconsin offense scores so many fricking points.  They are #1 in pts/yd.  OSU is #5.  Neither of these teams are prolific, but they are extremely efficient and they don't screw up.  Oregon, Boise State, and TCU are just fricking awesome all around.  Stanford is another team that makes the most of its chances.  Michigan's delta goes in the other direction (yd/game is awesome...pts/game not so much).  Obviously we need to move the two numbers closer together. 

Oh, if we scored .0868366 pts/yd, which is what NIU got at #6 in pts/yd rank (and closer to where we should be) we would have scored about 110 more points this year.  If we had Wisconsin's, we would have scored 167 more points this year...hopefully all against OSU, WISC, PSU, Iowa, and MSU.

In summary... our defense can continue to suck and there will still be hope.  Our offense needs to perform on 8 cylinders all the time and we need to get a kicker...have we tried the women's soccer team?

TEAM	YDS/G	PTS/G	pts/yd	PPY RK	YD/GM RANK	Rank Delta
Wisconsin	450.2	43.3	0.096	1	18	-17
Oregon	541.7	50.2	0.093	2	1	1
Boise State	525.5	46.4	0.088	3	4	-1
TCU	491.5	43.2	0.088	4	7	-3
Ohio State	448.8	39.4	0.088	5	19	-14
Northern Illinois	452	39.3	0.087	6	17	-11
Auburn	490.1	42.1	0.086	7	8	-1
East Carolina	445.5	38.2	0.086	8	22	-14
Stanford	467.3	39.8	0.085	9	14	-5
Oklahoma State	537.6	44.9	0.084	10	2	8
Southern Miss	458.2	37.6	0.082	11	15	-4
Nevada	536.9	43.3	0.081	12	3	9
Nebraska	424.3	33.8	0.080	13	27	-14
Alabama	435.6	34.4	0.079	14	25	-11
Hawaii	487.8	38.3	0.079	15	10	5
Houston	480.5	37.7	0.078	16	11	5
Tulsa	503.5	39.3	0.078	17	5	12
Oklahoma	480.1	37.5	0.078	18	12	6
San Diego State	448.5	35	0.078	19	20	-1
Arkansas	489.3	37.3	0.076	20	9	11
Kentucky	437.3	33	0.075	21	24	-3
Air Force	437.4	32.3	0.074	22	23	-1
USC	427.9	31.1	0.073	23	26	-3
Texas A&M	447.6	31.7	0.071	24	21	3
Texas Tech	452.6	31.9	0.071	25	16	9
Michigan	500.9	34.2	0.068	26	6	20
Baylor	478.5	32.6	0.068	27	13	14
Southern Methodist	422.8	27.9	0.066	28	28	0
Miami (FL)	422.6	27.1	0.064	29	30	-1
UAB	422.8	26.8	0.063	30	29	1

This is the thing about looking up at halftime and seeing around 250 yards and ten points in chart form: hoooo boy was Michigan bad at converting drives into points this year.

A chunk of this is on the kickers. I don't think Michigan made any calls a David Romer obsessive wouldn't regard as broadly correct because of their field goal situation, so all of the disadvantages going 4 of 13 provides should be encapsulated in FEI's kicking stat, in which Michigan has proudly reclaimed their crown as the worst in the nation. They're giving up an astounding 1.15 points relative to an average team every time they line up to kick. Pretending they're average closes the gap between themselves and puts them in a tie with A&M and Texas Tech; something in the 30s gets them slightly past.

Turnovers are another chunk. This one's not quite as easy to quantify. Michigan's 27 lost turnovers is 109th nationally. I'm going to take a wild stab at how much of Michigan's deficiency here is due to the huge TO rate that should be generally correct but vulnerable to a lot of niggling details, so bear with me. Michigan's drives last year excluding end-of-half situations that did not result in points:

• 43 punts
• 57 TDs
• 13 FGAs
• 27 turnovers

The national median in turnovers lost is 20. If we wave a wand and pretend this is Michigan's distribution, and leave the spread unchanged otherwise we get another 2.7 punts, 3.5 TDs, and eight tenths of a field goal. That's another two points a game, which gets Michigan up to… 22nd.

So then the rest of it is starting almost every drive at their 20 or worse thanks to a terrible defense, no punt return game, no kick return game, and everything else that goes into Michigan's average starting field position, in which Michigan ranks 92nd relative to the opponent.

If we're assigning blame, the the offense appear to be about 25% responsible thanks to those turnovers with special teams taking 50% and the defense 25%.

We have done this the last two years but it's worth noting that West Virginia was consistently positive in TO margin after Rodriguez's first year, so it's not like this is an artifact of the system. I know I keep saying this in defiance of persistently agonizing triple digit rankings. Maybe next year, when Rodriguez has an upperclassman at QB for the first time?

Brian,
Do you weigh the fact that Harbaugh probably is available only this offseason in your calculation to retain RR for a fourth year?  Does the presumed availability of a top-tier candidate with deep UM ties change the analysis of whether RR should be retained?  It has to in my mind--I'm not sure what conclusion it leads me to--does it in your mind?  Or do you challenge my assumption about only this offseason?
--
David

I'm not sure I agree with the premise. I can see Harbaugh sticking around for another year at Stanford if he knows he's got a shot at the job next year, or leaving his team a la Al Groh to coach his alma mater, or not actually getting a pro job offer for whatever reason. (Let's stipulate that there's no college job Michigan couldn't poach Harbaugh from and no college program is likely to be foolhardy enough to test that.)  But it is accurate that Harbaugh is available now and might not be in the future.

Does that change the calculus? Yeah. Without Harbaugh sitting there with an 11-1 Stanford team he built by hand from the finest recruits known to Stanford, I don't think the conversation about Rodriguez's job security is anywhere near as intense. Who's the next hot guy? Patterson and Peterson seem married to their current schools, Chip Kelly isn't going anywhere. The two guys next on everyone's lips are Dana Holgorsen and Gus Mahlzahn, two offensive coordinators who have never been head coaches.

Sans Harbaugh, Michigan would probably take a look at the available options, glance back at Denard, and say "well, one more year probably can't hurt." With him, it's a choice between as-probable-as-it-gets long term success and an awkward fit with the Big Ten offensive player of the year, or hoping that someone can finally turn Rodriguez's defense at Michigan into something other than doom. There are worse spots to be in. There are better.