Gibson at WVU
In the comments of Brian's mid-season secondary review, poster Rasmus wrote
"I'd love to see someone do a study of Gibson's tenure as WVU's defensive backs coach, from 2001 to 2007. That's seven seasons of data. Were they generally decent, or a constant liability? Did players leave for no apparent reason? And so on..."
I bit on it.
Here are WVUs rankings in Pass Defense, PD Efficiency and Total Defense:
2001: 1/8/40
2002: 55/47/33
2003: 104/45/74
2004: 32/20/37
2005: 34/30/15
2006: 109/63/62
2007: 14/28/7
First of all, throw out 2001 and 2002 since the players on those teams were inherited by RR and staff. Also, major caveat, as always, about WVU being a Big East team. Also, also, there's the obvious problem that simply using team measurables isn't particularly precise in evaluating DBs specifically. Anyhoo...
What's you see is two sloppy years and three respectable ones.
What I was more interested in was the level of talent they were able to recruit at WVU among DBs. So, first to identify the DBs, I went through the team's leading tacklers from 2005 to 2007 and culled out about 18 of them through that period. Then I looked at the recruiting stats of those 18. Wouldn't you know it, the very highest ranked guy was one Ryan Mundy, who actually led the team in tackles in 2007.
Of the 18 guys who played DB with some regularity, the average Scout star rating was 2.2; 8 were recruited as safeties, 2 as CBs, 2 as WRs, 2 as LBs, 1 QB, and 3 were walkons. Pretty impressive, huh?
Conclusion from rough, derivative evidence: Gibson had shit to work with -- Mundy included according to anybody who reads this board -- and made good with it.
October 20th, 2010 at 6:24 PM ^
Thanks for the data. Unfortunately, we just need more time. It sucks to hear and I think people's patience runs thin when it comes to Michigan football, but we just need to stick it out for another year.
October 20th, 2010 at 6:37 PM ^
It does suck. In reality what else are we all gonna do. It definitely seems it is in everyone's blood to love this team deeply. When they jump on and vent after a big loss, that emotional attachment is behind it. Hard to blame them.
But we need to follow your advice for sure.
October 20th, 2010 at 6:44 PM ^
Its a lot of fun to win every game, but its also fun to not know whether or not you're going to win and not knowing what will happen every Saturday. I am enjoying this season quite substantially. Honestly the only thing that annoys me is how polarized the fan base is. Any criticism of the coaching staff and I'm classified in the "Fire RR now", any praise of improvement and I'm in the "koolaid drinking" crowd. Honestly if we finish with 7-8 or more wins, which is looking probable, I think its will be a pretty solid season.
October 20th, 2010 at 6:33 PM ^
Yeah you know those Big East offenses were juggernauts...
October 20th, 2010 at 6:57 PM ^
He had Big East players himself, you know.
October 20th, 2010 at 7:27 PM ^
yes i know. but when you reduce the overall talent level, its far easier to succeed with a scheme-based approach as opposed to a talent-based approach. when both sides have less talent, better execution of a set scheme thats build to attack the weak points of an offense is far more likely succeed than if overall talent is higher.
its part of the reason why the zone read offense doesnt work in the nfl - nfl linebackers and DEs are too quick and smart.
October 20th, 2010 at 7:47 PM ^
I don't agree. A lot of small-conference teams are high-scoring. An offense can get by with so-so talent if it executes well. A defense with so-so talent is always going to have serious limitations, no matter how disciplined it is. UMass is a good example of both.
As for the zone read in the NFL, it's not so much that it can't work (there isn't much evidence in either direction), but that defenses are so hard-hitting that coaches are afraid that their QBs will get knocked out. (Whether that fear is justified is debatable.) NFL coaches are a very conservative breed.
October 20th, 2010 at 6:34 PM ^
What about the "left for no apparent reason" data? Were you able to find out anything on that one? Great research BTW.......
October 20th, 2010 at 9:40 PM ^
Yeah, it's really hard to reconstruct the recruiting inventory of a team I didn't care about until 2008. It's hard enough to keep track of Michigan. I can say that between 2002 and 2007 WVU took on about 20 safeties and only about 8 CBs. The safety part of that seemed somewhat normal to me -- HS safeties go on to play all over the place at the college level. But the dearth of CBs -- like less than 2 per year on average -- was weird. Those are just the numbers, hard as they can be given the reliability of scout services. As far as who might have been run off through sloth, homesickness, depthchart transfers or not-on-the-same-page type misfortune, I'm just too lazy to dig into that.
October 20th, 2010 at 10:44 PM ^
since a majority of the "athlete's" we have right now who are on defense (and not seeing much of the field at this time) are guys who are safeties (which is a position we seem to have alot of depth at). MRob, Josh Furman, Carvin Johnson, Vinopal, TGordon, Hawthorne, etc.
Let's see for deep safety play, CGordon all alone on an island or any combination of MRob, Fuman, Carvin or Vinopal, in a 2 deep safety formation? Like everyone says, why not? How could our pass defense get much worse?
From what I have see lately, I am also starting to believe, if you are going to play someone early (Fr or RS Fr), they should be playing a position on the field that they are familiar with. If they played safety in HS and you want them to play safety....Good. If they played QB in high school and now you want them to play CB.....not so much.....
October 20th, 2010 at 6:35 PM ^
good info man, but i do think that he just had more athletes at WVU. we may not want to accept it, but there wasn't that much speed to work with when RR got here. hopefully our guys playing this year can step up, and some freshman come in and make an impact. we just need more all-around athletes, which i do feel we are getting.
October 20th, 2010 at 6:37 PM ^
great data points, one can only hope that with time the D and secondary will improve, although i am still hoping for more 4-5 star recruits that want to work and show how great michigan can be
October 20th, 2010 at 6:37 PM ^
I'm most impressed by the way he turned the 109th ranked pass defense in 2006 into the 14th best pass defense in 2007. So, Mary Samsonite (it was on the briefcase!), you're telling me there's a chance that next year we can put things together?
October 20th, 2010 at 7:02 PM ^
Imagine that, we have coaches that know a thing or two about football. From listening to all the RR haters, you'd think our coaching staff came straight out of Podunkville High School.
October 20th, 2010 at 7:45 PM ^
2003. Those are some awful numbers. Almost like our numbers now. Rodriguez third year.
Despite those numbers, they lost a heartbreaker to top-ranked Miami in a famous Thursday night game, then ripped off seven straight wins to close the season, beating bowl teams BC and Pitt and flat out physically smoking a top-5 Va Tech team along the way en route to their first January bowl game, the Gator Bowl actually, in years.
plze repeat thyself. kthnx
October 20th, 2010 at 8:18 PM ^
How about his special teams credentials? After their Sunday that like our Saturday vs. MSU, the Miami Dolphins promptly fired their special teams coach. Hopefully ours isn't so special...
October 20th, 2010 at 9:38 PM ^
I'm not a fan of Gibson because of our secondary's performance and something I read on a WVU message board when RR was hired (they didn't want to lose RR, but were happy to get rid of Gibson).
It is nice to know that maybe the guy isn't so bad after all (though going from 34 to 109.............).
October 20th, 2010 at 9:56 PM ^
Rivals lists Bruce Tall as the safeties coach at WVU, and Gibson as "Secondary coach."
To me that'd be the Kovacs-ish position and the Cam Gordon-ish position. Not sure though.
October 20th, 2010 at 11:49 PM ^
thing im confused on is coach tall coached safeties at wvu, then RR comes here and hires him to be his DL coach...?? Im still skeptical of gibby, but why hire coach tall if he wasnt a DL coach before?
October 21st, 2010 at 3:37 PM ^
Honestly, there is no real good trending with those numbers so it is almost a random walk. That would seem to me that other factors were influencing those statistics as well that would be hard to attribute to your CB coach. Pac Man falls in there somewhere as well which provides one-half of your coaching requirements.