pj fleck

[Bryan Fuller]

Last week I looked at changes in the rosters in the B1G East so far in the offseason. Today we will do the same for the B1G West. The NFL Draft declaration date has come and gone, so we have some more clarity, though transfers are still in the process of deciding. As I said with the East piece, my plan is to come back through in a couple months and take a look at how the dust settled on these respective rosters. 

 

Purdue

EXITS

The Boilermakers have had a busy offseason, with their most notable exit being coach Jeff Brohm. With a new regime in, you'd expect quite a bit of turnover and there's plenty of it. Graduation/the NFL has taken all three of their stars in the passing game, QB Aidan O'Connell, WR Charlie Jones, and TE Payne Durham, as well as a huge chunk of their pass defense, starting corners Cory Trice and Reese Taylor, as well as HSP Jalen Graham and LB Kieren Douglas. They will be returning most of the OL and lead back Devin Mockobee, but that's a lot of experience and production to make up, before we even get into the portal subtractions.

To the portal the Boilermakers lost Spencer Holstege, a starting G for this year's team, as well as three useful pieces on the defensive line, Lawrence Johnson and Branson Deen, who were starter-ish rotation pieces at defensive tackle, and starting DE Jack Sullivan. All four of those players opted to pack their bags for warmer weather, with Deen opting to head to Miami, Johnson to Auburn, Holstege to UCLA, and Sullivan to rival USC. Reserve RB Kobe Lewis bailed for FAU as well, and then an assortment of bench names I am not familiar with are in the portal as well. It's going to be a pretty different Purdue team that shows up in Ann Arbor to play the Wolverines in the fall than the one we saw in Indianapolis a month ago. 

ACQUISITIONS

Well we can start with the new HC Ryan Walters, who is replacing Brohm. Walters, who turns 37 tomorrow, is considered a top young mind in coaching circles after presiding over elite defenses back-to-back seasons at Illinois, where he had minimal talent to work with. Seemed like a smart hire to me and he's reshuffled the coaching staff, bringing new DC Kevin Kane with him from Illinois (he was the associate head coach and OLB coach) and hiring new OC Graham Harrell, of Texas Tech QB fame from the late 2000s, away from West Virginia. Kane will help him rebuild the Purdue defense, while Harrell will ensure continuity with Brohm's Air Raid scheme. All three of these coaches are under the age of 40, so this is an exceptionally youthful staff. 

The biggest question for the Boilermakers with Aidan O'Connell leaving is what will happen at QB. Their big add out of the portal was QB Hudson Card from Texas, a high 4* prospect in the 2020 class who got passed over for Quinn Ewers in Austin, but played some when Ewers was injured this past season and did fine. Card seems to be the favorite to start, though Purdue managed to keep Brady Allen, their Class of 2022 QB who was a solid 4* himself, in the fold. Allen originally had his name in the portal, but pulled it out to return to Purdue, suggesting there will be a legitimate QB competition here. 

Elsewhere Purdue has added a few supplemental pieces, Isaiah Nichols (DT) and Anthony Brown (S) from Arkansas, the former being a middling rotational piece on the DL, while the latter got a redshirt as a true freshman this past season. They also got interior OL Jalen Grant, a two year starter at Bowling Green, to jump on board. None of these strike as particularly high impact additions, and I would expect them to add some more as the next few months roll along and the new staff gets their feet under them properly. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: more or less chaos]

How they Fleck you [Bryan Fuller]

This article stole the sponsor:  Starting this season, Neck Sharpies is sponsored by HomeSure Lending and Matt Demorest. Mortgage rates are LOW right now, so if you've been waiting to see if football is actually played as a sign that a refinance can save you a bunch of money, now's a good time to strike. It usually takes Matt and his people about 5 minutes to know if a refi makes sense, and if it doesn't they'll tell you. You know the guy, and you know from a bunch of other readers that he does a better job and charges less than the mills that mistreat Beileins.

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If you saw any highlights of Minnesota last year it was probably a long bomb to Rashod Bateman, or a 14-yard slant to Tyler Johnson. You probably kenned along the way that Tanner Morgan is one of the most efficient passers in the conference, with 10 YPC and a fantastic TD/INT ratio. It might surprise you to learn, then, that Minnesota last year was one of the most run-heavy teams with the most simplistic passing games in the country.

Mathlete and I recreated a lot of advanced stats over the offseason and Minnesota came out 13th in run rate and 14th in standard down run rate. They were also 48th in OL yards, 44th in run efficiency, and way down at 112th in run explosiveness, opposite a passing game that was 10th in efficiency and 5th in explosiveness. Of note they were also 98th in sack rate.

Usually that's the profile of a MANBALL team--an Iowa or Carr-era Michigan that runs until they see 8-man boxes and only then unleash their NFL arms and receivers. In PJ Fleck's case, however, it's not him choosing to run the ball but his opponents.

Minnesota's RPO offense is all about stretching linebackers' priorities and daring them to cheat towards one or the other. They have a big offensive line that doesn't pass protect very well, so the entire (effective) passing game is about throwing to covered receivers with just a little bit of leverage. That kind of passing offense works so long as the guy is truly in man and doesn't have help inside.

To take care of the help, they run RPOs. Lots of them. So much of them that you can almost force them into running the ball all game. Then they're running the ball so much you start cheating towards it and OPE, you let Bateman or Autman-Bell loose.

[After THE JUMP: How Minnesota throws it to the same three spots on the field and gets away with it]

You're good Jake but if you're still my best quarterback here by 2020 that would really disappoint these people. [Patrick Barron]

In our slack chat I was making a point about how P.J. Fleck's hard pursuit of Andrel Anthony is a good sign for Andrel's prospects, and we got on to some of the meme-ish "always offer [position] if [school] is after him" recruiting rules.

The Rules: The internet has no lack of "Position U" articles. They come in three varieties: too focused on a point in the past when only a few teams threw the ball (hi Purdue), too focused on NFL careers (hi Miami), or too focused on the present because the author's real intention is Oklahoma should get an extra trophy for two recent Heisman winners they ganked from Big 12 rivals. Getting consistent stardom out of five-stars (USC) and five-star transfers is harder than it sounds, but that's soft content for sites that go for peak clicks-per-neuron ratios.

The point of this exercise is to identify serial scouting over-performance, ie schools that get more out of less at a position with such frequency that an offer from that school reflects positively on a guy Michigan recruited. Also things will be biased to the Midwest, because that's what I'm most familiar with. This is MGoBlog, where we use copious amounts of research to bring you the real, sometimes counterintuitive answers.

Like for example this one that was stupendously simple:

Oregon Quarterbacks

image

via NBC's twitter

Pro-Style Era: Bill Musgrave, Danny O'Neil, Tony Graziani, Akili Smith, Joey Harrington, Jason Fife, Kellen Clemons

Spread Era: Dennis Dixon, Jeremiah Masoli, Darron Thomas, Marcus Mariota, Justin Herbert

There is ONE. One damn year since Mike Bellotti came onboard has Oregon had less than awesome quarterback play, that in 2015 with a D-II transfer sandwiched between three years of Mariota and four of Herbert. Almost none of these guys were major recruits. Herbert was #659 in his class, barely higher than the highest Michigan State commit. Mariota was #491 and the #3 player in Hawaii. Darron Thomas was the relative blue-chip at #280, the #5 Dual-Threat to the composite. Masoli was an unheralded JuCo transfer. You have to go back to Dennis Dixon, the #2 dual-threat in the 2003 class (#53 overall) to find a guy who cracked a top-250. And that followed an insane streak by Bellotti going back to the late 1980s.  Onetime expected-to-be-a-Michigan-commit Tyler Shough is expected to be the next guy.

They have had their whiffs but a lot of their transfers were good elsewhere—Johnny Durocher at Washington, Braxton Burmeister is expected to start at VT. Bryan Bennett went to SE Louisiana but made an NFL roster. Jake Rodrigues, the half-decent SDSU guy we faced, was an Oregon transfer too.

2nd Team: Jim Harbaugh Quarterbacks

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It's had its moments. [Bryan Fuller]

I really tried not to do the homer thing, but after spending half a night trying to find any other answer, the guy who was the subject of a two-parter on under-the-radar QB recruiting by me in 2015 is the guy. Harbaugh really had quite a streak going before Michigan, and that's not even counting guys like RGIII, Taysom Hill, Brock Osweiller, Tanner Price and Connor Shaw who decommitted from Stanford when he couldn't get them in for some reason or another.

As for those he did get, start with two USD pros, Todd Mortensen and Josh Johnson. At Stanford he recruited Andrew Luck and successors Josh Nunes and Kevin Hogan. He drafted Colin Kaepernick. At Michigan however he's so far mostly played transfers. Grad transfer Jake Rudock worked out great, after about half a season. John O'Korn did not work out, and Shea Patterson was a mixed success. Two attempts at inserting home grown redshirt freshmen in hopes they'd take four years to dislodge were ended almost immediately by a pair of Wisconsin headshots, one to Brandon Peters in 2017 and the other issued to Dylan McCaffery in 2019, so those are mostly incomplete. Peters got recruited over by Patterson, bailed, and was a decent starter for Illinois last year. McCaffrey would be a redshirt sophomore this year.

HONORABLE MENTION

Michigan State under Dantonio. Brad Salem(?) had a string of good ones from Kirk Cousins to Connor Cook, to early career Brian Lewerke, with less-than-serviceable Andrew Maxwell and Tyler O'Connor thrown in between. NC State has more quarterbacks in the NFL today than any two schools, but they're mostly transfers and from other regimes.

[Hit THE JUMP for shorter writeups because getting tired of Wisconsin takes less time than trying to outright my bias]

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