Yardbarker: Steven Threet

Sausage Fruits From The Factory

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:21:52 -0500

Okay, I did get two questions answered. One: I asked Illinois center Ryan McDonald about J Leman's American flag tie. Had he seen the picture? Yes. Does he just wear that thing? "Every time I see him with a tie it's in an American flag tie." But he apparently didn't wear it to the wedding. "If you're in a tux, you can't pull that off."

J Leman picture goes here.

The other: I did get my question about the number of tight ends on the roster off. Rodriguez responded "well, now that's not entirely true, we threw to Owen Schmitt quite a bit and sometimes he lined up at tight end," at which point I gave him an "aw, come on" kind of beaten-down puppy dog look and he went into a spiel about how at Michigan they have the sort of tight ends they've never had at West Virginia and how they're looking to use them. I asked further about what was the rationale for having them split into the slot when traditionally slot receivers in the spread are 5'8" electron guys.

Rodriguez: "You want to look for mismatches part of what we're experimenting with that with the tight ends. If they can prove to be a mismatch on the field we'll use them; if they can't, they won't."

This was not as revelatory as I hoped, but it wasn't about how he feels about leadership, man.

Clarification: The stuff about Michigan hating children by ducking out of Lamarr Woodley's golf this is a miscommunication and they'll be there next year.

Observation: Curtis Painter has an unbelievable amount of product in his hair.

Theme: Rich Rodriguez would like you to know he's not married to running 70% of the time. This came up at various times as people came in and out, most artfully asking if he was stupid enough to run Steven Threet 30 times a game but all polite like. Rodriguez: "We've been pigeonholed as a club that runs. We have to have enough flexibility to go a couple different ways. You see one spread and it's not like another spread. The spread you can go a lot of different ways."

Later, he was asked about recruiting and segued in to this bit: "We don't have to have Pat White. Pat's a special guy but you can get a guy who can move a little bit and be accurate, we'll go with that." There was a followup about that and Rodriguez made an interesting point: "We're practicing the same plays when Shawn King is the quarterback and Pat White, we just call them differently. In practice we don't focus on one or the other. In the game we were calling what's working."

Stonum. "Stonum is five months ahead of him because he got there five months ahead." Stonum's chances of playing are better because he enrolled early.

Zinger. Much was made about this "apostles" bit that Rodriguez has going on; at one point Rodriguez clarified the deal: "We've always had a group of leaders; we let the players pick. Sometimes it's as simple as picking pregame music. It's not like we're making major decisions. They're making suggestions."

Angelique Chengelis then got off a pretty good one: "there's only one Jesus Christ." Rodriguez, thankfully, did not claim that happiness for himself.

Thing that makes HULK SMASH: IF YOU START A QUESTION WITH "IT'S A CLICHE, BUT" DO NOT ASK THAT QUESTION.

This would be slightly interesting if I knew who Rodriguez was talking about: "He looks stronger. He's done a great job according to Mike and looks like he has as far as getting stronger across the board; he's got a terrific attitude."

Pick your favorite player. That's who he's talking about.

On recruiting: "We trust our own judgments... recruiting rankings are a little overblown but not always. Would I take a roster full of five star guys? I would, if they have the right attitude."

"I think we can go anywhere in the country. Our base areas: Michigan, surrounding states, also an emphasis in Florida. Fortunately for us we think we've got enough of a brand name to at least give us a shot. Some of it is system-oriented, but a lot of it is just the player and attitude all coaches want in athletes."

Observation: no one wants to talk to Purdue LB Anthony Heygood.

Boilerplate: "The thing i like about camp is that it's all football from morning to night. In the spring guys have classes and all that and they've got responsibilities and the like. We'll certainly know our guys better at the end of August. I will know our team a whole lot better after 30 days."

Minor HULK SMASH moment: At this point the Dis-paaatch guy actually asks the us against the world question, which is always "do you think the team is adopting an "us against the world" mentality?" Rodriguez says "no."

Weird: Players vote on captains before the last regular season game.

Opinion on something that's not that interesting. Rodriguez was asked about this movement towards national officiating crews instead of conference-affiliated ones: "National officiating crews are a good idea; just want the games to be consistently called. The attempt to go national is an attempt to be more consistent." He also said he hadn't noticed much of a difference between conferences in bowl games and such.

Joke about referees: "I used to yell at them a lot when I was younger, but then I figured out they aren't going to change the call so I stopped."

Carlos Brown gon' take some snaps, probably. Carlos Brown was brought up; Rodriguez dubbed him a "wildcard" because he missed so much of spring when he sliced his finger open. This led into a good question from someone who I couldn't identify: "how many guys will touch the ball at quarterback this year." Rodriguez repeated the question with an arched eyebrow, paused, and then exclaimed "good question! I set the over-under: 20"

Then he said this: "we've got to be creative, moreso now than we might have to in the future."

My take-home: hello, Wildcat.

Also, on Feagin: he has to "make his mark in the first two weeks" and will be "given everything he can handle mentally."

How do you feel about the Big Ten perception Ohio State blah? "If you want to change that perception, you've got to win."

Oops. The past few years there were a lot of schools visiting West Virginia, but not ones that he thought he'd play. Including... uh... Ohio State.

The last bit in this quote is reassuring for me, though: "There's no patents on schemes. We never give them everything. Like we never tell people why we call this play in a certain situation. They bring us stuff here, We try to get smarter every year, learn some things from people all the time."

Theme: The other side of "salty language." Talking points from Morgan Trent and Tim Jamison when asked about how Rodriguez was different from Carr. Trent: "he's a little more intense, a little more vocal. He wants it to be chaotic environment in practice so we're ready during the game." Jamison: "He brings a lot of energy, it's great for us. He's not going to pat you on the butt. He demands greatness of you. You need to get better every day. You need to get ready to compete."

Tim Jamison: "I don't think anyone else is going to leave. I think everyone else is ready, confident, and has brought into the program. We're just working out hard, watching TV, hearing about how bad Michigan is going to be. I'm not going to brag on what we're going to do, but we're excited to go into training camp."

Stock answer. Jamison on defending the spread better this year because Michigan has a spread: "As the year went on we got better at it but we can't help but get better at it this year."

What kind of football will people see out of Michigan? American football. Ha. Jamison: "You're going to see a team that's very conditioned, very physical, anxious. We're anxious to see what we're going to do as well."

Awww, Lloyd Carr. Jamison, laughing: "The Brown Jug is the only rivalry Carr broke down from start to finish. From the beginning to the end, every year."

Mailbag!

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:32:21 -0500

A very special email from BHGP contributor Hawkeye State:

Brian,

Because you are the de facto defender of recruiting services, I had to ask you this question:

David Barrent is a gargantuan offensive line prospect from West Des Moines. Relatively early in the game, and after a handful of offers from the middle-of-the-pack Big 10 and Big XII teams (Zooker, Nebraska, Minnesota, MSU, etc.), he committed to Iowa. Scout heralded his commitment in a breathlessly-worded post entitled "Four-Star In-Stater Commits to Iowa". Not only that, but they start the article with this paragraph:

While the state of Iowa produces a handful of high major prospects each year on the gridiron, the number of 'four star' prospects to come out of the state is a small one, perhaps one every other year. This year, there are three such players and one of them, David Barrent of West Des Moines (Valley) has committed to the Hawkeyes...

Clearly, Scout thought he was 4-star material. That is, right up until I received an updated Scout prospect list today and found Barrent had been demoted to 3 stars, despite the fact not one snap has been taken since that article in May. In fact, the only news I can seem to find on Barrent during that time is that he was the MVP of some camp in Chicago.

My question, then, is this: As a rational human being, how the hell am I supposed to take these guys seriously?

Subquestion: Isn't it in Scout's (and Rivals') best interest to have 4-star players remain uncommited until late in the game? If your team has a chance at picking up 3 4-star commits on the eve of signing day, aren't you more likely to buy a subscription to their sites to monitor their progress than if those players are 3-stars? Conversely, if you already have a 4-star in the bag, are you less concerned with whether you get another than if you have a 3-star and are in pursuit of a 4? Isn't this just blind self-interest? And doesn't that mean that the recruiting rankings from Scout and Rivals are no better than Lemming's Notre Dame worship? I'll hang up and listen.

HS

This is a common question, usually one offered up immediately after Recruit X has seen his ranking dinged after doing nothing in particular. Various points:

The guys running the sites are not doing the rankings. The breathlessly worded article referenced above was written by the Iowa guys at Hawkeye Nation [ grrrrr ... -ed], the Iowa Scout site. They have every reason to swoon so subscribers will be excited and happy. The men actually compiling the rankings are a different set of people.

The seemingly arbitrary drops aren't usually based on anything the kid does. Sometimes they are -- Michigan QB commit Kevin Newsome's been erratic at a number of passing camps this summer and has seen his ranking fall as a result -- but more often it's just a matter of early rankings being based on incomplete knowledge. This gets worse and worse every year as Scout and Rivals try to one-up each other with ever-earlier top 100 lists. A number of kids look good in early film and get rated high, then when film comes in on other kids or guys look particularly impressive at camp, they get slotted in above the previous high-ranked kids. This is no doubt what happened to Barrent.

High rated kids are far more likely to fall than rise. Howard Stassen maintains a list of the most overrated teams in college football based on a composite of pre- and post-season rankings. The top seven: Michigan(yay!), Texas, Notre Dame, Nebraska, Florida State, Southern Cal, Oklahoma, and Miami. Since the span covered is 1989 to present, this would also be a good approximation of the best teams in college football. Indeed, FSU, Miami and Nebraska are 1-2-3 in winning percentage; Michigan is #7, Texas #9, Oklahoma #13, and Notre Dame #17. How can the top three teams of the era also be the most overrated? Well, if you start off #1 you can only go down. If you start off outside the top 25 you can only go up.* (Washington State is the most underrated team.)

Four and five star recruits are FSU, Miami, and Nebraska here. It's a mathematical certainty that a player ranked at the very tippy top of a bell curve distribution of talent is likely to fall when additional information is incorporated into the rankings. High-rated commits are indeed likely to slip in the ratings, but so are high-rated uncommitted players. The difference is uncommitted players have no one to bitch for them.

End discursive points.

I think it's perfectly legit to drop this tackle without him actually doing anything except eating cheeseburgers. That's not to say recruiting services don't have their problems. There's a reason MGoBlog's season wrapup of recruiting doesn't just say "Scout ranks X, Rivals ranks Y" but has an extensive section on each recruit detailing his recruitment from offers to early rankings to camps to late rankings: there is information in there not encapsulated in rankings. I do think there is a slight bias towards uncommitted recruits, but that's because uncommitted recruits continue to pick up public offers and are more likely to attend the various camps both services run -- they're more likely to be in the limelight. But given the strong results put up by the ranking services in terms of both All-Americans and NFL draft picks, it's hard to dispute the usefulness of star rankings.

Recruiting services can be annoyingly overblown, maddeningly political, and barely English at times... but they've got that cheddar in the form of onfield performance.

*(this insight originally brought to my attention by Vijay of IBFC.)

Dear Brian,

Love the new digs. Hope you get all the bugs worked out the way you want them to. _____ questions:

1. Recruiting: If Jay Hopson isn't able to recruit MS players to UM, will he keep his job? Is it even possible to pull in recruits from that state without totally random MLB-playing uncles in Detroit?

We'll see what Hopson's haul ends up as at the end of the year. He's not just handling Mississippi, FWIW: he's also responsible for Oklahoma, where Michigan is in it for four or five high-profile players, and other sections around the country. Premium-board insider buzz is generally positive about his effort level and general personability.

I remain skeptical about recruiting Mississippi, which has some weird juju around it that causes kids to pick sure pain over, like, almost anything else. And their education system is somewhere between "nonexistent" and "Somalia" so the chances of picking up a guy who just can't stay eligible seem higher than usual.

2. Notre Dame: With Charlie's benefactor gone at ND and he has a mediocre to poor season, will the contract for life still prevent his firing (I really dislike him and the way he used the Saints to pry all that money out of ND)?

Kevin White wasn't actually Weis' main backer. The firing of Tyrone Willingham was done against White's wishes, as was Weis' contract extension. (Internet Notre Dame fans are still mostly in loooooove with Weis and universally loathed White, if that gives some insight onto the relative sides here.) Weis is likely secure until his heralded recruiting classes are upperclassmen. It would be hard to boot him until Clausen's a senior, IMO.

3. Zone-Read Option: Are there any examples out there of successful (meaning Alamo Bowl or better) teams running the Z-R-O based offense with non-Pat Whites at the helm? Going back to "Stalactites of Fear" I think that would go a long way towards calming some fears. I have heard of Sean King and his success at Tulane w/ Rod, but Threet and Sheridan are not NFL prospects. After that Woody Dantzler was the PWesque player for Rod at Clemson, and well are there any other examples out there at the BCS level? Rothlisberger at BGU with Meyer rings a bell, and Alex Smith as well from Utah, but what are the metrics we can use to compare all those players to what we have. I guess my question is: how much worse off are we with our talent at QB (passing and running)?

A couple of objections: Roethlisberger played for Miami. They ran a spread, but it was a M-versus-Florida passing spread, not the spread 'n' shred. And Steven Threet is not necessarily chopped liver. He was Rivals' #8 QB prospect two years ago, a four-star with a number of attractive offers. In an alternate universe where Carr is still the coach and Mallett is still around, I bet he's still your odds-on favorite to start this fall.

As to the questions posed... as I was writing my chart-heavy piece in this year's Hail To The Victors I assembled a chart. It was a glorious, glorious chart. I loved that chart, and love it still. Here it is:

Table 1: Yards Per Carry For WVU, NU, And Michigan In The Zone Read Era

Year	West Virginia		Northwestern		Michigan
Year	YPC	Nat'l Rank	YPC	Nat'l Rank	YPC	Nat'l Rank
2001	4.19	36th	4.1	45th	3.59	78th
2002	5.16	8th	4.31	39th	3.82	66th
2003	4.6	19th	4.65	18th	4.25	44th
2004	5.14	9th	4.64	26th	3.83	68th
2005	5.23	11th	5.03	14th	3.89	57th
2006	6.68	1st	4.04	52nd	4.27	42nd
2007	6.15	1st	3.61	85th	3.97	61st

Northwestern's offense under Randy Walker was basically the spread 'n' shred, except he ran it with guys like Zak Kustok and Brett Basanez and very, very little other talent (five offensive draft picks over the time surveyed here -- Michigan had five this year) and every year until the last two, when Walker died and everyone graduated all at once and the program was thrown into chaos, the talent-free Wildcats killed Michigan in YPC.

Steven Threet isn't Vince Young... but he might be Brett Basanez.

4. The Football Strategy Window: I agree with Chris at Smart Football and yourself that the Spread Z-R-O offense reached its zenith a couple years ago, and now that "everybody's doing it" the strategic advantage of running it has been diminished (I watched Kellen Lewis get shut down by PSU with a simple read-stunt by the DE and WLB). How likely is it that Rod and company would do a Bear Bryant style trip to Darrell Royal to learn a new offense (the Wishbone FYI) to stay on the bleeding edge of offensive football? I just want to know just how likely is it that Rod really does "not stay predictable" in the words of the offensive coaches.

I addressed this idea in a super-nerdy post in which I copped to a brief period of Magic: The Gathering participation. The main idea was thus:

Magic, like many games, has a distinct rock-paper-scissors aspect to it. If you have a Goblins deck it could tear through anything that's particularly slow but be weak against a "Control" deck designed to keep everything dead or immobile. And Magic, like many games, often inspires copycats when one strategy tends to win a number of tournaments in a row. Once Goblins start rampaging everywhere, everyone thinks that's the way to win and runs them, and it's at this point your lame-o Control deck can show up, lock everything down, and coast to victory. If this happens a bunch, the metagame starts getting split between Goblins and Control and a third thing that might do okay against both gets added in and so on and so forth. At any one time, there are usually two or three dominant archetypes and then scattered weirdos trying to invent a new one and almost always failing. When a weirdo breaks through, though...

Rodriguez is obviously one of the breakthrough weirdos, but now his offense is well on its way to becoming a dominant archetype. Michigan will never have one of those games like West Virginia's Sugar Bowl against Georgia where you blink five times and it's 35-0.

But the thing about dominant archetypes is this: they get dominant and stay dominant because they are better ways to do business. It's likely that Michigan will experience great success with the Rodriguez offense as-is because it's really hard to stop even if you know it's coming. I expect that Rodriguez will slant less heavily to the run as he acquires access to better downfield receivers and quarterbacks who are true run-pass threats and not NFL wide receivers; I don't think he'll have to reinvent his personal wheel to scratch out 30 points a game.

Thanks for everything,

Tyler Sellhorn

Teacher, Assistant Football Coach
Fort Wayne South Side HS

P.S. You had to crack on my banner entry, didn't you?

Dude...

...yes, yes I did.

Will the stadium already be louder next year with the renovations? The upper deck is there already and can keep the sound in. It's a matter of not having fans there yet. What do you think?
Robert Hovenkamp

I'm not a sound expert or anything, but I think the metal superstructure won't have much of an effect on noise levels this fall. Without a full glass wall to reflect sound right back where it came, most of it will pass right through the superstructure and much of what does get reflected will bounce harmlessly away from the stadium. You'll have to wait for 2009.