greg frey

Time it was, and what a time it was, it was. A time of innocence, a time of confidences. Long ago, it must be. I have a photograph. [Bryan Fuller]

Previously: Podcast 14.0A, 14.0B, 14.0C. The Story. Quarterback. Running Back. Wide Receiver. Tight End.

[Bolded player rules: not necessarily returning starter, but someone we've seen enough of that I'm no longer talking about their recruiting profile (much, anyway). Extant contributor.]

LT Yr. LG Yr. C Yr. RG Yr. RT Yr.
Ryan Hayes Jr** Trevor Keegan So** Olu Oluwatimi Sr** Zak Zinter So* Trente Jones So**
Jeffrey Persi Fr** Reece Atteberry So* Greg Crippen So Gio El-Hadi Fr* Karsen Barnhart So**
Tristan Bounds Fr* Alessandro Lorenzetti Fr Raheem Anderson Fr* Connor Jones Fr Andrew Gentry Fr

Tim Drevno put out fantastic, mauling offensive lines at Stanford. The guys they recruited were 3-stars, but they were smart, and didn't have to start until they were redshirt sophomores or juniors, by which time they'd been sufficiently drilled to run Drevno's complicated list of calls and checks. At Michigan he fruitlessly chased after recruits who didn't want his immediate playing time and started a season with Nolan Ulizio at right tackle. The "Drevno Effect" never happened. He's now at UCLA.

Greg Frey, the Rodriguez assistant who recruited tight ends and grew them into Mike Schofield and Taylor Lewan, was brought back for a year. He recruited some more build-a-bears for a year then left for his alma mater. Today he's at Duke.

Ed Warinner seemed like a guy who knew what he was about. Between the first game of 2018 and the 2018 Big Ten season Warinner turned Jon Runyan Jr. from a turnstile into one of the most underrated guards in the NFL. Last year Michigan broomed Ed for a guy born the year Ed coached his first OL at Army. Warinner is now the run game coordinator at FAU.

Sherrone Moore played tackle at Oklahoma in the mid-aughts, and coached tight ends at every stop until Michigan raised him to OL coach. His first line, made of parts acquired by Drevno, Frey, and Warinner, won the Joe Moore Award.

In all that time, with all those coaches, somehow Michigan figured out how to amalgamate all of their philosophies into a stable run of tackles. Runyan graduated and instead of the fanbase collectively chewing their fingers off, a redshirt sophomore Ryan Hayes stepped in. Andrew Stueber graduated to the NFL this offseason and his backup, a 4th year guy, won the job early in spring. Behind him is a classmate who started some in 2020 and 2021. Behind that guy is a 3rd year guy, and a 2nd year guy, and a freshman who's getting talked up even though he's not needed for years. Except for Hayes they're all Warinner recruits, though most are Frey types, and they run Drevno's tackle-pulling gap system. This spring Hayes intimated that Moore was increasing the complexity of their protection calls, since the guys playing have been around long enough to handle more on their plates. Imagine that.

[After THE JUMP: The feet. My goodness THE FEET!]
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

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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

image

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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TOO MANY COOKS [Bryan Fuller]

Today's hot topic is a statement from President in waiting Grant Newsome on last year's offense:

The offensive line? Players talked about how much new position coach Ed Warinner made simplifications this spring, mainly because he had no other choice. Grant Newsome told reporters Tuesday that Warinner stripped down the complex language and overall concept because it was overwhelming.

"He said he was even confused by the amount of terminology and different plays we had in the playbook," Newsome said.

The internet's talked a lot about the excessive complexity of Michigan's offense in the aftermath, and I feel like I have to interject. Michigan's OSU gameplan wins the game if it doesn't draw the worst QB performance in living memory. Michigan's ability to tweak and screw with people's heads has been a trademark of Harbaugh's best offenses. It can and should be Michigan's approaching going forward for the same reason RichRod shouldn't have run a pro-style offense in his first year in Ann Arbor.

I'd like to separate out the offensive approach in general from a particular problem on the offensive line that Newsome highlights above. Michigan's 2017 OL, and by extension the team, suffered from a terminal case of…

borges disease

BORGES DISEASE

BORGES DISEEEEEEEEEEASE

Borges disease is when you try to do everything without doing one thing well and everything falls apart in a morass of beautiful-on-paper plays that are executed with the balletic grace of a drunken donkey crashing his ex-wife's wedding.

Borges's special power was containing all bad-idea multitudes within himself. Michigan created their own version of this by importing former Indiana and RichRod OL coach Greg Frey for a single disastrous year. This wasn't Frey's fault; he remains a well-regarded OL coach and jumped to his alma mater FSU before a serious inquest could result. Because Frey's hire was a half-measure on Harbaugh's part, it blew up in his face.

Publicly, Michigan split OL duties between Frey and a still-extant Drevno, handing Frey the tackles and TEs while Drevno coached the interior line. I'm not sure that's the way it actually worked, because Michigan went from a power-based run offense in Harbaugh's first two years to an inside zone team with some power sprinkled in. Then they went to a 50/50 split, and finally they returned zone to an occasional constraint play, because they were immensely bad at running zone.

So not only did Michigan spend a bunch of time trying to get good at IZ and burn a bunch of snaps grabbing two yards a pop, they retarded their growth as the mashing power team their personnel certainly pointed to. Post-MSU UFR, which was in the 50-50 phase:

Michigan ran 11 zone plays versus 14 gap-blocked plays. (FB dives, crack sweeps, and the reverse are excluded from this analysis.) That is a significant shift away from zone. That still remains a part of the playbook, obviously... but a crappy one. Those 11 plays gained just 25 yards. Michigan suuuucks at zone.

There were costs to the returning diversity. Michigan had a couple of plays on which it looked like someone busted an assignment. Onwenu appeared to be running a trap on a play that was not a trap, and either Hill or McKeon busted on this Isaac TFL. Michigan blocks a big cavern in the middle that has an unblocked LB, and then Hill runs outside. Isaac follows him, because follow your fullback:

I gave that to Hill but that could be what he's supposed to do; in that case McKeon needs to be doubling on Cole's guy and leaving the force player for Hill. YMMV. Either way it's a mental mistake that turns a promising play into a TFL.

When Michigan focused on becoming the mashing team they were always supposed to be, the results were good. Despite wasting a bunch of time, their S&P+ breakdown stats paint the picture of a bunch of maulers:

  • Power success rate: 7th
  • Adjusted line yards: 20th
  • Rushing explosiveness: 29th
  • Overall rushing S&P+: 14th

A #47 stuff rate, #79 success rate, and #90 opportunity rate look like a lot of missed assignments in that context, missed assignments created by Michigan's failed attempt to adopt Frey's approach on the ground.

That is dysfunction. Michigan masked it fairly well by pushing the abort button halfway through the season and having a couple good running backs and some Large Adult Sons. But since those Large Adult Sons came coupled with serious pass protection issues, there was no Plan B for the other half of the offense.

There the disconnect between Drevno and Frey was easily seen every time Michigan failed to pick up a stunt, which was about every other stunt. Michigan looked like the worst-coached offensive line in the country last year. I started wondering if Patrick Kugler's inability to get on the field until his redshirt senior year was because he couldn't make a line call to save his life. And here's where the Newsome quote comes in. Michigan clearly couldn't execute their pass protection system.

An outsider can't know whether that's because two different guys were teaching it, or it was an unholy combination of two different approaches, or it was just plain bad because Drevno is bad and should feel bad. But it all goes back to Michigan importing an offensive coordinator (Pep Hamilton) and an OL coach without telling the guy who thought he was both to hit the bricks.