So how do we feel about these new announcements:
Cannon Montgomery - Assistant RBs coach
Brian Whitehead - Nickels coach
Jireh Wilson - Edges coach
Jens Danielsen was also announced, but we knew about him.
Definitely some youth with RB and Edge.
Forums:
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Nepotism?
Hey, our last nepotism RB coach hire turned out to be pretty successful...
I'm sorry - this is anything BUT a nepotism hire:
2005 Mississippi State (CB/RC)
2006 Mississippi State (RB/RC)
2007 South Carolina (OLB/co-ST)
2008 South Carolina (CB)
2009–2010 South Carolina (S/ST/RC
Um that's not Montgomery...
Yeah, that's Shane. Our "last nepotism RB coach hire".
These all seem a bit underwhelming. Nepo RB coach, Journeyman nickel coach with minimal accomplishments, and a very young Safeties coach coaching edge. Strange choices for sure. Maybe the young guys are more recruiting focused? Or maybe VT is a REALLY tough sell for position coaches? Hard to see the logic.
Oh, and Brant Davis to TE coach, leaving Holt to focus on Special teams. This makes sense with a new OL coach onboard.
If you are looking for proven P4 coaches, this is a huge swing and miss of course. I look at it as we are adding numbers/resources- so that's a good thing.
At the end of the day these guys aren't going to make or break our team (unlike Crook).
Pry is on his last leg, he should have the freedom to pick who's on the sinking ship if he gets fired.
These are assistants. 3 years ago these guys would have titles like GAs or Analysts or Quality Assurance. I don't know what you were expecting/how you can be that underwhelmed here.
Edit: looks like that's not correct; it's not that these guys would have been analysts years ago; we just wouldn't have had single-position coaches on the staff.
Regardless, I still don't know how to be that disappointed about this... I can't imagine a world where an assistant OL coach who coaches just the interior line and reports(?) to Matt Moore is expected to have P4 coaching experience.
As college staffs build up you will see more guys like these that do have p4 exp, however like you said these positions didn't exist as named a couple years ago. Being an assistant OLine coach at VT isn't as valuable as being one at ND, but I would expect even then the assistant position coaches will still be young and less expirenced.
I liked these coaches to how the academic side works, there are deans (HC), Department head (coordinators), Professors(position coaches), and instructors (assistant position coaches).
These guys are there to teach the basics so we're not looking for guys that bring in the grants and have interesting research, we're looking for guys to teach the concepts. We're never going to get some one known.
X officially ILB coach
Brent Davis is taking over TEs from Stu
Stu should have been fired after Vandy when he didn't pay attention to the fucking numbers on the field. But he is still here, underperforming.
or after Miami when he also didnt pay attention to the numbers on the field AND decided to call a squib kick inexplicably which Miami returned to mid-field and gifted them three points
Yep - its a results business. Get him the fuck out of here.
Even with those mishaps we still had good special teams by advanced metrics. So understand removing the TE responsibility so he can do his job better
Advanced metrics are situation agnostic. Thus we lose 2 fucking games due to special teams gaffs and it doesn't show. I also don't know what advanced stat tracks 6 people on the team issued the number 0...
Yes and no. But, 100% correct for almost all the football adv. stats. And I don't think a lot of people understand that.
Baseball is getting really good at developing situational adv. stats. Knowing how to pitch each player and specific to pitcher arsenal, time through order, count, etc. And vice versa.
The major difference is that baseball is a highly repetitive sport that's essentially the same scenario (pitch and hit). And there are so many games, it's a crap ton of data to work with.
But with football, situational adv. stats are generally generated using data across all teams, all styles of offense and defense, and player abilities. It losses all nuance and specificity. If the adv. stats suggest to go for it 4th and 2 on the 30 instead of kicking the football in a tie game, but you're Iowa, and it's the 4th quarter with 4 minutes left, you should probably kick the FG. The Iowa offense isn't making that first down. And Iowa's D will likely hold serve.
Idk what you mean by 'situational' but plenty of 'advanced' stats (EPA, Success Rate, etc) account for down and distance. They might not include the score/clock, but that stuff is easy to account for once you understand the EV of different options.
situational, as in how I explained.
In a given situation, what is the best option for that team given: their offensive scheme and tendencies, the defensive scheme and tendencies, personnel, score, clock, etc. The adv. statistics will tell you, at a general level of the league, whether on average a team should go for it on down and distance. At least, I have not seen granularity in any adv. statistics within football that get to that level of particularity.
But in baseball, there is that level of granularity. Teams are determining how to pitch to each every player, based on pitcher pitch selection and success against similar players, and batter tendencies, using data considering the count, the time through the order, handedness, men on base, etc. For example, the Nationals started doing this last year and had really great success with Sean Doolittle as coach, developing a game plan and translating the adv. statistics to their pitching squad. And they're doing it with "bargain" starting pitching. It's the next moneyball thing in baseball.
Using advanced statistics is much harder in football because there are more options (e.g., many types of offensive schemes), greater variance in those options (executional success of the same play can vary greatly when 11 players need to work in unison), and much less data to work with (only 12-21 games, and data from the year before isn't easily translatable to the next year). So, developing reliable AI models is much, much more difficult. And the reason the adv. statistics in football are so generic.
Don't have the numbers handy, But I am sure Barry Bond's WAR, OPS, et are off the fucking charts. Except for when it mattered most though- choking dog in the post season, which is why he never won anything. I remember a big man from Gonzaga a few years ago- great player, carried them to the final game IIRC- where he promptly sucked and couldn't put the ball in the ocean. I'm sure his advanced stats that year were great though, as another team cut the nets down. I bet Pry's advanced stats are decent- until the 4th quarter in key games.
Barry's steroid supply only lasted through September.
Yea, true. But adv. statistics can easily be tailored to pick up situational stats in baseball to get that granularity you're suggesting. For Barry Bonds, just look at WAR during offseason. Or look at WAR when player in scoring position and 2 outs. Or WAR against elite pitching. Adv. stats in baseball are really easy to pick up situationally because those situations are often repeated and easily defined.
There are some decent adv. statistics in football for some situations. There was one the other day that one of those adv. stats nerds made that essentially showed which RBs (on a college team basis) was a product of their O-line or their own ability. Jaunty was a product of his O-line and ability. Tuten was a product of only his own ability. But that's still a really broad adv. statistical assessment, and not the granularity of an actual in-game play for a particular moment.
Everyone remembers the gaffs (and rightfully so) but overall our special teams have been good under Stu. We were 35th in SP+ this year after being 14th in 2023.
F+ has us 17th and 5th
Maybe we'll at least see some growth from the TE's
Did we already know about this guy
https://www.si.com/college/westvirginia/football/virginia-tech-hires-for...
Not sure how I feel about raiding the cousins for all these positions, but whatever, just win.
There's surely a joke somewhere in here about most of our new hires being... Related
Yeah we should have raided Bama or OSUs staff instead- just saying
Hoping for some new articles soon on the new coaching additions
Well apparently Stanford just fired their football coach.
um and I thought we were late to the party
For denigrating women employees not for performance.
Rich Rod and Chris Beard still gainfully employed though...
Stanford has a much lower tolerance for bullshit - and they have never been a win at all costs place
Stanford doesnt have to "pay" most of their coaches as the positions are almost all endowed
And their GM, Andrew Luck, is a dude with serious integrity. I still remember him deciding to forego NFL to play one last year in college and people thought he was insane. I'm a huge fan of his.
How does skipping the NFL to play college translate to integrity? I mean, I get that it's unusual, and in the spirit of amateurism and 'love of the game' but that's not a show of integrity.
Because he was likely headed for the Panthers
I would have gone back to college, too
maybe integrity is the wrong word, but strong internal compass would fit
I can get behind that. Dude clearly knows what's important to him, and isn't afraid to go for it.
Because he chose to forego the NFL to get his college degree. He was a college athlete that took the college portion of that seriously. I'd consider that integrity.
I ran into Oliver Luck at the then Verizon Center in DC right after his son made his decision (WVU-Syracuse basketball game). He made a joke that the entire country was laughing at his son because he said he wanted to finish his degree. That stuck with me.
Well to be fair to the "entire country"- Stanford has been around since the late 1800's an I'm sure it will be around after I die... Luck could have not risked injury, gone to the NFL, got paid millions, and simply finished his degree when he was done playing. That was the logic most fans didn't agree with. Why risk injury?
Probably the same reason people are willing to dump money into college sports for no "rational" reason
You're giving Stanford way too much credit... let's look at the time table here (all dates included in ESPN article, except for the public apology, which was listed as 'last wednesday')
The more likely scenario IMO is the new guy at Stanford (Andrew luck) saw the opportunity to replace a 3 win coach and bring in his own guy.
Andrew Luck's dad is Oliver Luck. Andrew knows to never let a good scandal go to waste.
Agreed, IMO, Taylor's clock was ticking as soon as the Luck hire happened. This was a convenient way to expedite things for The Cardinal.
💯 people pointed out that there was not even a canned comment from Taylor about the luck hire. Really weird. Did not seem like Taylor was on board (who would be? No one wants more bosses than they need).
For most of the last 100 years, Stanford football has only been good when Harbaugh was feeding them steroids. Who cares about Stanford football?
I mean, I do? I'm not a fan of them by any stretch, but it's one of those unique schools that is different and thus interesting.
But there's also 60ish schools I find interesting in any given season so 🤷♂️
I would rather have Stanford in the ACC than Cuse, Pitt, BC, etc. but that toothpaste is out of the bottle.
No one wants more bosses than they need immediately led me to think ...
That was my same exact thought as I read the Andrew Luck as GM announcement. I know that there are a lot of AD's that would want a GM (aka associate AD) who drive football staffing, revenue distribution, etc, but coaches (at least of this generation) are not going to want to give that up.
Stanford being the first school to actually give a coach another boss... that job is already hard enough. Good luck making a compelling hire. They should run the wishbone.