identity crisis

Football season is underway.  Could you tell?  Probably not from inside a UVA bubble.  There's little excitement, little buzz, and little attention being paid to the Hoos by anyone outside the state.  When attention is paid, it's almost always to the proverbial hot seat under Mike London's proverbial posterior.  UVA fans weren't alone in being incredulous that London was kept around after last season.  Grantland calls it "the utterly baffling phenomenon that is his continued employment by the Commonwealth of Virginia" as the grand finale to their hot-seat preview.  The only other theme you ever really see is "tough schedule"; ESPN's ACC power rankings have UVA 12th out of 14, on the premise of "gee, this team is talented but that schedule is so hard."  This more or less ignores their own player rankings which gave UVA exactly one player in the nation's top 100 and ACC's top 25.  (Quin Blanding.)

The truth is the schedule isn't that hard.  Sure, the nonconference schedule isn't piled high with weenies.  It's basically Three Men and a Baby William & Mary.  It's also two-thirds ACC.  The Coastal Conference is the most milquetoast division in all of college football.  If you think the conference schedule is overly challenging, there's a saying about suckers at the poker table, which applies here.

Sooner or later, and probably sooner but I've been burned by that assumption before, I'll write the obit for the London regime.  It'll say the words quarterbacks about a hundred times.  The list of things London has mismanaged is long and distinguished and - here's the scary part - mostly unfixable this year.  He could address a few things, like the crappy special teams and his nonsensical clock management, but truly fixing them - no, that would take a couple years.  In some cases because the issues are structural and in some cases because we need a couple years of evidence to call them fixed.

There is one place he can make tangible progress, though.  Besides winning, there's one absolutely huge, glaring difference between the football team and the other major programs at this school: Identity.  Basketball, baseball, lacrosse, you've seen what they've built and the reputations they have.  A program's identity and its relationship to success is a little bit of a chicken-or-egg question, but a coach has gotta know what he stands for, and I don't mean getting his players to go to class.  That's what drives your recruiting and your teaching and your coaching.

I know Mike London is a man of character and he wants his players to be great guys and hard-working and all that, but that's not really it.  That doesn't translate into coaching and to the extent that it's translated into recruiting, it hasn't driven the on-field direction of the team.  Tony Bennett recruits players of tremendous character, not just for the sake of it but because his incredibly successful system requires a ton of selflessness and trust in your teammates.  Brian O'Connor recruits only college-enthusiastic players because it means he doesn't have to sweat out the draft and because they see Omaha as more than just a place where scouts gather.

What's Mike London's philosophy?  Best I can tell, it's that athletes and speed make a football team and you can recruit a bunch of them and mold them into football players.  Besides the obvious roster-management problems with this (essentially, these guys can only play three positions - WR, CB, S) it's sort of telling: even the one thing that London can be said to be consistent about is essentially a scattershot lottery.  Take a decent-looking athlete and hope he develops.  Trent Corney has for years now tantalized with his immense raw talent, and played almost never.

There are hopeful glimmers.  They're not likely to be enough to save the regime, but they're out there, and all on defense, where the one truly credible name on the coaching staff resides.  In just a couple short years Jon Tenuta has established his identity on his side of the ball, and you saw it emerge last year.  Offense is a so-far hopeless cause; it's just kind of there and the coaches are still talking about changing its aims and goals.  Now we want to be a power-running team, right after spending years neglecting O-line recruiting.  That should work.  Defense, though, is Tenuta's blitzy-blitz scheme and his disruption, and you can actually tell what he's trying to do.

This is the challenge that awaits the football team this year: On offense, start developing some kind of identity.  Most successful football teams are known by what they do on offense.  If they're going to put their chips on the power running game, that means they can't go out to Pasadena and start going all screen-happy again.  The defense has to be able to keep up this year what they did last year, with almost entirely new front-seven personnel.

If London, Tenuta, and Steve Fairchild are successful in finally moving the football team toward a defined plan, an identity, a meaning, then they'll probably be at least somewhat successful in the one metric that matters, and they just might keep their jobs.  If they can't, they won't get another chance.

the recruit: Caanan Brown

Name: Caanan Brown
Position: LB
Hometown: Clearwater, FL
School: Clearwater Central Catholic
Height: 6'3"
Weight: 225

24/7: 76, two stars; #135 OLB, FL #235
ESPN: 76, three stars; #77 OLB, SE #379, FL #136
Rivals: 5.4, two stars
Scout: two stars; #125 OLB

Other offers: UMass

Now this is a tough case to crack.  There isn't a lot out there on Caanan Brown, who committed more or less out of nowhere and remains sort of a nowhere recruit.  He plays in a region of the country that's loaded with top football players and therefore doesn't stand out in his locality.  Which in turn means a lack of local-boy-makes-good articles.  He didn't have a lot of offers - the only one consistently listed is one from UMass, although there is one guru article out there that makes a passing mention of FAU, FIU, and Buffalo.

Which leaves us essentially with the conclusion that Brown is one of those Coaches' Choice commits in which someone sees something in him that fits a system.  Obvious guess: Jon Tenuta.  Interestingly, Scout - which rarely has a full strengths-and-weaknesses evaluation of UVA prospects - has such a list that lends a lot of credence to the idea that Tenuta wants Brown in a Max Valles role as a blitzing linebacker.  Included in Brown's strengths, per Scout, is "shedding ability," and indeed, a few of the highlights on his tapes are plays where he's blocked, and then, poof, he isn't.

I have to admit, though, that the main impression I got from the highlight tapes is a need to improve his strength.  I don't usually get a great deal from those things, because they're highlights for a reason.  Everyone looks good on them.  In Brown's case, he's not an overpowering tackler at all, and uses good handwork to free himself from his blocker.  That probably explains the near-consensus two-star rating he received.

It's a shame, really, that ESPN doesn't have a breakdown of his play, because they stand as the outlier as far as ratings go and it'd be interesting to hear their take.  The ratings from everyone else on Brown are very consistent, and his offers line up with that.  Very unenthusiastic.  It's likely, therefore, that Brown is being recruited to fill a specific niche rather than a full-time starting role - at least initially.  He's got decent quicks for his size, and Scout (and Brown himself) speak of pass coverage as an area for improvement, all of which only add to the narrative of a guy being brought in to rush the passer.  Brown plays both DE and LB for his high school team, so it won't be a major leap.

I suppose if Valles is listed as a "strong-side linebacker," that's where Brown will end up if I'm right about his future role.  But a lot of this is speculation, too; we're still getting a feel for Tenuta's philosophy on things.  I mean, we know he likes to get all blitzy up in here, that's not new.  But there's a lot of underlying detail there, which we're still feeling our way around.  I suspect Brown is a recruit who Jim Reid would never have given a look, and that he's a Tenuta pick all the way, so rather than use what we know about the defense to project Brown's future, it's more like we'll use Brown as a data point on Tenuta's outlook on life.

overhaul complete

Today, finally, Mike London (or Jon Oliver) finalized the overhaul of the football staff.  Or appeared to finalize it; four coaches have been let go and four have been added, so that would seem to finish things off.  I've been wrong before when I said "done," though, so, yeah.  Anyway.

We already covered Jeff Banks, so I won't bother repeating myself.  Marques Hagans needs no introduction.  Those two, though, while perfectly good additions to the coaching staff (particularly Banks, I think, if mainly because it gives us someone who knows what he's doing on special teams) don't comprise the home run portion of the moves.

First, there's Tom O'Brien, who you'll remember as the one-time head coach at NC State, and before that, Boston College.  TOB's official title is associate head coach for the offense and tight ends coach.  Jon Tenuta is "associate head coach for the defense/defensive coordinator."  This associate stuff is going to be pretty transparent to us, and truthfully I'd guess that TOB will handle more of that associate grunt work stuff than Tenuta will, since he's not also a coordinator.

What I'd love to do is evaluate Tenuta under the cold hard auspices of statistics, but that'd take longer than I've got; cfbstats.com only goes back to 2007 and the truth is that Tenuta's only spent two seasons in that time as an actual defensive coordinator; 2007 was his last year at Georgia Tech, he was never the DC at NC State, and only spent a year with the title at Notre Dame.  So it's awfully hard to tell how much of the defense was really his.

Make no mistake, though, he's had his fingerprints on all of them.  And Tenuta is one of the best-known defensive names in the business.  So well-known that it's rather astounding UVA would land him; it just may have helped that this is his alma mater, and Scott Stadium is where he played his college ball.  There probably isn't an assistant coach anywhere that's been involved in more rumors lately than Tenuta.  Ohio State, LSU, and Illinois are three schools that were in various stages of hiring Tenuta and ultimately didn't, which has probably added somewhat to his celebrity.

Also adding to his celebrity: blitzes, and lots of them.  UVA fans who wanted a "hyper-aggressive" defense have gotten their man.  Blitzy blitz blitzes.  No more of those drives where the offense runs the exact same wide receiver screen for eight yards a pop like six times in a row because the corners are playing that far off.  (Of course, the fans that wanted "hyper-aggressive" lose the right to complain when we blitz a screen pass and it goes for 85 yards.  Still.)  Tenuta isn't known as much of a recruiter, but his presence is likely to be something of a recruiting chip among defensive players.

O'Brien isn't much of a recruiter either.  In fact he's kind of milquetoast; his teams always seemed that way, at any rate.  Very even tempered, which is weird for a Marine.  But you can tell he knows his football just from the way he always took the 9th-rated recruiting class in the ACC to bowl after bowl after bowl.  One wonders what might've happened if he could recruit.

Let's make no mistake, though: recruiting is not this team's problem, and these hires weren't made with recruiting in mind.  They were done to shore up the X's and O's.  And not even that so much as the mechanics of running a football team.  TOB is probably one of the better details men out there, and that is not weird at all for a Marine.  (Trust me.  Nobody nitpicks like a Marine.)  The staff turnover now looks like this:

HC: Mike London ->London

OC: Bill Lazor -> Lazor
DC: Jim Reid -> Jon Tenuta

QB: Bill Lazor -> Lazor
WR: Bill Lazor -> Marques Hagans
RB: Mike Faragalli -> Jeff Banks
TE: Shawn Moore -> Tom O'Brien
OL: Scott Wachenheim -> Wachenheim

DL: Jeff Hanson -> vacant
LB: Vincent Brown -> Brown
CB: Chip West -> West
S: Anthony Poindexter ->; Poindexter

ST: Anthony Poindexter -> Jeff Banks
RC: Jeff Hanson -> Chip West

People in new positions are duly highlighted.  Not everything here is as it seems, though.  There is no official defensive line coach; London just so happens to have his roots as a DL coach, and will probably take a more active role there, along with graduate assistant Jonathan Lewis, who's going into his second year.  TOB didn't get hired just to coach tight ends; he and Wachenheim will probably work hand in hand with both the OL and TEs, as O'Brien has much experience coaching the offensive line in the past.  Including right here in Charlottesville.  Hagans's actual duties won't change much, except now he's getting paid for real and can go recruit.  (Neither, for that matter, do Lazor's.)

(Speaking of recruiting, I wouldn't, by the way, get too focused on trying to pilfer any of NC State's class even though we hired most of the brains of their coaching staff.  There isn't much to steal, for one thing, nor much room in our class, for another.)

The upshot in the end is that UVA has done absolutely the best it could do.  Anyone wanting more than this is being stupidly unrealistic.  Tenuta is one of the top defensive minds in the country.  Jim Reid is a very good coach, but he's spent most of his career at the lower levels, below I-A football.  Tom O'Brien's credentials are impeccable, and you should expect him to improve the offensive line as well as maybe even fix Mike London's time-management skills.  Banks should be a massive upgrade on special teams.  We sacrificed some recruiting ability in Reid and Shawn Moore, but Hagans should be able to help bridge that gap, and anyway, London, Poindexter, and West know what they're doing in that regard.  If London can't succeed with this group, he can't succeed - and his successor may very well be on the staff now.