NFL - That is the measuring stick and the way up

We all want the program to go to the next level. Bronco obviously felt coaching changes would help and most fans seem to agree. I have posted a poll to see if fans agree who the new coaches should be. Maybe not.



But going to the next level up (Remember Crowton took us to a new level down)is also about players. In order to have and develop the best players you need to recruit the best talent. Coaching affects recruiting, but there is an even bigger factor if you want to recruit the big name **** and ***** talent. You can get lucky with a few walk-ons and ** or *** that overachieve, but the odds of success are higher with **** and ***** even though many of them will underachieve.



The **** and ***** players have to believe that you will put them into the NFL ASAP and as an early round draft pick if they are **** and as a 1st round draft pick if they are *****. If they do not believe that, they are going to go elsewhere. They expect to be NFL players.



Much has been said about BYU style football and the glory days. Quite frankly, the glory days and the BYU style of football were largely a gimmick designed to get solid but mostly unspectacular athletes to overacheive due to brains, hard work, discipline, and execution. It has worked pretty well - but does not often attract 1st round NFL type players other than at a few positions like QB, TE, and an occasional lineman on offense or defense. It just doesn't.



So now there is discussion of a more balanced attack in a pro-style offense that may be boring at times like Ohio State can be. That style of offense has been proven by other schools to more consistently attract **** and ***** athletes at a variety of positions because they end up in the NFL on starting line-ups.



Some may argue that the BYU recruiting pool that is realistically available (HC Compatible) has very few **** and ***** athletes that even exist as WR, RB, and DB.



So, if we gear around that **** and ***** concept - playing straight up in a pro set and there are not enough star studded athletes in our pool to make it happen - do we go forward or backwards?



Just askin

This is Bibberish. Not gibberish. Maybe Bibsterish. No, Bibberish works.

I know you like ** overachievers. This post could be dedicated to them and it could have a latin name of Bibberish Over-achieverish. ;-)



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College football has changed so dramatically from BYU's glory days that we cannot expect to do what we did back then and be successful. To be sucessful we be forward thinking and creative.



But if we just sit back trying to recapture the glory of, well, time will slip away and leave us with nothing but boring stories of the glory days.

Cougarbib2 wrote:
Much has been said about BYU style football and the glory days. Quite frankly, the glory days and the BYU style of football were largely a gimmick designed to get solid but mostly unspectacular athletes to overacheive due to brains, hard work, discipline, and execution. It has worked pretty well - but does not often attract 1st round NFL type players other than at a few positions like QB, TE, and an occasional lineman on offense or defense. It just doesn't.



So now there is discussion of a more balanced attack in a pro-style offense that may be boring at times like Ohio State can be. That style of offense has been proven by other schools to more consistently attract **** and ***** athletes at a variety of positions because they end up in the NFL on starting line-ups.



Some may argue that the BYU recruiting pool that is realistically available (HC Compatible) has very few **** and ***** athletes that even exist as WR, RB, and DB.



So, if we gear around that **** and ***** concept - playing straight up in a pro set and there are not enough star studded athletes in our pool to make it happen - do we go forward or backwards?



Just askin

I'll counter your rambling with a little of my own...



Back in BYU's glory days, BYU was able to place a lot of players on NFL rosters in part because BYU ran a system conducive to NFL play but in part because BYU was good at finding and developing talent.



I think BYU should go to a pro-style team because it is almost completely against the direction of college football today, and BYU will be able to recruit players based on that. [As an aside, unfortunately, it's a little difficult to sell recruits on being a pro-style team when you don't have much NFL cred on the staff, but that's a different challenge.]



But look at college football today--who runs a pro style offense? Not Ohio State. Not Auburn. Not Oregon. Not LSU. Not Florida. Not Boise State. When you can recruit five star athletes, system is mostly irrelevant, because the elite athletes will make the NFL no matter what. The three traditional pro style offenses that come to mind are Stanford, Wisconsin, and Alabama for the most part. Almost everyone else seems to be trying to implement some sort of read option spread.



Michigan under Lloyd Carr was a classic pro-style offense. I'm always surprised at how unspectacular Michigan's QBs seemed when they were playing, yet they always manage to stick on an NFL roster. Some of it was talent, but some was development and the emphasis on efficiency.



But I don't think BYU needs top flight talent implement a pro-style offense. The only place where Wisconsin is on the top of recruits' lists is the state of Wisconsin and maybe Minnesota. The Badgers probably have a hard time getting a top 3 class in the Big Ten, but they seem to do okay.



Why limit the pro-style attitude to the offense? What I'd like to see is the defensive coaching staff implement some ideas from tough NFL defenses. Use connections with Keisel and Hoke in Pittsburgh. Try to reach out to coaches in the Ravens staff. Reach out to Brian Urlacher. It would be nice if when people think of BYU football, they think tough, efficient, no-nonsense, smack you until you're black and blue kind of football like the Steelers and the Ravens play.



I think this goes to what Via Sikahema was getting at in his article.

Mingjai wrote:

Much has been said about BYU style football and the glory days. Quite frankly, the glory days and the BYU style of football were largely a gimmick designed to get solid but mostly unspectacular athletes to overacheive due to brains, hard work, discipline, and execution. It has worked pretty well - but does not often attract 1st round NFL type players other than at a few positions like QB, TE, and an occasional lineman on offense or defense. It just doesn't.



So now there is discussion of a more balanced attack in a pro-style offense that may be boring at times like Ohio State can be. That style of offense has been proven by other schools to more consistently attract **** and ***** athletes at a variety of positions because they end up in the NFL on starting line-ups.



Some may argue that the BYU recruiting pool that is realistically available (HC Compatible) has very few **** and ***** athletes that even exist as WR, RB, and DB.



So, if we gear around that **** and ***** concept - playing straight up in a pro set and there are not enough star studded athletes in our pool to make it happen - do we go forward or backwards?



Just askin

I'll counter your rambling with a little of my own...



Back in BYU's glory days, BYU was able to place a lot of players on NFL rosters in part because BYU ran a system conducive to NFL play but in part because BYU was good at finding and developing talent.



I think BYU should go to a pro-style team because it is almost completely against the direction of college football today, and BYU will be able to recruit players based on that. [As an aside, unfortunately, it's a little difficult to sell recruits on being a pro-style team when you don't have much NFL cred on the staff, but that's a different challenge.]



But look at college football today--who runs a pro style offense? Not Ohio State. Not Auburn. Not Oregon. Not LSU. Not Florida. Not Boise State. When you can recruit five star athletes, system is mostly irrelevant, because the elite athletes will make the NFL no matter what. The three traditional pro style offenses that come to mind are Stanford, Wisconsin, and Alabama for the most part. Almost everyone else seems to be trying to implement some sort of read option spread.



Michigan under Lloyd Carr was a classic pro-style offense. I'm always surprised at how unspectacular Michigan's QBs seemed when they were playing, yet they always manage to stick on an NFL roster. Some of it was talent, but some was development and the emphasis on efficiency.



But I don't think BYU needs top flight talent implement a pro-style offense. The only place where Wisconsin is on the top of recruits' lists is the state of Wisconsin and maybe Minnesota. The Badgers probably have a hard time getting a top 3 class in the Big Ten, but they seem to do okay.



Why limit the pro-style attitude to the offense? What I'd like to see is the defensive coaching staff implement some ideas from tough NFL defenses. Use connections with Keisel and Hoke in Pittsburgh. Try to reach out to coaches in the Ravens staff. Reach out to Brian Urlacher. It would be nice if when people think of BYU football, they think tough, efficient, no-nonsense, smack you until you're black and blue kind of football like the Steelers and the Ravens play.



I think this goes to what Via Sikahema was getting at in his article.

We agree on quite a bit. I agree that it is more about attitude than style of play. If it wasn't clear, my point is really about both offense and defense even though I wrote mostly about offense. It is about why, even in the glory days, we only occasionally produced 1st round NFL talent and never at certain positions - especially DB.



You mentioned coaches relative to recruiting, which I also mentioned. Well, we are overhauling the coaching staff now. There is a poll where you can name who we should get. At the risk of getting myself flamed again, I will mention previous posts where I suggested BYU needed to pay competitively so we could get the sizzle kind of coaches - ie Jeff Grimes as a position coach. I bet he could be bought. There are very good LDS coaches in college and the NFL with sizzle that would appeal to NFL motivated players. Not many of them are African American. That could be a problem.



My bigger concern is the talent pool - especially related to DBs when it comes to **** and *****. HC compatible pool may be very sparse and Provo may not be very appealing to many Non-LDS. And we don't pay players as much as USC and Auburn pays them. :) How do you feel about the pool? What is the solution, if any?

One thing that is being missed in this discussion is that during the "glory days" BYU was putting more people in the NFL than almost anyone, especially OL/DL players. During the 80's, BYU had something like 18 or so OL that played in the NFL. In the 2 decades since, it's something like 6. That I think is more of the point of Vai's article.



I have always felt that of the few downfalls of the coaching staff under Bronco is that very few BYU players are drafted. Over the past 5 drafts, BYU has had one first day pick, and only 2 or 3 (can't remember if Kehl was 4th or 5th) in the first 4 rounds. A few have been picked later in the draft, but most of the players that make teams end up being undrafted free agents. The only player that has the potential of being drafted off of this year's team is Rich, and he might not be (of course, that's because Reynolds came back).



Some people want to blame the mtn for this. I honestly think that the mtn has had very little impact on recruiting or draft position. In fact, it can be argued that the best recruiting classes for BYU were during this time. Weber State, who has considerably less exposure than BYU, has had more players drafted in at least one out of the last 5 drafts, and it may even be two.



During Crowton's 2nd year, BYU had it's first losing season in 30 years, BYU still had 5 players drafted, 3 on the defensive side of the ball. Anyone remember that defense. It was just plain awful (might have been worse than the previous year's defense which couldn't stop anything). None of the 5 were drafted early, but they still were drafted. What was the difference? Crowton and Borich had ties to the NFL and knew what it would take to sell their players to the scouts.



I think that BYU needs to do a better job of promoting and selling their current athletes to the NFL, and then future recruits will start to see a trend. I think this is a big deal, and it doesn't appear to have been fixed by the recent and pending coaching changes.