Offensive line Coach Darrell Funk

So I have now read a number of different posts, weighed comments and opinions about Coach Funk. Kalani has hired him and that’s essentially about 50% of what we need to know. The fact that he can live the HC, meets the other requirements for hire is another 25% of it. The fuzzy gray areas are what I will write about here, and I am not sure that I can draw any specific conclusions regarding the quality of the hire. I am cautiously optimistic. But I also have serious concerns when looking over the performance metrics of some of Coach Funk’s career. He has spent a lot of time with Coach Brady Hoke (Michigan). His work at Purdue and CSU is not necessarily bad or great experience. Work at SDSU seemed positive in some respects. But I would like to concentrate on Michigan under Hoke because the results were somewhat concerning; not completely a red flag when mixed with some more recent positive results, but still worth noting.

Funk was OLC at UM under Hoke from 2011-2014. Hoke followed Rich-Rod’s tenure, who followed Lloyd Carr, who followed Gary Moeller, who followed Bo Schembechler…

Team W/L Records for the four Hoke season time frame went:

2011 11-2
2012 9-5
2013 7-6
2014 5-7

Hoke was fired after the 2014 season.

Now an O-Line coach can be fairly evaluated on any number of critical statistics. These include, Total Offense (TO), Passing Offense (PO), Rushing Offense (RO) and ‘efficiency categories’ like rushing yards/carry (YPC), total surrendered sacks (SS), as well as sacks/attempt (SA). These statistics say a lot about the efficiency of the Offensive Line but are not without mitigation either. Consider BYU when Riley Nelson was running the offense. The man could not throw the ball anywhere except Ross Apo’s feet and he took 6-7 seconds to throw the ball. I recorded how awful Nelson was as a QB in terms of causing his own sacks, interceptions and other turnovers. So, you cannot ALWAYS blame an O-Line for the failures of skill position players that are just as bad as green snot. So regardless of the following information, consider that UM’s recruiting classes under Rich-Rod were not well adapted to Hoke’s more power-based approach to the game. Nevertheless, I think a continued decline in performance in almost every metric is a concern when it lasts for four seasons. With that, here are some critical metrics to look at. My apologies if the columns are out-of-line as I did the table in a Word.Doc first and those do not translate in the dopy routine very well:

Year Pass O Rush O Total O Total O/Gm YPC TO YPP Season SS Avg SS/PA+ SS
2011 2377 2884 5261 404.7 560 - 5.2 6.2 18 1/16.8 PA - 302
2012 2591 2389 4980 383.1 502 - 4.8 6.1 18 1/18.7 PA - 336
2013 3221 1634 4855 373.5 498 - 3.3 6.1 36 1/12.0 PA - 432
2014 2042 1954 3996 333.0 425 - 4.6 5.3 25 1/18.0 PA - 450
Table 1.

Once again, you cannot just assume that the O-Line was responsible for all 97 Sacks in 4 years and 1,420 pass attempts. But we do see a generally downward trend in terms of production. One of the anomalies that stands out is the number of sacks per attempt in the third year. Devin Gardner had a reasonably good passing year however he was sacked once every twelve, pass attempt plays. A pass attempt play is the sum of sacks plus pass attempts. Michigan lost 270 yards against their rushing total that season. Its net yards gained rushing at 1,634 was anemic because of sacks. Was that the QB or the Line or both? History tells us its usually a little of both, and more line than QB when the QB’s rating is above 140 and completion percentage above 60%, both applicable to the 2013 season.

Overall a four-year average of 24+ sacks per season on an average of 355 Pass Attempts is one sack every 14.63 pass play attempts. Compare this to BYU’s most recent season: 375 Pass Attempts, 387 pass play attempts w/12 sacks surrendered; an average of 1 sack every 32.25 plays. That was in fact the fewest sacks surrendered in the history of BYU football since 1972. But consider that the competition might have been a huge factor. Suppose you increase the sack total by 50%, that number would still have been around 1/21.82 pass play attempts, nearly 18% better than Funk’s best year at Michigan.

You can evaluate the other categories for yourself. I just feel that these numbers are ‘telling’ and the downward trend bothers me a little. The mitigating factors are heavily weighted to the “emotional” evaluation. He has a long history of experience, had some success in other places, produced some great running backs at lesser institutions, etc. Do players respond to his methods? Is he a player's development coach? What were his player-relations like at other programs? My hope is that Darrell has been told, “…you must keep up the pace and work ethic, player development standards and production of you predecessors.” Failure to do so means a decline in the program.

I want to iterate we welcome the new coach. He has a bit to prove and my hope is he does just that.