Nothing major in this feature on Steve Logan. But, it was interesting and something not to completely ignore in light of Logan’s connections to the Triangle and the overlap with the Tom O’Brien move from BC.
One tangent that I’d like to highlight stems from the following quote from the article:
Logan, 54, is replacing Dana Bible, who followed former Boston College head coach Tom O’Brien to North Carolina State. Although Boston College led the ACC in total offense two years ago and ranked second in the league last season, Bible’s critics said his play calling was too conservative.
First, Dana Bible IS conservative. NC State fans who long for the Norm Chow and Marty Gailbrath days need to realize this going into the relationship. As bad of OC’s as Noel Mazzone and Marc Trestman were…they certainly couldn’t be labeled as ‘conservative’. Ineffective? Sure. Poor play callers? Sure. But, not ‘conservative’. Many new NC State fans will need to re-calibrate their expectations of play calling in the future.
Q: Does anyone really care how subjectively ‘conservative’ an offensive coordinator is judged as long as the Wolfpack is winning?
A: Of course not. (Unless, of course, you were one of those sad souls who believed that Herb Sendek wasn’t liked simply because of his personality. Riiiight).
This is the thing about the Boston College fanbase that blows me away — your program was consistently performing at a very acceptable PEAK for YEARS. Eight straight bowls. Six straight bowl wins. Big regular season games with BCS implications. If the BC fanbase that didn’t like Bible was actually more passionate and supportive (insert word – ‘BETTER’), then the Eagles would have played in some really nice bowls instead of their ultimatel less-desirable destinations (interesting paradox, isn’tt it?) It wasn’t Dana Bible’s fault that the fanbase wouldn’t/couldn’t sell enough tickets to impress the Peach or Gator or Champs Bowls.
I’ve got a few related bullet-points on these comments that I’d like to randomly throw out for the record:
(1) EVERY fanbase in America finds problems with their offensive coordinator. Very few OC’s make it more than 3 or 4 years in one place in large part because of this phenomenon. It is just the nature of the college football. Live with it. Heck, a large number of LSU fans thought that they could do much better than Jimbo Fisher — even after winning a National Championship!! This is what makes OC’s like Norm Chow and Ralph Friedgen so valuable and so good. Even if a fan wanted to complain about a Chow or Friedgen, the fan inherently knows how stupid that they would look based on the respect that these coaches have deservedly built through the years.
(2) So, if an offensive coordinator has been in ANY job just half as long as Bible was at BC, then the fanbase invariable has a host of ‘examples’ of failure that are easy to focus upon. The unfortunate thing for ‘conservative’ OC’s is that they rarely punctuate their victories with a performance for which they get credit. An OC like Bible won’t get any credit from yahoo-Joe who doesn’t understand that the responsibility of the 20-17 win falls largely on the OC who chose not to risk an interception on a key play or whose play calls shortened the game by running 6 minutes off the clock in the third quarter and tired the opponents defense. But a Norm Chow will get extra credit for a reverse followed by a pass across the field to Philip Rivers for a touchdown in Chapel Hill.
It is understandble that different styles yield different perspectives of performance. But, when a program was consistently performing where BC was performing when compared to the resource base available at Chestnut Hill, who cares if the coordinator was “conservative”. Perhaps they HAD to be conservative because they knew that they did not have enough raw talent on the team to score more points?
(3) Which brings us to the issue of talent.
Both TOB (and Bible) have politely intimated that they only had limited talent at Boston College and one of the most exciting things about coming to NC State was the opportunity to coach more skill-position offensive players than in the past. If the last couple of weeks of recruiting are any indication of their judgement then we can conclude that they knew what they were talking about.
Similarly, check out some of the comments that we ran in a previous entry regarding TOB/Bible/NC State’s new coaching staff.
“What we pride ourselves on is that we put our players in positions to do the things they do well,†Bible said Wednesday. “I’ve learned that what you might want to be [as a player], and what you can be, might be two different things. We play to our strengths.â€
I don’t have a problem with ^this. Anyone want to ponder a guess as to how many games NC State might have won over the last four years if our offensive coordinators would have more accurately tailored our offense to match our personnel?
As one of our community members said in the comments section of a previous entry:
It is nice to hear that our new coaching staff will play to the players strengths and not stubbornly ask them to continue do what they aren’t capable of doing. Rivers senior year could have been so much more had Amato not been so stubborn with his defensive philosophy. Same can be said when we had our defense doing well and Amato stubbornly forced Jay Davis to try to be Phillip Rivers by asking him to pass so frequently.
I like what I am hearing…I hope the product on the field is the same consistently good product that TOB has produced year after year.
Follow-up: An interesting entry from BCEagle showing past statistics of Steve Logan vs Dana Bible’s performance.
