BG Draft Report--Updated

So, to no one's surprise, there were no Falcons taken during the draft this weekend.  The only player who even had a remote chance at being drafted was Joseph Davidson, and you just don't see punters drafted that often.

In fact, he had a worse day than might have been imagined. Not only did he not get drafted, but he also wasn't signed as a UDFA, instead getting a mini-camp invite.

For all I know, that's the common route for punters, but I was surprised.

A UDFA is a player who is invited all the way through to training camp and is someone the team wanted to lock up.  Mini-camp invites are really long shots, and in fact the teams don't even announce a "release" when the player doesn't make it.

Teo Redding was similarly invited to the Lions mini-camp and Ryan Hunter to the Chiefs.

More likely, Hunter will play in the CFL.  He's a high priority as a Canadian citizen and is expected to be one of the top draft picks in their draft, which is coming up soon.

For the MAC, there were five players picked in the draft:

3rd round, 92nd overall OL Chukwuma Okorafor (Western Michigan) by the Pittsburgh Steelers
5th round, 157th overall TE Tyler Conklin (Central Michigan) by the Minnesota Vikings
5th round, 170th overall DB/KR Darius Phillips (Western Michigan) by the Cincinnati Bengals
7th round, 227th overall LB Quentin Poling (Ohio) by the Miami Dolphins
7th round, 249th overall QB Logan Woodside (Toledo) by the Cincinnati Bengals

UPDATE:  See the comments below and credit to the commenter...Redding is on a UDFA.  Also, I have seen elsewhere that Hunter was a UDFA as well.

Clater to Transfer

Officially opening my Recruitment !!!
Thank you for everything BG 🙏🏽💯 Gods Plan pic.twitter.com/Z9QDAImjF9

— Calvin Clater™⚡ (@CalvinClater) April 20, 2018

More transfers from the football program.  This one is on offense and at WR.  Calvin Clater, who came from Fort Worth.  You will remember him from being the Texas HS High Jump champion and as a two-star recruit.

Our #BGRisingStar for today is redshirt freshman Calvin Clater. A Texas high school state champion in the high jump, Calvin can create mismatches for smaller defenders in the secondary. #FlyWithUs #AyZiggy pic.twitter.com/5UgCqCQKDo

— BG Football (@BG_Football) March 20, 2018

No idea what is going on.  Easiest guess is he doesn't like where he ended the spring on the depth chart but I have no idea.  Coach has said he has been selling the recruits on playing time, so perhaps they have an expectation.

Anyway, the larger issue is that the biggest reason we had to believe in Coach Jinks was his recruiting and specifically this class.  He has talked about the need to "stack up" strong recruiting classes.  Well, of that '17 class, three of the players left without ever stepping on the field and one is suspended after playing only one season.

The team was bad last year and I think the consensus was a combination of poor talent and poor defensive coaching.  Coaching has been addressed, but the margin of error on when this gets turned around is relying on these recruiting classes.

On this year's recruiting, BG has no verbals yet.  Miami has 13 and 10 of them with 3-stars.  Toledo has 3, all with 3-stars.  In all, 6 teams have at least one verbal.

Last year, BG's first verbal didn't come around until Patrick Lupro on April 24, and he went to WMU anyway.  It will be interesting to see how BG's recruiting goes this year.

Best of luck to Calvin in his future endeavors.

BG Loses Another d-line transfer

My Recruitment Is Officially Back Open ‼️ pic.twitter.com/gQCygGsQJT

— Tyree Jackson ひ (@Tyree2017) April 18, 2018

OK, so there's another d-lineman on his way to another school.  This is Tyree Jackson, who redshirted last year and says he is moving along.  He joins Jamari Rouse, who made a similar announcement recently.  Both are Florida d-lineman who leave at a position where BG already lacks depth.  Obviously, we have new Coaches and that could be a factor.

Both were 3-star recruits from Florida.

Just for facts, BG had 12 3-star recruits in that class and 3 of them now are gone, if you count Wilcox as gone.  BG has 12 d-lineman on the spring roster, not all of them scholarship players.  The incoming class had only 1.

Best of luck, Tyree.

Blade's Briggs Kills It

So this one is a must read. 

David Briggs is the sports columnist at The Blade, and he's a good one.  Young man can write and he can make a point and he can be entertaining.  He makes his point and his opinions but he isn't an asshole about it.

Today the subject was the BG football program.  I'm not going to reprise it here because you should read it the way he wrote it.

Just going to make two little excerpts.

First, he refers to the Jinks statements last year that the team was close and that everything would be fine as a "Baghdad Bob routine" and if that doesn't make you laugh out loud, you need to have your sense of humor checked.

Second, he has this quote which I would like to comment on:

“This is a different game than high school,” he said. “You’re not allowed time to grow and learn from your mistakes. If I could do it over again, maybe I would have made some different choices because it is a different game. Looking at our situation when we did take this thing over, there were a lot of challenges, and maybe having that stability would have helped with that transition. There’s some validity there. There’s great validity there.”

Which is nice to read.  It is something I (and others) have been saying since the day of the hire and the day the assistants were announced.  Coaching high school is not the same as coaching college...NOT EVEN IN TEXAS.  And, as Briggs points out, the assistants were the wrong way to go giving what the program is facing.

In contrast, you see Nate Oats on the Buffalo MBB sideline.  He was similar to Jinks, just a couple years out of HS.  What did he do?  Hire two coaches with 25+ years of college coaching experience.

Anyway, the column is excellent.  Let me make a couple points.

First, I admire Jinks for holding himself accountable for those failings.  He has done it before.  He is a good person, something I say with 100% confidence.  He is willing to admit when he could have done better and he is willing to learn from his mistakes.

Not everyone is.  Don't minimize it.

Second, and most importantly, where do we stand today, coming off the worst two seasons in our history?  Well, to begin with, he has kept the team and the recruits and the program together and that's to his credit.  More importantly, the defensive coaching--which we should all be able to now admit was insufficient--is now completely turned over with experienced coaches with strong track records. 

I think the offense is on an upward trajectory and with even moderate defensive improvement BG is back on the road to being competitive again as the defensive players gain experience and those Jinks recruits filter into the mix.

Even with the abject disaster of the first two seasons, it is entirely possible that this thing could be turned around.  I will always contend that better coaches were available when Jinks was picked, but that's not relevant right now.  Unless we want to live through 2-3 more years of failure followed by another rebuild, the current arrangement needs to work.

It is not done, for sure.  Jinks has yet to prove himself.  He's done some things right but he hasn't gotten any kind of results yet.  He may never.  But the program has not looked better since he got here.

BG MBB: Defensive review

So last week we looked at the BG MBB offense.  Now's a chance to go back and look at the defense.  This is a far more interesting case...and partly confounding at first.

Here's the thing.  Based on the AVERAGE stats, BG was in the middle of the pack on defense.  BG was 7th in defensive efficiency.  And yet, anyone who watched the team live would have to think that BG was often just awful on defense.  How can that be?

So, I went digging into the numbers a little bit.  I would suggest to you that the actual issue is not the average but how the average was arrived at and therefore, really, consistency.

There are multiple ways to arrive at an average.  The normal way is to have a bunch of results right around the average and fewer as you get away from the average.  You could also have a bunch of good results and a bunch of bad results and then that would average to the middle.

Let's test that on BG.  The MAC average points per possession was 1.057.  BG was 1.064.  For comparison, we will also look at Kent at 1.059, the nearest team to BG.

So, what you'd expect is a team averaging where BG and Kent did to have games around the average, say from 1.0 to 1.1.  Kent had 7 of their 19 games in this middle range.  BG had 3.

Meanwhile, BG had 8 of their 19 games at 1.13 or more.  Kent had 5.  BG had five games over 1.24 and Kent had 1.

And that's how you can be an extremely inconsistent defensive team and still end up in the middle of the pack on average.

BG had some good games, too.  BG had 8 games under 1 point per possession and Kent had 6.

Now, does that all matter.  The answer is, obviously, it does.

BG had 8 games under a point and went 6-2 in those games.
BG also had 8 games over 1.13. (1-7)
BG had five games over 1.24 (1-4)

For the curious, the outlier is the 2/13 WMU game, the only one where BG played dreadful D and then outshot it.  The games where BG played good D and still lost were the @Kent and @BSU.

There was a narrative for much of the season that BG needed to get stops to get in transition to help their offense.  I just can't see how this can be the whole story.  When playing better than average defense (when you'd expect that all to kick in) BG was only 6-4.  As I noted in the offensive review last week, BG simply also has to get better as a shooting team.  You should win when playing above average defense.

Having said that, you can see that in a staggering 20% of the games BG's defense gave them virtually no chance to win.

A few more points.

Going back to averages....

BG was the best team in the MAC on the defensive boards.  This is vital to the transition concept.  BG was also 10th in steals.  It seems like you don't see teams do well in both.  There's a trade-off in spacing.

Anyway, beyond that BG was average against the shot, at forcing turnovers and keeping teams off the line.

BG was 11th defending the 3FG.

So, as with much of the program, there's major work to be done here, especially as the personnel continues to evolve.  My understanding is that Laster is a strong defender.  From an observation standpoint, BG seemed to give up a lot of PGs driving straight at the basket which I suspect played into late-season PT allocation.  

Last point.  You don't have to be a great defensive team to be in the top ranges of the MAC.  UT was in the middle of the pack as well.  But you will never reach any of your goals--regular season title, 20 wins, MAC tourney title--without playing more consistent defense and being a multi-dimensional team.

Spring Game Report

So the Spring Game is in the books.  BG still has a week of practice upcoming to get ready for summer workouts.  This "game" was held in the Perry Field House due to the awful weather so a lot of things were limited.  No one got injured, which is a primary goal.

The format was that the defense was spotted 27 points and the offense tried to catch up on 4, 10-minute running clocks.  The offense did not catch up.  Had last season been played under similar circumstances, BG would have been 9-3.

Jarrett Doege had a limited, but good to nearly perfect day.  All signals point to him continuing to improve, which is obviously a key element to the team being better on offense.

You might have seen a completed pass to a Justin Sawmiller.  Like me, you might have asked, "who is Justin Sawmiller?"  He's a senior who actually played one year at UC.  The Blade had noted in the preview that BG would be playing a lot of depth at WR due to health issues with Phoutavong, Morris and Guyton.  Coach said WR depth was a key reason why BG couldn't divide into 2 true teams.

Also, The Blade noted that long-time defensive player Jack Walz has moved to WR.

Coach said that the offense is now focusing on "the little things" which would seem to indicate that they are happy with where things stand.

Taborn and Labus also did not play.  As I have noted, I think the offensive line is the primary remaining question mark on the offense and could be a limiting factor.

As for the defense, Coach said that the defense is playing fast and running to the ball.  However, they have been "throwing a lot of things at them" and there is work to be done on the scheme type stuff.

Jamari Rouse Transfers

🏈🙏🏿🏈 pic.twitter.com/wvxOU2Quda

— Jamari Rouse-Oparah (@JamariRouse) April 11, 2018

So, this news on twitter this morning, Jamari Rouse has announced he is transferring from Bowling Green.  He is a d-lineman from Florida who red-shirted last season.  He was a 3-star recruit when BG signed him and was ranked as the #7 DT in Florida.

I have no idea how this was working out or what is up.  We have new defensive coaches.  He had options out of HS.  And, at least in basketball, we don't see guys willing to serve apprenticeships.  There may be other reasons, too.  He's a long way from home.

In any event, this is his life and his call.  Best of luck to him.

It does come at a position where retention has been a big issue for the Falcons and from that standpoint, it will make things more difficult.

Finally, if you look at the tweet and he actually posted an image of his release letter from BGSU.  Essentially, he is free to go to any school we don't play next year or that isn't in the MAC.  Interesting to see.