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Study Suggests Oregon is Doomed for a Downturn with Helfrich
Hardcore_Husky
Administrator, Swaye's Wigwam Posts: 304 
Study Suggests Oregon is Doomed for a Downturn with Helfrich
Though on the cusp of a championship, the promotion of Mark Helfrich carries red flags, writes our resident Metrics Superiority Guy.
Comments
Do some actual analysis and then pop off
The big difference with Oregon vs Miami 2000s, their success was built on a very unique offensive system which is the bedrock of their competitive advantage, the strength of this system is reinforced by their crazy staff continuity, and was put into hyper drive the past 3 years with a once in a decade type talent that hit the ground running day1. Miamis advantage was, and always has been, geographical talent advantage, not their system. Geography and recruiting are actually Oregons biggest disadvantages. Systems are a more sustainable source of advantage than sales/recruiting in my opinion. Good salesman leave, worse ones come in the team regresses. If it wasn't SC would be amazing every year. In that sense you could maybe make a better correlation to Nebraska than Miami.
Mariota leaving will take out a lot of wind from their sails, but how they deal with staff continuity while maintaining a high performance system will be the big item that could turn 10win seasons into 7 or 8win seasons and door.ass.out.
That old black guy RB coach that dresses like Al Cappone - he should be retiring soon, not sure why no one makes a run at Scott Frost, or their OL coach. How they replace coaches is key while maintaining what makes their offense so unique. Pellum taking over for Allioti appears to be a success, but defense is irrelevant when talking about Oregons prospects for regression.
Which brings me back to Helfrich. Watching Helfrich on interviews, he comes of like such a dopey pussy. Does he think he's Letterman on these press conferences? Can't imagine he's an inspiring leader of players or coaches in that program.
That's not a huge issue when the bulk of the key players/coaches came up through Chip Kelly and Belotti (though maybe we saw signs of this with the tears vs Stanford and quit-job vs Az last year)...but how will the players, and more importantly coaches, that come up through Helfrichs watch react and maintain their high-performance system? Will they continue the course Kelly built, or will it go Pear shaped? My guess is the latter.
Maybe MH is Kaiser Soze'ing me in these interviews, but I kind of think he's a poor leader and we will see a general regression to an 8 or 9 win max type of coach.
TL;DR: Agree. MH is a fag, he will probably fuck it up.
Helf is not Osborne because Chip Kelly was Oregon's Osborne.
The study is an objective analysis. Feel free to draw your own conclusions. It will take three to four seasons to know who is right. Until then it will be interesting or interesting.
Laziest fucking analysis ever.
"This happened at Nebraska 45 years ago, so Oregon is going to be similar now."
Do you even history bro?
But I would still cyber you.
Where the analysis fails for me is that Oregon is more like Nebraska than Miami. So Helfrich is either Osborne or Solich I guess.
but still.
Time for Peterman to nut up and find a QB that doesn't look like a Jerry's kid reject and teach some big fat fucks how to block once in awhile. If we wait for them to fail while we stand around pissing into the wind, all that is going to happen is they will keep hoisting hardware while we smell like urine.
Either way, kill Crazy Larry.
If one is looking for Oregon to step back it will be the admin that does it not the coach
Then your putting Kelly up there with Osborne, Switzer, James, and Holtz? Hey, we all loved Chip but how many national titles did he win? Ohh zero, thats right. If Helf wins the national championship he will already be a better head coach then Kelly. Kelly helped bring us from good to great, but Helf, hopefully, is taking us from great to the best in 2 years.
Recruiting hasn't dropped off, Phil isn't going anywhere, the Ducks are now a national brand name, Oregon boasts some of the best facilities in the entire country and Helf has only lost 3 games in two seasons.
I tend to think Helfrich is a damn good coach.
Will happily revisit this on a later date. OT blowhard alert....
I hate that quote. Math and specifically stats are so misunderstood it's scary.
That quote is from a "wannabe" who couldn't tell the difference between a truly normalized dataset and a spreadsheet full of nonsense violating all inference and collection assumptions. Then he ran a bunch of crap paired - t or chi tests to show some null hypothesis rejected as well as his publication attempt.
The researchers and scientists that can't grasp Stats ( and believe the above quote) are either now cutting keys at Home Depot or teaching Bio/Chem/Phys 101 at Meatball State.....
This is where they come up with lame dick quotes like this after years of crying himself to sleep after his statistical prowess was embarrassed by his fellow peers.
Sincerely,
QSci superiority guy
You raise some good poonts. Helfrich also kicked Colt Lyerla off the team and basically benched DAT in his first year. Also suspended Pharoh Brown for the snowball fight. Dude is not afraid to enforce discipline.
Frankly, I think the offense looks better this year than it ever did with Chip. A lot of that is Mariota, but the development of the recievers has a lot to do with the WR coach (Matt Lubick) that Helf hired. The playcalling is vastly improved, and you have to credit Frost (who Helf promoted). The DL has been very good under Ron Aiken (who Helfrich hired). The OL has been fantastic in dealing with multiple injuries, and you have to credit Steve Greatwood (who has been at Oregon since the beginning of time and predates Helfrich by a century or two).
I think there is some concern as some of the key long-term assistants either retire or move on (Greatwood, Pellum, Neal lead this list)... but Helfrich's hires have been good.
Also, I really like his tone in interviews. This season he seems to have perfected this whole "we're not executing in X phase well enough" tone for the halftime interviews which I like. He also preaches process and fundamentals, which I like for coaches to do. As mentioned, he's not afraid to enforce discipline even against the stars, so he's not a "player's coach." Yet pretty much every Duck player raves about him.
Who knows, maybe we got lucky, or maybe Chip Kelly was right about the guy.
* I also don't think you can over-emphasize the effect that Royce Freeman has had on the offense. A Helfrich recruit, and probably the best pure RB I have seen at Oregon in my time of being associated with the UO (1991-present).