Coach Gregory’s LB Legacy

Bob Gregory has been named the new DC (co-DC with Ikaika Malloe) at Washington and there was much... rejoicing? Perhaps hand-wringing and second-guessing would be more accurate. Many fans wanted a sexier splash in hiring, someone from outside the program with a new recruiting network and a knack for landing top talent, or someone with former head-coach credentials. Jimmy Lake chose to lean on stability, consistency, and familiarity, plus Gregory’s own solid history as DC at Cal and Boise State in the years before he came to UW.

The Husky inside linebacker play has not been great the past two years, and recency bias is a real thing. Whether it’s poor player development, recruiting misses, or just bad luck, fans wanted someone to blame and many pointed the finger at Gregory as part of the problem. Was he really, though? In this article, I’m going to look at his legacy as LB coach, and specifically, as coach of the inside linebackers, since Pete Kwiatkowski was the nominal OLB coach alongside his DC duties, and UW’s scheme makes the difference between DE and OLB pretty murky anyway and see how he stacks up.

A little history

The table below recounts the careers of every ILB coached by or recruited under the LB coach regime of Bob Gregory, which started in 2014 when he came in with Chris Petersen. The LBs are separated into three groups:

Already Established: Players who were already regulars in the program when Gregory arrived.

Developed by Gregory: Players recruited by the previous staff but never played (or at least recorded no stats in the 2013 season) and were developed by Gregory.

Recruited by Gregory: Players who started in the program in 2014 or after.

Players are listed by the year they began the program, including players who were recruited and signed but never enrolled or who transferred after starting at UW. Not all of the player rosters I consulted differentiated ILB from OLB, and some players changed positions or spent some time at each. I’ve marked those who spent at least part of their career at OLB with an asterisk* but included them here for the sake of completeness. If you only want to consider pure ILBs, feel free to ignore them entirely.

For LBs who played part of their career under Gregory, I’ve also included their stats from prior seasons just so we can have a full look at the scope of their careers on the field.

Reading the Table

The above table represents a rolling window of play for each player, representing their years with the program, based on the team rosters listed online. Tackles each year is self-explanatory, including solos and assists. BP is a metric for Big Plays, using the following formula (BP = TFL + Sack + PD + FF + FR + INTx2 + TDx3)

• Sacks are counted in addition to tackles for loss even though sacks are a subset of TFLs, as the average yardage loss on a sack is substantially greater than on an average TFL.
• Interceptions have the same net BP value as a forced fumble + a fumble recovery, as in each case the player is causing and then recovering the turnover.
• IMPACT score. The total impact score and Impact/Game measure is based on total tackles + 3x Big Plays. This intentionally weights big plays as being more important than tackles, which is probably self-evident but it also helps sort out players who are just on the field managing the basic necessities (someone has to make tackles at some point, so on almost every defensive play someone will get one) vs. the players who are making key game-wrecking plays that tilt the field. The best players, of course, will do both.

A Note About “Games.” In the table above, Games includes all potential games that UW played during that player’s career. If they were injured and couldn’t play, or if they were blocked by another player and didn’t get on the field, those games still count against the player. The best ability is availability, and a player’s job is to get onto the field and play, and if they are hurt or not getting it done in practice or not outplaying the person in front of them and demanding the coaches put them in with their play, then they are not affecting the on-the-field product in a meaningful way. This is not an examination of what might have been, or what might be in the future, but what they actually did on the field. It’s unfortunate that someone like Josh Calvert blew out his ACL last year and couldn’t get back on the field in a shortened season, and he might be great in the future, but so far 2 years in his Husky career has been a zero.

Measuring all possible games (other than leaving school early) also accounts for the total sweep of the player’s career. One version did have the full 5-year sweep of your potential career included, but it felt odd to statistically punish players for succeeding so much that they left for the NFL. If you had one great season, terrific. But unless it was 1996 Corey Dillon great, your per-game averages might look nice but your total impact on the success of the program isn’t going to add up to a lot if you languished on the bench for 3 seasons before blowing up (or having a fantastic freshman year and never following it up). Consistency matters. It’s not the only thing, but it definitely is an important thing.

Cumulative Stats vs. Per-Game Averages

Because players have careers of varying lengths, and in the case of this past seasons since we only had 4 games instead of the 13/14-game schedules we’ve had every other year in this study, I’m mainly going to focus on per-game averages. This is doubly true since many of the players here are only partway through their careers and hopefully have their best years in the future.

Still, cumulative stats matter, showing that you not only came in and rocked the house but you just kept doing it. Ben Burr-Kirven racked up 338 tackles in his career, #1 in this time period, almost as many as the #4 and 5 players (Azeem Victor and Tevis Bartlett) on this list combined. Shaq Thompson was a big-play machine, racking up 20 more BPs in three seasons at UW than #5 Azeem Victor did in five. Brandon Wellington put up a solid ILB career. Not a lot of big plays but was a decent cog in the machinery of the defense throughout his time. The numbers in the table above tell the tale of the recent past, but the key stat we’re going to look at is Impact/Game.

From Zeroes to Heroes

UW has produced exactly two bona-fide heroes at ILB in the past decade (an Impact/Game score over 6.0), with Shaq Thompson and Ben Burr-Kirven both taking 1st-team All-America honors. Both technically happened on Gregory’s watch, though Shaq was already a star and played only his final season under Bob. BBK is all Gregory’s.

At the other end of the spectrum are the zeroes (an Impact/Game score of literally zero) ILBs that have achieved nothing in their UW careers, not even a single tackle. Many of those are walk-ons, and that’s completely expected. They’re scout team filler and anything you get from them is really a bonus. However, that also includes scholarship washouts like Drew Lewis and guys who can’t get on the field like Josh Calvert, Miki Ah You, and Carson Bruener.

In between the heroes and zeroes, you have several tiers, which break down roughly like this:

Hero: All-American, probable high draft pick with the right measurables (Shaq yes, BBK not so much)

Stud: All-Pac 12, possibly more than once, good chance to be drafted or stick as an UDFA

Solid: Multi-year starter, league average or a little above, might make honorable mention All-Pac 12, possible UDFA/practice squad player

JAG: Just a guy, decent rotational player or mediocre part-time starter

Scrub: Career backup, mostly sees action on special teams or in blowouts or emergencies

Zero: Never recorded a stat on the field

Looking at the other ILBs over the Gregory era, here is where they rank in these categories (walk-ons are marked with an asterisk).

Studs (4.0-6.0): Keishawn Bierria, Tevis Bartlett, Azeem Victor, Edefuan Ulofoshio*

Solids (2.0-4.0): Brandon Wellington, Jackson Sirmon, Connor O’Brien

JAGs (1.0-2.0): D.J. Beavers, Cooper McDonald, Scott Lawyer*, Kyler Manu

Scrubs (0.1-1.0): Ariel Ngata, Sean Constantine, M.J. Tafisi, Alphonzo Tuputala, Daniel Heimuli, Jusstis Warren*, Jake Wambaugh*, Camilo Eifler, Matt Preston*

Actual Production vs. Expected Production

In UWdadVanc’s recent fanpost (Evaluating UW’s Recruiting Using Expected Outcomes - UW Dawg Pound), he describes expected draftability of players at various star levels, including parsing out high, mid, and low-ranked tiers within each category. By that measure, UW hasn’t been reeling in a ton of stars at the ILB position, but they’re not terrible. Players in italics were not recruited under Gregory.

5 Star: Shaq Thompson

Mid-4*: Camilo Eifler

Low-4*: Daniel Heimuli, Josh Calvert, Brandon Wellington, Ariel Ngata

High-3*: Jackson Sirmon, M.J. Tafisi, Sean Constantine, DJ Beavers, Miki Ah You, Connor O’Brien, Keishawn Bierria

Mid-3*: Ben Burr-Kirven, Carson Bruener, Alphonzo Tuputala, Cooper McDonald, Tevis Bartlett, Azeem Victor, Kyler Manu, Drew Lewis

Walk-Ons: Scott Lawyer, Eric Rauch, Ronnie Espedal, Matt Preston, Jake Wambaugh, Jusstis Warren, Edefuan Ulofoshio, Ben Hines, Ruperake Fuavai, Drew Fowler

I’m going to expand that basic principle with a kind of categorical look at what we expect from players, not just in their potential draftability but more specifically at how well we expect them to pan out during their college careers. For players whose careers are incomplete, this kind of rating measures how productive their career has been so far.

In a nutshell, if a recruit is a mid 4-star or above, you expect them to become a stud, an all-conference type of player. If they do even better and become an All-American, hurray! If they settle into just being a league-average starter who gives some decent years to the program but never blossoms, that’s still a disappointment. If they end up a career backup or wash out entirely due to injury or ineffectiveness, that’s a bust. On the other hand, a career backup or rotational player is about all you expect from a low 3-star (and almost a best-case scenario for a typical walk-on).

Note: A Hero+ outcome would be someone who is not just an All-American but a finalist for national awards, a 1st-round pick, or a repeat All-American. Shaq won the Hornung Award and was a 1st-round pick so definitely qualifies. BBK was Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year so you might make a case for him, no national award + low draft status I think puts him a half-step behind Thompson.

So how do players stack up in terms of their collegiate accomplishments vs. how we should have expected them to perform based on their recruiting rankings? And how well did Bob Gregory’s ILB crew do under his tutelage?

Each player is noted for their recruiting rank, where we expected they’d perform, and how they did. Net Tiers indicates how many steps above or below their expected level they performed. If your recruiting ranking suggested you’d just be Solid but you turned into a Stud; that’s +1. If you were supposed to be a Stud but only turned out to be a JAG, that’d be a -2. If your career ended up above expected, it was a success; 2+ steps above expected, it was a massive success compared to your expectations based on recruiting rankings. If it was below expected, a disappointment, 2+ steps below expected, you were a bust.

The final column multiplies those tiers by the percentage of their career under Bob Gregory’s coaching.

Net Tier Results: The table above seems to show a modest level of success, with a total of 6 tiers above expectation in raw terms, though this drops to 3 tiers above expectation when you factor in players that only had part of their career under Gregory. Split apart the walk-ons from the scholarship players, however, and you get a different picture:

• Walk-Ons: +8 tiers over expectation under Bob Gregory
• Scholarship Players: -5 tiers under expectation under Bob Gregory

Walk-Ons: It’s important to differentiate between walk-ons and scholarship players, because with a walk-on you really have zero expectations, so anything involving the player producing on the field, even on special teams or as a backup, is gravy. Of the 11 walk-on ILBs, 6 were zeroes (expected) and 3 were Scrubs, which still counts as a success even if they were 3 of the 4 least impactful non-zeroes on the list. There were two legit success stories from the ILB walk-on ranks. At the beginning of BG’s tenure, Scott Lawyer racked up 60 tackles as a solid backup (50% of his tenure under BG) but almost no big plays; pretty much the definition of a JAG. At the end of his tenure, of course, is the legend of Edefuan Ulofoshio, who’s already a Stud with at least another year to go at UW. On 11 rolls of the dice, UW managed one decent backup and a stud.

Statistically speaking, walk-ons bias the curve, because you literally cannot have a meaningful failure as a walk-on (aside from someone getting into legal trouble or injuring someone else in practice or otherwise causing problems). It’s a single-tailed distribution, with nowhere to go but up.

Taken in combination with the scholarship players you get a bit of a mess, because of the walk-ons, you get a net total of +9 positive tiers: 4 from Eddie, 2 from Lawyer, 3 more from Preston, Wambaugh, and Warren, and no negatives. Of those players, only one was an actual impact player. As walk-ons go, it’s still a successful project. This is kind of like finding free lottery tickets. Six were duds, three gave us a free Slurpee, one gave us 5 bucks, and one was an actual winner. a bona-fide home run with Ulofoshio.

Scholarship Players: Focusing on the scholarship players, UW brought in 21 players on scholarship. Here’s how their success broke down (with a comparison to the total including walk-ons).

The largest result for scholarship players under Bob G’s watch so far has been Bust, players that have 2 or more tiers of impact below expectation, followed by those that Met Expectations. Minor disappointments were as common as Massive Successes (2+ tiers above expectation).

• Over half of scholarship ILBs failed to meet expectations.
• Less than a quarter of scholarship ILBs exceeded expectations.

You can blame whatever you like for each individual circumstance, and it could just be luck. You can’t only apply luck to failures, though; if it’s bad luck for one player to bust then you should chalk it up to good luck when another player unexpectedly pops. The sense of luck, though, should be understood less in terms of the player than in terms of the team. Luck can certainly affect the result of a play or an injury, but the team’s overall sense of “luck” comes down to “which players succeeded or failed when it seemed like they shouldn’t have.” Luck’s hard to quantify, but I’d like to think that over the course of a decade-plus it probably evens out.

The end product of what the UW has put into their ILB room and what they’ve gotten out of it in the Gregory era thus far seems like a net negative. Not a huge net negative, but definitely something below overall expectations even with the presence of two All-Americans.

What About the Young Guys?

The final book has not yet been written on Bob Gregory as ILB coach, given that players that he recruited are still in the program and may yet turn into something. They’ve been hurt, so they might be stars in waiting. Or they might stay hurt and turn into nothing. It’s possible they’ll succeed, though. If they do, he’ll deserve credit for that. They didn’t start their careers well, but if Heimuli, Calvert, Ah You, and Tafisi can pull themselves off the scrap heap and turn into the Solid or Stud players they were expected to be (or one or more of the other youngsters can make a leap into stardom) would probably pull BG’s ILB legacy up to right around dead even.

The Future?

ILB recruiting has been okay but not great. We’ve had success with 3-star players popping, but our highly recruited players have been far more miss than hit so far, and we haven’t reeled in many of them. We can hope for better results recruiting and for continued development. We’ll if BG and the other defensive assistants will be more dynamic in closing the deal with the new staffing arrangements and hopefully being able to do campus visits

For the near future, we’ll need to lean into player development and hope that BG and Co. can improve their record on that score to get our ILB crew back to where we’d love for them to be!

Go Huskies!