Mike Yurcich Is a Pretty Good Coordinator, But It Doesn’t Always Seem That Way

Oklahoma State averaged over eight yards a play on Saturday against a defense that coming into the game was top 30 in the country in yards per play allowed. Eight yards a play would rank No. 4 in the country overall behind Louisville, Miami and Texas Tech. And still I heard complaints.

They’re one-dimensional!

What about when they face great corners!

Fire the OC!

I’m convinced that last one is just a trope that is trotted out on any random poor play by any college football team’s offense. It doesn’t even really mean anything anymore. It’s like saying “we’re taking it one game at a time” or “he loves his family.” It just exists in the ether as a meaningless statement.

Anyway, I have been thinking about Mike Yurcich a lot recently. Thinking about his offenses and what OSU is trying to accomplish. Wondering why he takes such a beating while his two predecessors — Dana Holgorsen and Todd Monken — are so beloved. I think I came up with a couple of answers.

First, I looked at yards per play for all three coordinators. The results are pretty predictable.

• Monken: 7.0
• Dana: 6.9
• Yurcich: 5.9

But it goes deeper than that I think. Yurcich has six games in which his teams have gained more than eight yards per play (including last Saturday). That’s pretty good, even 42 games into his career as the coordinator. Even when you make it a percentage. Monken had five in two years. Dana had two in one year. Yurcich is about on track with that.

So his highs are as high. But his lows, well they are really, really low. I plotted every game of each coordinator’s tenure on this chart. This is yards per play for a given game.

Monken and Dana always existed between five and nine yards per play with one game for each above nine. That’s a good slot to live in. You’re going to score a lot of points and win a lot of games when your offense averages between five and nine yards per game. The national average this season through three weeks, by the way, is 5.9. That will drop slightly over the final 10 weeks as fewer FCS games are sprinkled in. The national average last year at season’s end was 5.7.

So you can see Yurcich hanging with those other two guys in terms of best games. He’s right there. And his middle games are pretty good too. But his bad games. Whooo boy. The CMU game this year was below five. So was the Ole Miss bowl game as well as the WVU and Texas games from last year. He had four (!) games in 2014 in which his teams averaged 4.1 yards per play or worse.

Yurcich’s ceiling is just as high as Monk and Dana, but his floor is much lower, and I think that’s where a lot of the frustration comes in. You have to remember four other things when looking at these numbers though:

• Dana and Monken had Weeden for a year each. Yurcich had Daxx and J.W.
• Dana and Monken had NFL running backs — maybe they are better recruiters?
• OSU’s offensive philosophy has changed since those other two guys left … I would expect there to be a bit of dropoff no matter who Gundy brought in to run the show
• OSU’s offensive line was pretty clearly superior in 2011-2013 than now — maybe that’s coaching, maybe not

Is Yurcich as good of a playcaller as Monk or Dana? Nobody thinks that. Both coaches parlayed the position into head coaching jobs at FBS schools. Their trajectories were towards spots like that. I’m not sure that’s something we can always expect that to happen [stares at Doug Meacham’s bio for 15 minutes, weeps].

The criticism there of Yurcich is maybe a little heavy and definitely misinformed. Is he an elite playcaller? Probably not. But are you going to go get somebody who is that much better than him? I’m not so sure. Gundy clearly values continuity within his program, and Yurcich has provided that. And who knows how the rest of this season will play out.

“Momentum is a big part of offensive play and football in general,” Yurcich said after his QB broke the school record for passing yards on Saturday. “Whenever you can put together some rhythm as an offense, it’s going to go better for you obviously. The sooner you can start that, the better. Momentum and confidence, all those things start.

“One of the important keys is to focus on one play at a time because when you don’t have that momentum and when you’re not having that explosive start to be able to restart yourself is a key. You can’t always reflect on the past and you have to play one play at a time and focus on that play and make that play the only play that matters. So playing in the now and in the moment is a really important ingredient to that.”

In the now and in the moment. It sure looked great for Yurcich last week. What about the next nine?