Three running backs from the class of 2013: Derrick Green, Wyatt Shallman, De’Veon Smith (image via 247 Sports)
Redshirt junior running back/fullback/linebacker Wyatt Shallman will pursue a graduate transfer opportunity elsewhere for next season. He played each of those positions at various times throughout his college career, though he finishes his days at Michigan with 4 career carries for 14 yards while playing in sixteen career games.
My history of discussing Shallman has been short and emphatic. I wrote a scouting report on him in January of 2012 (LINK), had a bit more to say about him when he committed in February of 2012 (LINK), and eventually landed on a TTB Rating of 65 (LINK). Beyond his recruitment, there really hasn’t been much reason to talk about him over the years. He started out as a tailback for Brady Hoke, which was a bad fit to begin. He took snaps at fullback for Jim Harbaugh back in the spring of 2016, and I noted that he did not look enthused to be a blocking back. He switched to defense in the middle of this past season, but that didn’t seem like a great solution. Switching positions in the middle of your fourth year generally isn’t a good sign.
There is the occasional recruit whose negative reviews engender some anger from, well, people who are interested in seeing that recruit succeed. I received a fair amount of hate mail after my assessment of Shallman’s abilities several years ago. Despite the fact that Shallman was a 247 Composite 4-star, the #1 fullback, and #299 overall, I didn’t see him making much of an impact at Michigan.
The departure of Shallman is a positive for all parties. Shallman was not going to play in 2017. He had already been passed up by classmates or younger players at every position he played, and he wasn’t a standout on special teams, either. This opens up a spot for a younger player or a transfer to enter the fray and compete for a more meaningful role. Meanwhile, Shallman has an opportunity to end up elsewhere – likely at a MAC school, I would guess – and carve out a spot.
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Like me; Wyatt has weird surfer dude animal lover freak & philosopher as a basic part of his DNA. Screw the MAC – He belongs here at San Diego St with a future on the Beach and his own TV show in conjunction with the SD Zoo………
He is a Free Spirit in the True sense of the word. Wish him the best.
INTJohn
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Credit for calling this one. I thought he’d eventually end up as a quality H-back or OLB but it never worked out that way. If he had played for Harbaugh from day 1 perhaps it would have worked out differently.
Jumbo RBs are a bad idea!
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Two words, “Ron Dayne'”
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Did Wisconsin miss Ron Dayne after he was gone or did they replace him with someone else?
How good was Ron Dayne when he stopped running behind Wisconsin’s OL?
I’ll answer for you. No and Not
Dayne was replace by a 5’9 200 RB who had 1700 yards the following year. In the NFL he averaged 3.8 ypc.
Dayne was a good player 20 years ago. But a) that was 20 years ago and b) his production was mostly thanks to an OL. You can tell that because no matter which back they put back there became an all-conference if not Heisman contender every year. The offense was a machine and Dayne deserves only a sliver of credit for it.
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Two words, “Heisman Trophy.”
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Eric Crouch has one of those too. And he threw 3 more picks than TD’s that year.
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Not sure about your point, Eric Crouch was an option QB. As an aside, he also won Davey O’Brian on the strength of 2700 or so total yards a raft of touchdowns and an extremely efficient offense.
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2 letters: OL
They did that – thanks to the machine that Alvarez built with help from Brad Childress.
Many Heisman trophy winners are products of systems.
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A number, followed by two words, “7,125 yards rushing.”
That would be #1 all time ahead of anybody you might care to name, including Dorsett, Herschel Walker, Bo Jackson, Ladainian Thompson, OJ Simpson, Ricky Williams, ….. Pick a name, the big boy out gained all of them. None of those guys is even within 500 yards of Dayne’s record. Oh, and all those guys had offensive lines too.
Your premise is foolish. “Jumbo backs are a bad idea.” I don’t care what shape my RB is, as long as he kills you running the football. Ron Dayne was a stone cold killer running the football. He’s pound your ass till you wished it was over and then he’s pound it some more. And you couldn’t get him out of the game. Go ahead, hit him all you want, it’s your funeral. He just kept bringing it for carry after carry until you broke.
Nobody at the college level has the evidence to say that they did it better.
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Not all of those guys were so readily replaced and all of them went on to success at the NFL level.
THAT – plus the continued success of Wisconsin RBs after Dayne left – is why it is illogical to credit Dayne for that production.
Some credit yes, but Dayne was not the primary factor in the success and production.
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Don’t take too much credit from RDayne. While he did run behind a great OL, so did his following Badger RBs–and noone of them have produced nearly as much as he did
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I’m not going to give Dayne a lot of credit for the production because his replacements did approximately the same thing.
I will give Dayne credit for being a good (not great) college player and extremely durable. The workload was impressive. He showed up for it and produced.
But so would other backs and so did they in the years to come. The OL was probably the best OL Wisconsin ever had.
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No 90s RB came close to what Dayne did, unless you think half of total yards is close enough. In fact, Monte Ball is second all-time, and he’s a decade removed (and 2K yards)
“his replacementside did approximately the same thing”
http://www.totalfootballstats.com/RushingLeaders_Career.asp?id=167
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Every player is a “system” player, and every player depends on 10+ other guys on his team for success. I don’t really like knocking guys for playing in a certain system and saying they’re not very good. People say that about Tom Brady, Charles Woodson, Denard Robinson, Anthony Thomas, etc., along with great players from Nebraska, Texas Tech, Alabama, etc. Ron Dayne was excellent at what Wisconsin asked him to do, Jason White was excellent at what Oklahoma asked him to do, Vince Young was excellent at what Texas asked him to do, etc.
Either players are flat-out good, or almost every single one is a “system guy” who’s just doing what the coaches set him up to do.
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There are guys that transcend system and there are guys that don’t. Pat White and Tim Tebow were system QBs. Cam Newton and Marcus Mariota are not.
A great player will be successful in different environments. A system player will only have success in one environment and will be readily replaced.
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Cam Newton is a guy whose NFL “system” has been altered to replicate his college system, which may be a big reason that he’s been successful. Put him in New England running the same plays as Tom Brady, and maybe that story changes.
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That’s a hodge podge of examples.
Nobody called Woodson a system guy. He was a great player, wherever he played, and he was impossible to replace at Michigan.
Vince Young was a guy that Texas changed their offense to support. That’s not being a system guy that being a generational talent that you build your offense around (rather than fitting into a system).
Like Young, Denard Robinson made the Hoke/Borges coaching staff call plays they’ve run before.
There are obviously varying degrees of ability among some of these players, but when an offensive system is humming along at full speed you can replaces the pieces very easily. Average players look good, good players look great, etc.
The Michigan RBs of the 80s and 90s are great examples of this. Most of them were all conference or all american but none of them were very successful when not running behind the Michigan OL.
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Your excuse for Vince Young is hogwash. Just because they changed the system to fit him doesn’t mean he’s not a system guy. That’s like saying Denard Robinson wasn’t a system guy. No, he WAS a system guy who was bad as a throwing QB under Brady Hoke, wasn’t recruited by many other teams to play QB, and has moved to RB in the NFL. It just so happened that he fit the system that Rodriguez was bringing in from WVU.
Ron Dayne was a great college player, and he happened to fit well into Wisconsin’s system. The same thing goes for Denard Robinson, Vince Young, Dennis Dixon, etc. Are they transcendent like Barry Sanders or Tony Dorsett? No, but if you only respect the talent of transcendent players, then that’s a very, very short list.
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There is a reason these jumbo backs barely exist anymore. The ones that do play for Alabama which is another CFB machine and NFL OL factory.
The only other non-alabama jumbo back I can think of is Toby Gerhart, who also ran behind a CFB machine of a running attack at Stanford.
Michigan OL/offense is not at the CFB machine level and until they get there — Jumbo backs are a bad idea!
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The reason they are hard to find is that they’ve always been hard to find. Nothing has changed. The fact that you can’t think of any has to do with the fact that 270 lbs people with the speed to carry the football come few and far between. When you find one if you aren’t smart enough to hand him the football, you just had a bad idea.
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Somewhat unrelated story: A couple years ago, the coach at my HS program tried to shoehorn a 290 lb. kid into a role as a FB. I was against it, but whatever the head man says goes. Fast forward about three weeks into the season, and he was an OT.
I actually like jumbo backs if – IF – you have a very good OL. That’s why I thought Derrick Green would have success at Michigan, because he was 230 lbs. with some speed and it seemed like Michigan was recruiting to have a great OL. But the OL thing never happened, and Green never got the chance to be running full speed at safeties. (He still went down too easily and everything, but the point is simply that jumbo backs need blocking up front to be fully effective.)
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IF you have a dominant OL – I like jumbo backs too. I would recruit and develop the former first. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
Jumbo backs aren’t very hard to find at all. They were standard issue in the 80s and 90s. The ones who have the speed and elusiveness that can approximate dudes who are 5’9 to 6′ are.
Ty Isaac is mediocre at best back, but I think he would have exceptional (all conference level) success if you gave him the bulk of carries behind Alabama’s current OL, the OL that Gerhart had, the Wisconsin OLs of the aughts, or the Michigan OLs of the 90s.
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Jumbo backs are highly entertaining. That makes them appealing to football fans the same way a no defense volume shooting pg is appealing to bball fans. If you have the right supporting cast – it’s brilliant. But that’s the hard part.
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Take away the names and look at what the lead back did each year.
Dayne’s best year was 1999:
338 plays / 2043 yards / 6.0 per touch
The following year a 5’9 RB had:
314 / 1704 yards / 5.4 per touch
That same player (M. Bennett) had a better NFL career than Dayne.
Dayne was good, but his best attributes were durability and being at the right place at the right time.
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OK, take away names:
One had 200 career careers, the Heisman winner was entrusted with 2200 carries
One led his team to a 4-4 conference record, the guy we’re saying was great carried his team to 7-1
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You’re talking about volume and team outcomes, which is in line with my compliments regarding durability and being at the right place at the right time.
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You said those RBs who followed did appx the same, I showed you how untrue that was
You said take away the names, and I showed you more to dispute the “appx the same” crap
While I appreciate your fandom, and agree with your belief that our OL has been the Root Cause of our offensive woes lately, I have to say that your strategy in online debating is quite obvious: you change your argument when a point is made, and hope that more & longer posts are taken as superior talking points. They’re not
GO BLUE
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JE all due respect but you didn’t show me they did differently, you counted up total stats for 4 years and compared them to guys who didn’t play for 4 years.
This is akin to asserting that tempo spread teams have better offenses because they run more plays.
There is a point there because you have to move the ball to run a lot of plays, just like you have to be good to earn a lot of carries, but it masks the bigger issue. We have more telling data than counting stats.
Dayne had sustained success but so did Wisconsin RBs as a whole. The YPC for the lead Wisconsin back was in the 5 to 6 neighborhood consistently over a very long period. Other backs were more impressive than Dayne in that regard.
Again, what Dayne did that was impressive was play a lot. He deserves credit for that, and his size probably contributed to it. But he is not the lead catalyst in why that offense was so successful. Because, again, it continued after he was gone, unabated.
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Dude had the best hair ever. Going to miss looking over at the UM bench and not seeing that beautiful blonde mane of his.
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I still remember his HS highlight tape – was basically a collection of six yard runs. Did not have much in the way of defensive highlights either. Good athlete, just not a physical player. Interested to see where he winds up.
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It’s funny looking back on that initial scouting report. TomVH, Wyatt with no hair (He may not have cut his hair since that photo), some guy named Robert hopes that his commitment doesn’t affect Ty Isaac’s recruitment. Turns out that his commitment most certainly did not affect Ty Isaac’s recruitment, Isaac committed to USC anyways, and yet they both still end up teammates.
Regardless, props for the accurate assessment. Shallman does seem like a really cool guy who will find happiness outside of football in life. Would love for Michigan to get a similar player to him that just turns out to have all of the upside the scouting services thought he had. Funny enough, I think Ty Isaac could be used more in that H-Back role next year that we thought Shallman would have originally.
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Been calling for Isaac as an H-back since he arrived at UM at 230 pounds+.
Not going to happen this late in the game. It’s pretty clear he’s an unenthusiastic blocker.
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Why is it that the reply button to an individual post is sometimes missing? In this thread it occurs for me in the exchange of dialog between Lanknows and je93.
Maybe for the best…
I’ve heard this same argument about Walter Peyton and Emmitt Smith. Lanknows, “Dayne was good, but his best attributes were durability and being at the right place at the right time.”
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Comments only go 8 levels deep. Once it gets past that, the columns get too skinny and you can only fit one word per line. Unfortunately, the REPLY button disappears unless you go back to the 8th-level comment.
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A system is something that has longevity and stays through multiple players. A system is something you run over and over again and find personnel to suit. A system guy is someone who fits into that predefined “system”. Not every player is a system player.
I think there is a fundamental difference here in the definition of the word.
If you are changing your offense to fit a players skillset – that is not a system. That is flexibility. If you as a head coach change the playcalling to fit a special player you are going outside of your system. You don’t have a new system just because you accommodate an outlier talent.
Rich Rodriguez has a system, but if he coached Tom Brady he would (presumably) toss aside his system to fit Tom Brady’s skillset. But Tom Brady is not a ‘system player’.
Al Borges’ system didn’t become the spread n shred just because he installed some of those plays into his playbook.
Denard Robinson is a system QB. Russel Wilson and Cam Newton are not.
Newton in college was successful in an offense where he ran half the time. In the NFL his run/pass ratio isn’t remotely the same and he’s had a 4,000 yard season as a passer. He’s not running anything like Malzhan’s system.
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We do have different definitions of the word “system.” Mine just happens to be the right one.
Look, a zone read option offense is a system. A triple option offense is a system. The Run ‘n’ Shoot is a system. And so on. It doesn’t matter if it’s been at a school for 20 years or for 1 year. Texas installed a system to meet Vince Young’s skills, and he played in that system throughout his career. When he had a chance to play in a different system (with the Titans, for example), he failed. He’s a system guy. He’s not what you would call a “transcendent player.” And that’s fine. He was still a great college player.
Rich Rodriguez would almost certainly toss his system aside if Tom Brady were his QB…and he would install a different system.
What you’re talking about is a philosophy when it comes to Cam Newton. If I run a triple option offense but I pass the ball 60% of the time, that doesn’t mean I’ve changed my system. It means I’ve changed my philosophy. Maybe I’ve got a good passer and/or good receivers, or maybe my running backs just suck this year. I’m not going to sit here and say Newton runs the exact same set of plays that he did at Auburn, but it is kind of a souped up version. An NFL team isn’t going to run Newton as much because they’re paying him more than any other player on their team (I think). He’s the face of their franchise. It’s a similar system, but the philosophy has changed.
I agree that Russell Wilson isn’t a system QB. The reason is that he had success at NC State, Wisconsin, and with the Seattle Seahawks, all of which have/had different systems. But I’m not taking anything away from any of these guys. They’re all very good/great players. But they all have played within certain systems and had success in those systems; furthermore, there are systems in which they would not succeed (Brady in Rodriguez’s zone read option, Peyton Manning in Georgia Tech’s triple option, Ron Dayne in the Run ‘n’ Shoot, etc.).
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An offense is not a system if it is different from year to year.
We agree Rodriguez has a system (presumably because he runs the same offense no matter where he is or what players he has). We also agree that Rodriguez would discard it for Tom Brady. But I would not call a Rodriguez offense with Brady a different ‘system’. Rodriguez would most likely go back to his ‘system’ offense afterwards.*
I believe this is what happened at Texas before and after Vince Young (Simms and Mccoy).
*Of course it is possible for a system to evolve based on talent available. I think this is what we saw from Taggert. He took the Harbaugh system, added Florida talent, and arrived at something that looks closer to Chip Kelly’s Oregon offense (where no-coincidence he landed).
I don’t agree with you about Newton or the Panthers offense. I don’t really see it as anything like Auburn’s offense. I think his current team is LESS dependent on his talent than that Auburn team. He ran a lot in college and he runs a lot relative to NFL QBs in the NFL but the offenses are totally different in terms of scheme, personnel, plays etc.
I don’t see Seattle’s offense as a ‘system’. I don’t think there is enough identity there to distinguish it.
I think Barry Sanders would be great in any offense and is not a system player. Same for Calvin Johnson, and many other good players.
Just because you are limited in some fashion (Brady’s legs, Denard’s arm) doesn’t mean you are a system guy in my book. You are a system guy if you succeed because you happen to be in a particular system and your skills are likely not transferable outside of it. Brady can be great in a lot of different offenses, despite his limitation. Denard’s (arm and size) limitations make him great only in a system that emphasizes getting a running QB in space.
Two players, both had great success in college despite some turmoil, both have limitations in their skillset, but one is a ‘system’ guy and one is not. IMO
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Any offense or defense is a system. Jim Harbaugh’s offense is a system. Don Brown’s defense is a system. There are others that are even more obvious. Vince Young played in that offensive system for three years. It didn’t change from year to year. Is it a system by year two…is it a system by year three? If not, did Rich Rodriguez not have a system since he was only at Michigan for three years?
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Every offense has a scheme, but not every scheme is a system.
You can build a system around a scheme. But scheme is something you can change from year to year (or even drive to drive to take it to the extreme) while a system is something you put in place consistently over years.
I think if you treat scheme and system as synonyms the word loses meaning.
I think we have to agree to disagree about football semantics on this one.
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As for the examples you mentioned:
Texas didn’t change it’s system it ran a different scheme for the sake of Vince Young’s talent. The ‘system’ was put on hiatus to support a generational college talent. It was there in the same form (more or less) before and after Young.
Rodriguez was installing his system. I would argue he did it right away but it was still “under construction” and not very successful. It was the same system he ran at WVU and Arizona, before and after. The before and after (multi-year) element is critical here.
In contrast, I would argue that Borges installed his system far more slowly, to the point that you could debate if he installed any system at all. His 2011 Michigan offense didn’t look much like his offenses before or after.
I guess you could say he was gradually transitioning from Rodriguez’s system to his own over time, but that 2011 team was not any discernible ‘system’ to my eyes. It was a hodge podge offense.
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If every player is a system player – isn’t the ‘system’ term unnecessary and meaningless?
This is why your definition is incorrect in my view.
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It’s the Barry Sander vs Emmitt Smith argument, which was a big point of conversation in the 90s.
The difference between Smith and Dayne is that Smith wasn’t easily replaced.
A better parallel is the Marino vs Montana argument. I’m on the Marino side because Montana was replaced by Young and wasn’t nearly as good in KC.
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As opposed to Dayne who has yet to be replaced.
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Dayne was replaced by Bennett immediately.
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…sort of. Dayne ran for 2,034 yards and 20 touchdowns on 6.0 YPC during his senior year.
Michael Bennett ran for 1,681 yards and 11 touchdowns on 5.4 YPC the next year. Those are still very good numbers, but they’re obviously…worse.
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Within the standard deviation of Dayne’s 4 seasons. Nice thing about a guy sticking around 4 years is you can see that the same player has year to year variance and it’s not necessarily about him getting better or worse from year to year.
It wasn’t just Bennett though – we saw it year after year for many years. Wisc replaced standout RBs again and again and those guys went off to unexceptional NFL careers again and again. It’s pretty clear that the Wisc game was not reliant on elite RB talent.
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LOL, Lanknows wins on sheer volume of posts
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I’m the Ron Dayne of TTB
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It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility. Yogi Berra
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