Colorado Head Coach Mike MacIntyre Must Take Control of the Offense

Heading into what was supposed to be "gimme" win against UMass at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough (the home of the Patriots), the Colorado Buffaloes find themselves scrambling before the season gets any more lost. The Buffs and their fans came into the season assuming that the CU team would easily dispatch their three non-conference opponents and scoured the schedule to find 3 Pac-12 foes to defeat and earn the right to their first bowl game since 2007.

After the shellacking they took at the hands of Colorado State in the Rocky Mountain Showdown, Buff fans are now scouring the schedule to find any teams that the Buffs can beat at all. The Buffs, as a Pac-12 team, are supposed to have more talent than the likes of CSU, UMass, and Hawaii.

It's not even supposed to be a level playing field.

The Buffs have better facilities to practice and train in. They are able to better feed their athletes. They spend a lot more money on their program. With all that in place, the blame for the failures of the team falls squarely on the coaching staff.

CU fans found themselves longing for the play-calling of Eric Bieniemy.

That's pretty bad. Bieniemy once called a quarterback sneak on first down because he had not noticed that his team had made a first down on the prior play.

How bad was the play-calling of offensive coordinator Brian Lindgren? It was terrible. In his 2nd year at CU (and throughout his first), Lindgren has shown absolutely no ability to get his team into an offensive rhythm for an entire game (or even a half). He has a serious propensity for following a series or two of great success with the next 2 or 3 series of insisting on not doing what has been working. Or, by driving down the field and then changing the play-calling inside the red zone.

Buff fans are also asking, "Is this a team that wants to play at a fast pace (to supposedly take advantage of how 'in-shape' they are supposed to be in) or a team that methodically takes time off the clock? With Lindgren running the offense, the identity of this team when it has the ball is schizophrenic at best, and self destructive almost always.

MacIntyre jumped in to help coach the defensive backs, and it showed.

The weakest part of a horrible defense last year was the defensive backfield. Mac jumped in this spring and fall camp and worked with the DB's. It worked, because they pretty much shut down the record setting passer from CSU. Grayson averaged around 300 yards a game last year, and the Buffs held him to 134 yards in the Rocky Mountain showdown.

In fact, 84 of those 134 yards passing by CSU came in the last 17 1/2 minutes of the game. By that time, the CSU running game was so dominating the Buffs' defensive line that the DB's had to start moving forward to help stop the run. Only then did CSU start completing passes on a consistent level.

Let Lindgren focus on the QB's, and let Mac call the plays.

Sefo Liufau has obviously made himself a little quicker this year, but nobody is ever going to confuse him with Kordell Stewart or Darian Hagan. He is not an offensive threat when running, but he can use his feet to keep the opposing defense from disregarding him.

Sefo and Lindgren need to work on his pocket work. They are doing much like they did last year in regard to spreading out the passes, which mostly means they are not spreading them around at all. Last year, Paul Richardon and Nelson Spruce got the vast majority of passes thrown their way. This year, it appears that Lindgren wants to do the same thing with Spruce and the true freshman Shay Fields. The two of them combined for 15 of the 24 completions.

Another problem with the passing game is that Sefo does not seem to know how to "look off" his receiver to confuse the defense. What that means is that he tends to look directly at his intended receiver for their entire route. Defensive backs see where Liufau is looking from the time he gets in the pocket and they KNOW where the ball will be thrown. It also makes it much easier when they know that most of the passes will be thrown to the same two guys.

Last year, 59% of the completed passes went to Richardson and Spruce. In the game against CSU, 62.5% of the completions went to Spruce and Fields. That's okay if your receivers are dominating and scoring at will. It's not okay when your team has won only 4 out of 13 games under Lindgren.

Maybe Lindgren was spoiled working with David Fales.

Watching highlights of Fales, he seems to have the tendency of watching his receiver run the route too. The difference between Liufau and Fales, however is that Fales scanned the field of play with the eyes of a hawk to determine which of his receivers was likely to be open BEFORE the play started. It was only then that the ball was snapped and Fales hit his target so often that he was considered one of the best QB's in the country.

The other difference is that when the guy Fales thought would be open wasn't, he was able to adjust down the line. In 2012, Fales had eight receivers with 10 or more catches, six with 26 or more, four with 47 or more, and two with 62 or more. Fales was able to spread the wealth to lots of different receivers and San Jose State was a much harder team to defend because of it.

Lindgren got much of the credit for that San Jose Spartan team in 2012 that won 11 games and ended up in the top 20 at the end of the season. Perhaps that credit would be better directed at David Fales. The success of Lindgren's offensive schemes has been very limited without Fales in the line-up.

In a two year span, Lindgren went from Offensive Coordinator for the Northern Arizona Lumberjacks to the same position for a Pac-12 team.

Some coaches are able to make quantum leaps up the ladder in a very successful way.

San Francisco 49er Head Coach Jim Harbaugh is often used as an example. He went from coaching a FCS program at the University of San Diego for three years to head coach at Stanford. He made the Cardinal, a perennial also ran in football, one of the most dominant teams in college football. After 4 years at Stanford, he became head coach for the NFL 49ers. He quickly turned a down team into a contender. He won NFL coach of the year in 2011 and guided the team to the Super Bowl in 2012.

Lindgren cannot be compared to Harbaugh. For one, Harbaugh spent 14 years at quarterback in the NFL. Lindgren was 7 years old when Harbaugh was playing NFL football.

This is not to say that Brian Lindgren does not have a bright future as a coach.

What is being said is that Lindgren needs more seasoning before taking over an offense that has to compete in the Pac-12. He needs to spend more time with his quarterbacks and less time trying to create an offense and calling plays.

If Lindgren ever expects Liufau to be nearly as good as David Fales, he needs much more attention than a trip to the Manning Passing Academy. Liufau needs a coach who devotes all his time to the quarterbacks at the University of Colorado. And Lindgren needs to focus on one thing (coaching the QB) before being thrust into the lion's den of Pac-12 football.

Colorado Buffs Should Look to Stanford for Football Inspiration

Some of the darkest days for fans of the University of Colorado football program have been concentrated in the last several years. Paradoxically, those looking for a new dawn in Boulder might focus their attention West to Palo Alto in California's Bay Area. It is there on the Stanford campus where one might find how quickly a new coach can turn around a moribund program.

The mastermind behind what is now the Stanford juggernaut was current San Francisco 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh. Following a three year stint at the University of San Diego, Harbaugh was named the head coach at Stanford. The situation in Palo Alto in 2006 was every bit as dire as it was in Boulder in 2012.

The Cardinal finished the 2006 season with a record of 1-11, lowlighted by an offense which scored a grand total of 127 points for the season. How bad is that? By comparison, the CU Buffs scored 214 points in 2012. Two days after the 2006 season ended, head coach Walt Harris was fired, and the Harbaugh revolution was begun.

Following the 1-11 season in 2006, Harbaugh began the arduous task of rebuilding the football culture for the Stanford Cardinal. In 2007, Stanford won four games, in 2008 they won five games, and in 2009 they won eight games to become bowl eligible for the first time since 2001.

 By 2010, the rebirth of the Stanford Cardinal football program was complete. Harbaugh led the team to an astonishing record of 12-1 and were ranked #4 in the country following the bowls. It was the first time that Stanford had been ranked in the top five at the end of the season in 70 years.

When Jim Harbaugh was hired at Stanford, one of the more important things he did was to bring along Mike Shaw, the current Cardinal head coach. When Harbaugh moved on to become head coach of the NFL San Francisco 49ers following the 2010 season, Shaw stayed at his alma mater as head coach and has kept the Cardinal rolling with 23 wins out of his 27 games. Stanford has ended the year in the Top 10 both of those seasons.

Like the Cardinal in 2006, the 2012 version of the CU Buffs was arguably the worst in the long and storied history of the program. They not only lost a lot (11 times, versus only victory), but they also lost so ugly that opponents scored more than 40 points 8 times during the season. Four opponents scored at least 50 points, and two rocked the Buffs for 69 and 70, respectively. Following the end of the season, head coach Jon Embree was fired.

Mike MacIntyre was hired  in December 2012 as the new head football coach at the University of Colorado. MacIntyre was previously the head coach at San Jose State, where he pulled a very Harbaugh- like reconstruction of the football program. In his three years at SJS, the Spartans went from a single win in 2010 (1-12), to 5-7 in 2011, and then to a stellar 11-2 record in 2012.

Like Harbaugh did at Stanford, MacIntyre took the San Jose State program and changed the culture. He did this by building an excellent staff that was dedicated to working as a team to molding young men into student athletes first and foremost. The excellence they demanded of their players off the field helped turn them into very good football players on the field.

The terms "strength" and "conditioning" are a mantra for all football programs, of course, but MacIntyre took it to a new level by hiring a young man named Dave Forman to be his director of Sports Performance. While at San Jose State, Mac hired Forman away from Stanford, where he had been working as a strength and conditioning coach for three years.

In his time at Stanford and his two years at SJS, Forman turned programs which were routinely pushed around into teams known for their strength, conditioning and performance. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that he will not achieve the same thing in Boulder. Indeed, the altitude at CU will only help CU to become one of the best conditioned programs in the conference and the country.

In the horror of the 2012 football season, it seemed to many Buff fans that the football world had been turned upside down. That being the case, the sun coming up to better times has risen from the West. Stanford and San Jose State are both bastions of the Bay Area's Silicon Vally, and together they helped create the new football technology which will return Colorado to football prominence once again.

Let the MacIntyre revolution at CU begin!

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Check out "A New Dawn for Colorado Buff Football"