2021 G5 Preview: Toledo is Looking For That Last Step
The Rockets were good at everything last season. Can they move to great this year?
ICYMI: This is a part of The Outside Zone’s full 2021 G5 preview series, which last looked at Air Force. You can find a master list for all of the previews here.
It seemed, early on in his tenure, that Jason Candle was the perfect choice to pick up where Matt Campbell had left off after he departed for Iowa State in 2015. He was a Mount Union guy, like Campbell, and had worked with him frequently before, first as teammates at Mount Union, then as coworkers in 2005-06, and again at Toledo from 2009-11 under Tim Beckman, where Candle coached tight ends and wide receivers while Campbell focused on the offensive line.
When Campbell took over for Beckman in 2012, he did as Toledo does and promoted from within, making Candle his offensive coordinator and eventually his associate head coach and quarterbacks coach. Candle thrived in that role, Toledo built three very good teams in four years and Campbell jumped to ISU.
Candle took over, hired another long-time Ohio guy in Brian Wright to coordinate his offense and Brian George, a MAC journeyman, on defense. In other words: Candle hired a pair of steady hands to make the transition from Campbell and the loss of two coordinators (kind of, Candle obviously remained in a different role, but Jon Heacock left the defensive side for Iowa State).
That made a lot of sense at the time. A lot of first-time coaches benefit from having older assistants to help them manage the day by day, and it worked very well for Candle early on, as he went 9-4 in year one and built a better team than Campbell ever had at Toledo in year two, rattling off an 11-3 record and a MAC Championship while evolving his offense nicely.
Like with a lot of coaching transitions, though, the honeymoon didn’t quite last. The offense somehow got even better in 2018 behind an unreal rushing attack, but George’s defense continued to decline, which it did every season he was in town. The offense went in 2019 too, the defense remained awful, and Toledo fell to 6-6 (which was pretty generous, honestly).
It was pretty obvious that the staff was stale and needed some new eyes, so Candle went to just about the best place in America for coaching talent: Mount Union. Toledo made former Mount Union head coach Vince Kehres its defensive coordinator and linebackers coach while pairing him with former Missouri, Miami and Alabama defensive line coach Craig Kuligowski, who left the latter under… weird circumstances. He didn’t seem to do a bad job with the Tide, but was let go after 2018, took the 2019 season off, and packed up for Toledo in January of 2020.
Candle shook up the other side of the ball too, with Wright moving to Pittsburg State (go Gorillas!). He brought in high school coaching legend Robert Weiner to coordinate the offensive and coach up the quarterbacks while keeping Mike Hallett around as the running game coordinator and offensive line coach (the rushing attack was not the issue in 2019).
Although we have just one year’s worth of samples (and the weirdest possible year at that), the early returns are… very favorable. Both sides of the ball improved significantly in 2020 with their new leaders, despite a super young roster and very little in the way of offseason install time. The passing game improved significantly, jumping to 19th in success rate and 12th in explosiveness, while the offense, in general, moved all the way up to 39th in success rate and ninth in explosiveness.
That was without an especially strong rushing attack (it was more explosive than it was efficient, slightly), which was just about the only real issue this offense had last season.
The defense, meanwhile, rode a strong defensive line, insanely aggressive linebacker play and A LOT of man coverage all the way to a No. 32 ranking in success rate, while checking in at fifth in explosiveness allowed and 39th in stuff rate.
Now, as the Rockets enter their first real offseason with this new staff, almost literally every player of importance from last year’s team returns and the MAC West looks at least marginally open, despite a lot of quality throughout in the form in the three Michigans and Ball State. To get back on top, Toledo just needs to take that continuity and turn a lot of good features into great ones. Oh, and it needs to fix one thing…
The Running Game
I mentioned it earlier, I’ll harp on it here - this rushing attack wasn’t very good last season, and will need to improve for Toledo to be able to beat a defense as good as Ball State’s, or to keep up with the offenses of the directional Michigan schools (and a road trip to Athens).
When trying to identify the problem with this attack, nothing really jumps off the screen. The line surrendered too many free rushers because it seemed uncomfortable at times with the gap blocking scheme that the Rockets have been using for years, and the running backs seemed to lack physicality in some games, but neither was a crucial issue. The two combined for some problems, certainly, and Toledo was behind the chains too often because of it, but I think this may have just been a COVID issue more than anything else. I like the talent in the running back room - Bryant Koback was awesome in 2018 and 2019 and Micah Kelly has flashed a ton of ability - even if it struggled with efficiency at times last season.
The line should improve as well. Hallett is no slouch, and last season’s was pretty much the first subpar run game he’s had.
I’m encouraged as well by a lot of the play design. Toledo is helped by having superior talent to its MAC partners, but this has also been a consistently well-coached and well-designed offense for years now, and 2020 wasn’t any different in the running game (I’ll talk about Weiner’s passing attack in a bit).
The staple was still Dart with a pulling center, as you see here. Toledo has been doing this for years and had success with it in 2020 when it wasn’t being blown up in the backfield. The Rockets run it with the center rather than the guard (generally the standard) or tackle (a popular move in the Big 12), but the actual design is fairly simple. The halfback heads outside, following one pulling blocker (the center, here), with down blocks from the rest of the line, and an outside zone-style kick-out block from the outermost blocker.
Toledo gets a bit creative with it by using an H-back in that outermost blocker role, so that it can free up the tackle to down block, running the halfback into the C gap and pulling that center into the second level to take on the first linebacker that hits the hole.
Here’s the same look again, with Koback reading the flow well and cutting inside to avoid a bunch of traffic.
They run it occasionally with a tackle as well, usually from four-wide, because it doesn’t require a tight end. These head for the B gap, with the playside tackle showing the kick-out block and the pulling tackle just leaving the backside end unblocked (because he’s not making the play here).
Unless the line just doesn’t improve at all (unlikely), I’m confident that Toledo’s rushing attack is bouncing back this season, even if it isn’t quite to 2018 levels (that group had like six good backs, this one has one and a half).
The Passing Game
The biggest impact of Weiner’s approach was on the passing game, which was leaps and bounds better than what Wright was ever doing. This attack was efficient, explosive and got a whole lot of players involved, be they running backs, tight ends, or your standard wide receivers.
It also had two quarterbacks directing it in Eli Peters (the familiar face) and Carter Bradley (younger and a bit flashier). Both played well, though Peters was quite a bit more efficient, and, in my view, was a significantly better option.
That brings the unfortunate news: Peters’ career is over. He took a medical hardship during spring ball (I don’t have details on this, he had dealt with injuries in the past so we’ll go with that). There’s a quarterback battle in place, allegedly, but Bradley should be the guy and I’ll be surprised if he isn’t. The Rockets did sign Tucker Gleason from Georgia Tech and have a few other options, but Bradley has the most experience and looked good in stretches last season.
I am a little concerned about his accuracy - he was a bit shakier than Peters and doesn’t exactly have a cannon (neither did Peters) - but I think he’s more than capable of running this passing attack, especially with the talent and coaching around him. Plus, he can do this.
Schematically (and I don’t say this a whole lot), this passing game is really cool. It doesn’t do a whole lot in the way of unique play design, but Toledo has one of the best and most efficient intermediate passing attacks that I’ve seen thus far this offseason and I think that Bradley absolutely has the brain and the arm for it.
I think this is my favorite example. I don’t usually show these kinds of plays because they’re not particularly interesting (to me), but this was a ton of Toledo’s passing attack. The Rockets relied heavily on strong route running to create openings, Peters had great timing with his wideouts and they were able to make plays after the catch because of how wide-open they were.
They get the halfback involved as an outlet too, which I love, especially for a younger quarterback. Nothing terribly complex, as I said, but I think Toledo may have the most technically skilled and structurally sound passing game in the MAC, even with a new quarterback.
The Run Defense
This defense is interesting enough to get subheads for both parts of it, though I don’t plan to go especially long on either because they overlap in pretty major ways.
Firstly, this run defense looked absolutely nasty at times last season. It also looked way too aggressive at other times, which is pretty heavily related to that first point. I don’t know that I’ve seen linebackers key on the run this hard before, and while it works really well when they get there on time, Toledo overshot its targets fairly frequently with this approach and could afford to dial it back just a tad.
I say that especially because the line (and specifically the tackles) are really good. These linebackers can be aggressive without going crazy and the run defense will still be super stout up front, and it may cut down on some of the bigger gains that really shouldn’t have happened last season.
The Pass Defense
Did I mention that this line is really good? Because folks,
It’s really, really good. Toledo blitzes like crazy, which certainly helps as well, but it’s very hard to throw the ball down the field on this defense. Because Toledo blitzes so frequently and plays almost exclusively man defense on the backend, there are short gains to be had here, but just about the only explosive plays on this group are going to come from someone making a mistake, and that just didn’t happen all that often last season.
Toledo is going to win the MAC
I haven’t done this yet during this series, because no team has given me a reason to, but I’m making my first big call here: Toldeo is winning the MAC West, and with Buffalo losing Lance Leipold, I think it wins the whole conference. There’s probably a slip-up game somewhere in conference play (maybe @Ohio or @Ball State), and they’re almost certainly losing to Notre Dame, but I think 10-2 and a MAC crown is completely reasonable here.