2021 Preview: Tom Arth Finally Got A Win. What's Next?
Can the culture-centric coach pull off another rebuild?
ICYMI: This is a part of The Outside Zone’s full 2021 G5 preview series, which last looked at UTEP. You can find a master list for all of the previews here.
Akron essentially announced when it hired Tom Arth in December of 2018 that it wanted to start from scratch following the end of the Terry Bowden era. It was a move that made sense then and still makes sense two years later, despite Arth’s Zips notching just a single win in his first two seasons. Bowden was moderately successful during his time at Akron, taking the program to a pair of bowl games, but he faced similar issues to those that a lot of P5 castaways have at smaller schools like this one: eventually, you get pretty tired of pushing the stone up the hill, and your program starts to atrophy.
Akron moved quickly in hopes of avoiding full rot, but once you let that sort of thing into your team, it’s going to be pretty difficult to get rid of it. The gaps in Bowden’s recruiting and development had already started to show in 2018, and by the time Arth arrived for the 2019 season, there really wasn’t much within the roster that could be salvaged. It was a mismatched group, recruited less to a system or to a culture and more just for the sake of talent acquisition. Akron was within out any sort of defining trait, just a group of players floating through a loosely defined system, led by a coach that just looked tired of trying to win in a very, very difficult job.
To Akron’s credit, there may not have been a better fit for the task of repairing this program than Arth. A Northeast Ohio native with a history of turning around programs at both John Carroll from 2013-16 and Chattanooga from 2017-18, Arth’s ties to the area and chops as a program-builder looked perfectly suited to a job that desperately needed to renew its in-state recruiting while connecting that recruiting to either a strong culture or a strong system.
In Arth’s case, there’s an element of both, though he’s much more committed to culture building than he is to a specific offensive system. He is a former offensive coordinator and a strong mind on that side of the ball, but he’s not doing anything particularly unique with his system: this is a pretty standard RPO-centric offense with zone blocking, the kind that you see at just about every program in America right now. Instead, Arth’s charm comes with his Ted Lasso-esque commitment to establishing a standard operating system within his program - a set of ideals that he recruits to and looks to instill within his team. He calls it “Our Way,” just as he has since his time at John Carroll. He can explain it better than I can.
“What it represents, what it means to us, is really everything in our program,” said Arth in 2019. “What we ask of our players is to be their best every single day. Everything we do is based off of ‘Our Way.’ It means a lot.
"We have to build a foundation of our program. Who we are, what we're about. Our culture, that's what we really focused our attention on these first few months. How we practice. How important football is to us? How important school is to us? How important our involvement in the community is? All of those things, and I think once we establish that we'll put ourselves in a great position."
Obviously that sounds like standard coach-speak mumbo-jumbo and to a decent extent it is, but in Arth’s case, this idea of “Our Way” seems to legitimately play a major role in how he builds his programs. You’d be hard pressed to find a piece of Akron football content from the last two years that doesn’t feature the #OurWay moniker or an Arth speech that doesn’t make a central point out of the importance of building a culture. Coach-speak or not, it’s pretty obvious that Arth and his staff believes in this stuff and is measuring the growth of this program on the amount of buy in that they can generate within the roster.
Unfortunately for the sake of these previews, that’s a difficult metric by which to judge from the outside of the program. While Akron’s culture could be improving significantly (and likely is, I’d say), Arth has one win in two seasons to show for that. He has a team that finished 129th in the 2019 SP+ rankings with a -29.8 ranking, followed by a team that finished 124th with a -23.1 rating in 2020. It’s improvement, certainly, but it’s very difficult to say definitively that we can chalk that improvement up entirely to the Arth approach, whatever that may mean.
It also makes this a pretty difficult program to project out over the next two or three years. How much does the Arth effect add to the floor here? How important are the recruiting rankings of Arth’s first two classes - neither of which are very impressive - matter, given that he works so hard on development? Unlike a lot of these other bottom-level G5 programs, Akron taking a pretty significant jump on the field wouldn’t be a significant surprise, but to predict or foresee that, you essentially have to take a leap of faith that Arth’s approach is going to work as intended.
There aren’t on-field results from 2020 that really do much to spark enthusiasm entering the 2021 campaign, but that doesn’t mean as much as it would at a school like UMass or Bowling Green, because the on-field strategies are not the core identity here. Coordinated and meticulous talent acquisition and development is, and we only have two years of Arth at Akron to base any of those expectations on - meaning we have one full recruiting class that’s actually played, and one that will play for the first time in 2021.
So, what are the expectations for Akron in 2021? Much of it is going to depend on halfback Teon Dollard. Dollard, a junior from Lake City, Fla. and a former JUCO standout at Independence CC, was essentially Akron’s entire offense in 2020. The Zips landed Michigan State transfer Anthony Williams in the transfer portal at the same position, which will help a little, but much of Akron’s success in 2021 is going to hinge on Dollard.
The good news on that front is that he appears to be returning to Akron for his senior season, rather than declaring for the NFL draft, though he’s made no official announcement on the matter that I can see outside of this tweet. That’s enough for me to assume that he’s back and base the entire Akron offensive preview around him, because the entire Akron offense is going to be built around him.
The design of offense is, as I mentioned, pretty similar to what you’re going to see at a school like Ole Miss, UCF or any number of the other places that have dropped into the RPO game taking hold at so many schools right now. Akron leans on zone blocking up front, usually from 12 personnel, with a lot of split zone looks like this one. You’ll be shocked to learn that the offensive line isn’t very good (this is going to be true of every single team on this preview list until like, Ohio, in the mid 80s), so Akron likes to add those extra tight ends into the fold, along with an RPO tag on almost every play (not this one!) in hopes of generating a numbers advantage.
If the line generally does its job, Dollard is one of the best running backs in the country. He’s explosive from the jump and can get up to top speed quickly, and while he isn’t especially elusive, he’s able to maintain his speed well through cuts and finishes quite a bit better than you’d expect from a 5-foot-11, 205-pound halfback.
When that running game is working well, forcing the defense to respect it an collapse in on every handoff, it opens up the rest of the Akron offense, which pretty much just consisted of this in 2020. Quarterback Zach Gibson has an inordinate amount of swagger for a guy that threw more interceptions than touchdowns in 2020, but he can run these plays pretty well. He’s back as a redshirt sophomore in 2021 and will almost certainly just be a better version of an RPO quarterback, because the vertical passing attack in this offense is next to nonexistent, save for the occasional Gibson pass down the field to a receiver in single coverage that managed to win a jump ball.
There are a few plays like this that give me hope that this passing attack can be something more at some point, but it isn’t going to get to that stage consistently in 2021. This is a neat play on a more traditional scissors concept, which is great against two-high safety looks like this one. The motion man heading to the flat instead of the halfback forces the defense to pay closer attention pre-snap and ultimately distracts the deep half coverage man to the field enough to create some pretty significant room for that elongated corner route behind the five-man shell but in front of the split deep zone pairing. That this is in the playbook at all tells me that Arth can build a pretty clever passing attack, but I don’t think that Akron really has any of the pieces needed at QB, WR or on the line to do this consistently.
So, it’s likely going to be a lot of this in the upcoming year for the Akron offense. Zone running, zone running, zone running and some more zone running. I like Arth’s motion, I like looks like these, designed for Dollard to hit the back side C gap against the blocking flow rather than with it, but I wouldn’t anticipate anything groundbreaking for this group this year. It’ll have a pretty good ground game, and all success outside of that is going to be dependent on how good the offense is in that ground game.
The defense is very, very young, even in its staff - coordinator Matt Feeney is 29 - and was not good in 2020, but could be pretty fun moving forward. Feeney runs a blitz-heavy 4-2-5 with a lot of man coverage and pre-snap motion, and while it didn’t have the horses last year to win matchups, it brings back pretty much everyone in 2021, including all-conference linebacker Bubba Arslanian and cornerback A.J. Watts.
It was very susceptible to big plays last season and will likely continue those struggles, but it’ll also get better at creating havoc, so I’d expect general improvement across the board, here. Maybe not top 100 level, but pretty close to it.
That brings us back to that question of expectations for Akron in 2021. Without putting too fine a point on it or naming an actual total, I don’t expect a bowl team in Akron in 2021. The talent isn’t there yet, and because the school is in need of money, the Zips have to play Auburn, Ohio State and Temple in non-conference play this year. It can beat Bryant and Bowling Green, and may be able to steal one or two more MAC games if it gets lucky. For this program and staff, that’s the kind of progress that it’s going to need to start finding a bit more consistently and tangibly entering year three. This administration is patient, but another one-win season is going to start making “Our Way” look like the wrong way.