Chuck Martin faced his first proverbial third-and-long early in his press session. Brian Kelly’s new offensive coordinator, along with all the Irish assistant coaches, each wearing a different title in 2012 than they did in 2011, met with an eager press corp, ready to hear how this year will be better than the last.
Martin drew quite a crowd, and quickly was faced with a challenging question that might as well have been a well-disguised zone blitzer. The former safeties coach and recruiting coordinator was asked what his biggest impact on the offense will be. Martin didn’t blink.
“Hopefully execution,” Martin said. “I think that’s what Coach Kelly is counting on.”
Consider Martin’s first test passed. The long-time defensive coach, who handled quarterbacks and playcalling in his six year tenure as a D-2 national championship coach at Grand Valley State was spot on identifying the issues that plagued the Irish offense, with uncharacteristic errors damning a season that saw prolific yardage outputs marred by back-breaking mistakes.
“We want his offense to look the way it’s supposed to look,” Martin said of Kelly’s scheme. “It’s just about execution. People are calling me and asking me, ‘what’s the matter with the offense?’ There’s nothing wrong with the offense, it’s been proven for years and years. It’s execution.
“My seven-year-old daughter could tell you that we didn’t execute well. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that hey, if you fumble the ball in some key situations, it could certainly effect the outcome of games. If you throw the ball to the other team in key situations it can certainly, you know. And it’s not just those two facets, it’s are we consistent route runners, are we consistent blocking things up front, it always comes back to the head coach and quarterback. If you watch our tape there was a lot of inconsistencies at times, and that’s our job to get corrected.”
With Charley Molnar gone to UMass, Ed Warinner and Tim Hinton to Ohio State, it’s Martin that’s headlined the reshuffling of an offensive staff that’s nothing short of drastic. After having a huge impact on the play of an Irish secondary that couldn’t cover pylons in 2009, Kelly is hoping Martin’s coaching will help an offense that faded down the stretch, never showing the creativity and explosiveness Kelly’s other teams did.
Seeing his role as something of a field commander, Marin will run day-to-day operations for Kelly, who will still have his fingerprints all over the offense. But Martin, along with an offensive staff that won’t see a single coach return to the same positional group, knows that this team needs to do a better job of simple core competency, something that suffered in the most inopportune times last year.
Perhaps no position group will have the focus on them like wide receiver, and with that group, Kelly has entrusted long-time lieutenant Mike Denbrock, who will also coordinate a passing game that’ll likely take some more shots down the field.
“I know that our plan offensively will include trying to stretch the field vertically a lot more than we did the first couple of years,” Denbrock said. “We’ve got to create more chunk plays. We’ve got to get some bigger chunks of yardage.”
Of course, who’ll be tasked with that is the biggest question of the offseason. Many assumed Deontay Greenberry was going to be the first person in line, but the incoming freshman decided to play his college football in Houston. That leaves unproven options like redshirt freshman Davaris Daniels or incoming freshmen Justin Ferguson and Chris Brown. Likely, this staff will look to rising junior TJ Jones to make the leap, who still hasn’t shown himself to be more than a complementary piece of the puzzle in his first two seasons.
“TJ’s development over these winter months and over the course of the spring is going to let us know if he’s going to step up into that role as an individual player or if it’s going to have to be more of a collection of guys,” Denbrock said, all but openly challenging Jones.
Replacing all-time receiving leader Michael Floyd won’t be handled by one player, but you’ve got to like seeing Denbrock challenge guys like Jones, who Irish fans are still waiting to dominate a football game. But if this offense is going to find its rhythm, they’ll need other receivers — notably fifth-year senior John Goodman and little used Daniel Smith — to start making an impact.
“I don’t know that you can ask one guy to fill Mike Floyd’s role on this football team,” Denbrock said. “It’s going to be a collection of everybody doing their job that much better and more consistent to get us the results that we all want and need.”
One thing is for certain, Kelly has tried his best to navigate the difference between making changes and wholesale change. As we’ve seen in the past, new philosophies and schemes take years to properly install, and putting Martin in charge of the unit better assures Kelly that he’ll get what he wants from the group that he has.
“My philosophy of players not plays came from Brian Kelly,” Martin said. “We focus on getting the ball to your best players in the most advantageous positions. We didn’t necessarily focus on coming up with another pretty pass route.”
