The most important decisions a head coach can make come down to their offensive and defensive coordinators. Steve Spurrier could only knock on the door of a title until he landed Bob Stoops as a defensive coordinator. Mack Brown 2.0’s recruiting landed some offensive talents capable of elevating UNC to rare air, but he botched things with his “back to the future” hire of Gene Chizik. Kirby Smart played an instrumental role helping Nick Saban launch the Alabama dynasty. Smart then went to Georgia and replicated the Alabama defenses, but his offenses proved a liability to Bulldog championship aspirations until Todd Monken came to town. These are Hall of Fame head coaches who still needed great coordinators to achieve their goals.
Last season, Belichick ended up with Freddie Kitchens as his offensive coordinator, seemingly by default. In 25 years of coaching to that point, Kitchens had been an offensive coordinator twice, both times as an interim to finish NFL seasons. He also had one ill-fated season as head coach of the Cleveland Browns. The rest of his career was coaching various offensive positions at the college and professional level. While the resume didn’t scream “completely unqualified,” it also wasn’t exactly the sort of elite coordinator the hiring crew at UNC promised would beat down the door to work with the great Bill Belichick.
Removing Kitchens from the staff seems addition by subtraction. Adding Bobby Petrino would seem an upgrade even if he were replacing an average OC, much less Freddie Kitchens. So, to try to put that change in perspective, how many games last season would Bobby Petrino have changed the outcome?
I think Petrino would have built an offense that played to Gio Lopez’s proven strengths rather than trying to turn him into a pocket passer. Gio’s a one read QB who becomes a running back when that read isn’t there. The key for Lopez succeeding as a runner isn’t in his raw athleticism; he’s not a guy with elite twitch or explosion. It’s in his vision and finding available space early in the play sequence. At South Alabama, Lopez had six rushes over 20 yards in 101 attempts, with his longest run going for 50 yards. Forty of them moved the chains, though, with an average gain of 6.1 yards. The key was to get Lopez moving after the first read. Three reads after the snap, there was rarely open space left for Lopez to exploit.
Think about that. UNC recruited a QB who’d never run an offense making multiple downfield reads and brought him in after spring practice. Belichick admitted at ACC media days that the program didn’t do player-led practices over the summer because no one knew the playbook. So, in addition to bringing in a QB with no experience running a multiple-read passing game, the program had no plan to acclimate Lopez to the scheme until fall camp. Why did Kitchens run that sort of offense with a QB who was clearly a poor fit for it? Easy answer: it’s what Kitchens knew. Lopez had to adapt to Kitchens rather than Kitchens molding an offense around what Lopez did best, while hiding what he did worst.
Petrino approaches things from the opposite perspective. If he’s got a one-read-and-go QB, he’s going to build a one-read-and-go offense. Petrino wants the offense to stay in his players’ comfort zones and to avoid asking players to do things they’ve never done or don’t do well. If that seems like an obvious thing for an offensive coordinator to do, well, that difference goes a long way towards explaining UNC’s offensive face plant last season.
So, changing nothing else, but subbing Petrino for Kitchens in January 2025, how many games does that move from L column to the W column?
