How did Troy Taylor and his staff make Sacramento State a winner in their first season? We're focused on recruiting right now for obvious reasons, but eventually most of our focus will shift to what can be done with our current team. There's not much public progress to follow about how we're doing in the transfer market or with high school recruits, so I'm jumping ahead a bit.
I did a very shallow dive into some information about Taylor's first season (2019) and I saw that they got a couple good JC transfers, but I didn't see anything to indicate a massive swapping out of bad players for good. I think it will be very interesting to hear from Agnew and Osborne about what it was like in that first off-season and get their take on why things worked so well.
2019 Record
9-4 (7-1) — Lost to ASU 19-7 in the second game of the season and ASU scored 10 points in the 4th quarter. It was 12-7 when Sac State scored its TD in the 4th. Lost to Fresno State 34-20 and Fresno State scored 20 points in the fourth quarter. After the loss to Fresno State, they beat No. 22 EWU, No. 6 Montana State (road game), and No. 5 Montana in consecutive weeks. The only Big Sky Conf. loss was at home to No. 3 Weber State.
They played No. 18 Austin Peay in the playoffs and were down 21-0 after the first quarter and that was the score at halftime. It was 28-0 early in the third quarter. Sac State scored 28 points in the second half but it was never actually a close game.
Record in previous seasons
2018: 2-8 (0-7)
2017: 7-4 (6-2)
2016: 2-9 (2-6)
2015: 2-9 (1-7)
What the heck happened in 2018? If I do more research will I find that they were wiped out by injuries? Did a bunch of stars graduate from the 2017 team? I did see there were some starters in 2017 who ended up being very productive in 2019. The most important example is quarterback Kevin Thomson.
His career highlights before Taylor:
2018
- Started all seven games in which he appeared.
- Completed 79-of-145 passes for 1,380 yards and eight touchdowns with only one interception.
- His efficiency rating of 151.3 was the third best all-time by a Hornet.
2017
- Started eight games at quarterback during his first season with the team.
- Set the Sacramento State single-season record with a quarterback efficiency of 171.80 and an average of 9.14 yards of total offense per play.
- Completed 97-of-175 passes for 1,828 yards and 17 touchdowns with just three interceptions.
With Taylor in 2019
- Named the Big Sky Offensive Player of the Year and first team all-conference.
- Tied for third in Walter Payton Award voting which goes to the top offensive player in the FCS.
- Completed 265-of-450 pass attempts for 3,216 yards and 27 touchdowns.
He was already having a good career by Sac State standards before Taylor and a normal expectation for his progression in 2019 would be another good season. I don't think Taylor or the QB coach did anything to dramatically improve Thomson's skills. Those skills were just used in a way that resulted in an historic season for a Sac State QB.
I also just randomly looked at a short Q&A Taylor did during his first spring session and I want to highlight this question and answer. "Very fast" never applied to a Shaw practice. I'm curious to see what this looks like and just how different it will be for our current guys.
Q: The tempo has been very fast in practice, when does the staff have time to correct mistakes?
A: "As a staff, we'll come back to the office and watch the practice completely. The players will then come back the next morning so we have a good block of time to analyze the tape. Typically what they think they did and what happened aren't the same thing. We spend a lot of time learning from the tape."
There's so much more I could look into and type about this, but I'm going to leave it here and let others take the baton.
stanford.rivals.com
