Cody Kennedy may have been a scapegoat

Cody Kennedy may have been a scapegoat

Adam Ford

6 Dec, 2023

In introducing Bobby Petrino, head coach Sam Pittman indicated that more coaching staff changes were coming. Those came this week with the news that offensive line coach Cody Kennedy has taken the same job at Mississippi State, and then news that the Hogs had hired Baylor offensive line coach Eric Mateos, who was a grad assistant under Pittman at Arkansas from 2013 to 2015. He coached Arkansas’ offensive line in the 2015 Liberty Bowl after Pittman had left for Georgia.

Mateos certainly comes with accolades, and he’s had a nice career since leaving Fayetteville. He coached BYU’s offensive lines in 2019 and 2020, and the Cougars had among the nation’s best offensive lines both years by almost any metric. His 2021 Baylor line was also a semifinalist for the Joe Moore Award, given to the nation’s best offensive line.

He’s broadly considered to be a rising star in the coaching industry. But then, so was Cody Kennedy. Football Scoop’s report on Mississippi State hiring Kennedy reads like a glowing press release, calling the hiring a “foundational move” and “an absolutely crucial addition”, adding that Kennedy “has widely been heralded as one of the top up-and-coming offensive line coaches in all of college football.”

So what gives here? Arkansas’ offensive line was horrible by any metric in 2023, so fans weren’t sad to see Kennedy go, and many openly demanded it:

So we’ll have to think critically here to unravel whether Arkansas has actually upgraded at offensive line coach. I think Arkansas’ offensive line struggles in 2023 can be broken down into three factors. Let’s see how many of those factors are Kennedy’s fault.

Issue #1 – Youth at tackle

Arkansas’ tackles just got whipped all season, especially in pass protection. They weren’t horrible against straight-up rushes, but they struggled with any kind of twist or exotic pressure.

The reason here is quite obvious: Arkansas lost both starters from the 2022 team and had to start redshirt freshmen at both positions. Those guys – Andrew Chamblee and Patrick Kutas – were both 4-stars and will probably be fine in time, but they were forced into a starting role a little too early.

And why did that happen? We looked at it earlier in the year, but maybe a refresh of notable offensive line recruiting classes in recent years will be helpful. Only players who have made the depth chart at some point in their career are listed, along with the HC/OL coach combo who recruited them:

  • 2017 (Bielema / Anderson): Dalton Wagner
  • 2018 (Morris / Fry): Luke Jones*, Noah Gatlin
  • 2019 (Morris / Fry): Ricky Stromberg, Brady Latham, Beaux Limmer, Myron Cunningham
  • 2020 (Pittman / Davis): –
  • 2021 (Pittman / Davis): Devon Manuel, Josh Street
  • 2022 (Pittman / Kennedy): Andrew Chamblee, Patrick Kutas, E’Marion Harris
  • 2023 (Pittman / Kennedy): – (these players are true freshmen)

*Jones transferred away, then transferred back and started in 2022

The problem should be pretty obvious: only two of the seven recruits signed in Pittman’s first two seasons have ever cracked the two-deep. The players from the 2020 and 2021 classes should be third- and fourth-year players by now. They should be the starters, but they aren’t here. Pittman’s first class – Marcus Henderson, Jalen St. John, and Ray Curry – is completely gone, with none of its members ever playing a significant snap in a Razorback uniform. The second class, which included consensus 4-star Terry Wells, is also gone except for Manuel, a part-time starter at left tackle (who is now transferring), and Street, a backup guard who has barely played.

So there was a “hole” that was formed in 2020-21 that hit in 2023. But it’s hard to pin that on Kennedy. He wasn’t on staff in 2020 and wasn’t the lead recruiter for any of the 2021 recruits (Davis was, before leaving for LSU). He can perhaps get some blame for not developing those 3-stars into something better, but there was a clear hole that formed before he got there. I’m not blaming Davis either: Arkansas as a program was in a bad place in 2020, so it’s not surprising that the Hogs weren’t able to pull together an elite class. That’s just a side effect of constant coaching churn and 2-10 seasons.

Issue #2 – Regression of interior veterans

While Arkansas’ issues at tackle can be explained by youth and inexperience, what about the sudden regression of the veteran guards, namely Brady Latham, a four-year starter?

Again, there’s an explanation that largely absolves Kennedy. Latham was great under Kennedy’s coaching in 2021 and 2022, but only after Dan Enos came in and changed the offense did Latham struggle. We’ve discussed at length on this site how Kendal Briles’ offense schemed up explosive plays, and how Enos’s offenses rarely generate explosives. In particular, after Arkansas ranked 1st or 2nd in the SEC in yards before contact per rush in 2021 and 2022, Enos has never had an offense be very good at generating yards before contact. I don’t know the exact coaching points from either coach, but Arkansas’ ability to generate yards before contact plummeted in 2023. That, in turn, exposed a nasty truth: Arkansas’ running backs were pretty overrated. Even before the season, we worried that Rocket Sanders’ reliance on a big cushion would be exposed as he struggled to get anything after contact.

Just watching, my guess about the change is something like this: Briles wanted linemen who were explosive out of their stance. His plays were fast-developing and the holes quick-opening, so he needed linemen who could get a quick, impactful push, but they didn’t necessarily need to hold it for long. Enos runs a lot of long-developing plays, so he needs linemen to secure and hold a block for a long time. I’m very far from an offensive line coach, but that seems like a very different skillset, and just watching the line this year versus last year looks completely different in terms of execution. And as a final datapoint, Arkansas’ best game of the year in terms of yards before contact came after Enos was fired: the FIU game.

Issue #3 – Simplicity

This is certainly the most controversial of the three points, and it isn’t fully fleshed out. But bear with me.

On the Monday Night Football game between the Bengals and Jaguars, the Bengals took a huge sack late in the game when they left the Jags’ best pass-rusher completely unblocked. The announcers noted that the Bengals’ protection for that play was not suitable to the look the Jacksonville defense had given them, and they probably should have changed it. Why would they not have changed it? Perhaps the fact that their backup quarterback was in the game had something to do with it.

When you have an inexperienced player, or a player that struggles to process and make decisions in the moment, you want to keep things simple. Simplicity helps players play fast and loose and not over-think things. That’s how Kendal Briles ran an offense. He gave KJ Jefferson single reads and simple decisions to make. He uses only a handful of formations and concepts. He wanted raw athleticism to be at the forefront of the game. I think that benefitted Jefferson, a fantastic athlete, greatly during his career.

But simplicity invites complication as a counter. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Jefferson audible or change the protection at the line. Arkansas ran a ton of plays right into the strength of the defense when they should have audibled. It’s clear that with Jefferson at QB – or Briles as OC – the Hogs were just lining up and running plays. That’s why opponents figured out they could counter the Hogs by getting exotic. Opponents willing to complicate – like Liberty in 2022 – trapped Arkansas in bad plays that they couldn’t or wouldn’t get out of. Even in 2021 and 2022 under Briles, the Hogs had plays blown up at a high rate, but it was less noticeable because the offense was also generating plenty of explosive plays.

Enos’s offense was supposed to be more cerebral, more complicated – but it didn’t look like that ever got off the ground. I never saw the at-the-line adjustments that we saw during Enos’s first stint as OC, and it may have been that personnel used to running Briles’ offense just couldn’t adjust. The Hogs routinely ran plays right into the strength of the defense or had bad protection schemes against the rush. Again, that may look like the line’s fault, but I think many of those were X’s and O’s failures.

Did Arkansas actually upgrade with Mateos?

To be completely fair, an elite offensive line coach isn’t going to produce a bad offensive line in his third year, so I don’t think Kennedy was a can’t-miss elite coach. But I also won’t be surprised if he does a good job at Mississippi State. I absolutely think he was a scapegoat for a bad OC hire by Sam Pittman and for a understandable downturn that followed a soft recruiting class.

The good news is that I don’t really think Mateos is a big step down. I think this is a perfectly fine hire, the future of the line isn’t any worse, and in the long run, maybe a fresh start for Hog fans and for Kennedy will be a good thing.

Petrino’s offense is also going to be cerebral. In his introductory press conference, when talking about what made Ryan Mallett and Lamar Jackson special, specifically cited not Mallett’s arm or Jackson’s elusiveness, but their intelligence. Their ability to quickly identify coverage, get into the right play and the right protection, and then get through progressions quickly.

That’s a pretty sharp distinction from how Arkansas has run offense the last few years. With a new offensive coordinator, likely a new starting quarterback, and a ton of portal activity expected on the offensive line (Arkansas appears to be targeting players with high ProFootballFocus pass protection grades), a fresh look at the line might be best. The Briles-Jefferson offense was awesome and rewrote a lot of Razorback records, but constant evolution is necessary to remain competitive.

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