Profile of Michigan Assistant Ryan Danehy

Photo via UM media relations.

Unlike previous UM offensive coordinator Judd Lattimore, new hire Ryan Danehy has been a one-gig coach throughout his career. He’s been at Dartmouth for his entire six-year tenure, serving as a goalies coach and assistant offensive coordinator until last spring, when he was the full offensive coordinator. That coaching career began just a year after his final year suiting up for the Big Green (during which he played in the MLL).

Until now, Danehy had been a career Dartmouth Man.

His MGoBlue article and Dartmouth bio both state that Danehy scored 73 goals and 11 assists in his four-year playing career in Hanover, but a quick look at the stats seems to show that’s not correct. Though Dartmouth’s statistics archive only goes back to his sophomore year, in his final three seasons, Danehy scored 33 goals and 24 assists. Unless he scored 40 goals (possible) and -13 assists (not possible) as a freshman, the numbers are incorrect.

Anyway, on to his coaching career. After a year away from Hanover, he returned to become an assistant with the goalies and offense. To the stats!

I’ll start one year before he returned, to give a bit of context for where Dartmouth was, and how much changed with him on the staff. The year prior to his arrival is in italics, last year (his only as a coordinator) in bold.

So, as we can see, the Dartmouth offense has never been awesome – it was No. 43 nationally last spring, the second-best mark in this stretch. The numbers also indicate that there hasn’t been a whole lot of significant improvement or regression during the course of Danehy’s tenure (save a big drop from 2008 to 2009).

Survey says: doesn’t tell us much. Let’s take a look at how goalies have performed under Danehy:

There’s so much noise here, since we aren’t looking at the team’s defensive quality (generally poor, for the record) in his tenure. However, other than one bad year in 2009, the numbers were generally OK.

As for his role as recruiting coordinator – a one-year deal that lasted only through his final season at Dartmouth – it’s even tougher to note what sort of impact he had. The Big Green hasn’t landed a top 20 recruiting class per Inside Lacrosse in any of the years of their archives.

Verdict

At this point, Danehy is mostly an unknown. He obviously has a personality that people are going to like, and that’s a positive. For all Judd Lattimore’s track record of success, there seemed to be a mismatch in that department over the past year.

Simply on account of better chemistry (and a year of Division-1 lacrosse under just about everyone’s belt), this season is going to be an improvement over 2012 from an offensive standpoint.