(01-09-2015 02:24 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  I think he tries too much to fit people to a predetermined system than to tweak the system to the players. The square peg in a round hole thing. I think we need to be more diligent about finding ways to get our best athletes on the field in places that they can help us.



I don't agree with the too conservative play calling criticism. My criticism of play calling is that the offense seems to be predicated on trying to outguess the defense instead of running a system and imposing our will on the opponent through concept and execution. I don't like the Meerkat, which seems to be the natural expression of this philosophy. It appears that we go beyond "take what the defense gives us" and end up letting the defense dictate our play calls. At some point, I think you have to have something that you can fall back on, something that you can say, "I don't care what you do defensively, we can line up and run this and make 4-5 yards on execution." My problem with our run/pass mix is not that we don't call enough passes, but that we don't execute the passes we do call well enough. And I agree with what I think ruowls is saying, that a lot of our execution issues stem from bad concepts. We threw the ball twice as much as we ran it in the third quarter at La Tech, and in the process got outscored 41-0 and were effectively blown out of probably the biggest game of our season.

I do think he has shown ability to adapt system to players...maybe to a fault. Look at this year on how he got Taylor touches, look at the Willson/VMcD era, the Casey/Dillard era, the Callahan/Gaines man/lock-down all the time outside that exposed Safeties, how he played field position/offensive play calling with Boz/Martens, and last but should be first is the Sam 'up the gut' and continually trying to get him the ball when there was nothing there and your system would not run that. I think the offense has actually been built (to a fault) around the NFL guys on the team.

Team is only strong as weakest link so this approach has left the team exposed against good teams b/c the good teams can bottle-up our good players and find our weaknesses (Safety, DL, QB in some years, etc.,) where we don't have the talent depth but allows us to beat bad teams b/c bad teams usually don't have the talent to play with our NFL guys.

(01-10-2015 06:35 AM)owl40 Wrote:  I do think he has shown ability to adapt system to players...maybe to a fault. Look at this year on how he got Taylor touches, look at the Willson/VMcD era, the Casey/Dillard era, the Callahan/Gaines man/lock-down all the time outside that exposed Safeties, how he played field position/offensive play calling with Boz/Martens, and last but should be first is the Sam 'up the gut' and continually trying to get him the ball when there was nothing there and your system would not run that. I think the offense has actually been built (to a fault) around the NFL guys on the team.

Team is only strong as weakest link so this approach has left the team exposed against good teams b/c the good teams can bottle-up our good players and find our weaknesses (Safety, DL, QB in some years, etc.,) where we don't have the talent depth but allows us to beat bad teams b/c bad teams usually don't have the talent to play with our NFL guys.

I find it interesting that you use Sam "up the gut" as an example of adapting the system and I see that as a prime example of not adapting. Sam was our best player, he was a running back, and in our system running backs run up the middle, so we ran Sam up the middle, even though that was not his strength and we had other people (Smith, Eddington, Petersen, Ross) who could run the ball up the middle. We finally used him as a senior the way we should have used him all along, and I think he was more effective used that way, in large part because he stayed healthier.

I do agree that we try to get more touches for our best players. Any system does that. But I think it's more plugging them into the scheme and giving them the touches that the scheme says they get, instead of saying, here is this guy, here's what he does best, let's get him touches doing what he does best, and let's tweak the scheme to accommodate that.

As for Gaines/Callahan, normally if you have two lockdown corners shouldn't that make life easier for the safeties, not harder?

Agree that we made good use of Boz/Martens, but good kicking games go well with DB's normal conservative approach. What I don't understand is that we don't seem to have had a lot of urgency about finding the next Boz/Martens to replace them when they graduated. It's certainly possible that there was and I missed it, but it seems more like we were willing just to take what we could and live with reduced capabilities in those areas. Again, I don't think we emphasize the kicking game enough, and that seems very inconsistent with the conservative nature of the overall philosophy.