(09-12-2021 07:27 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(09-11-2021 10:51 PM)texowl2 Wrote:  Sadly, I think this all starts with the offensive scheme and the play calling. At least that ridiculous turn and pitch wasn't called. This looks like 09-11, early 12 and 15-17. Or Jerry Berndt or Bob Polk, the ultimate insult.

The Berndt reference is interesting. Jerry's problem was that he had better athletes at Rice than he had at Penn, so he couldn't understand why he couldn't get the same results he got at Penn. His mind never quite worked out how much better TexasU and Pardee's UH and Hatfield's Arkansas and Sherrill's aTm were than Harvard and Yale and Dartmouth and Brown.

I think Bloomgren may be having a similar experience. He saw this stuff work at Stanford with 12 NFL draft selections and 11 All-Americans, and can't quite wrap his head around the fact that it's not working at Rice with considerably different (and lesser) talent. He's not a bad coach with the right talent to make his system work, but my worry from the start has been that he's not going to get that talent at Rice.

My criticism of the play calling is really a criticism of the scheme. We run plays, not a coordinated offense. Hatfield ran the fullback up the middle a lot, but it set up the QB keep and the pitch and the other dimensions of the option. And when he threw it was usually deep, to keep the safety from jumping the option. I don't see the same kinds of complementary relationships in Bloomgren's scheme. When you out-athlete the other team, you can just line up and run plays, but when you don't, you need a method to your scheming, and I don't see it here.

I don't think it's any coincidence that the most impressive single game result in Bloomgren's time at Rice came in a game where injuries at the QB position forced him to get away from his basic scheme.

By the way, as an aside related to Berndt, many of us were highly impressed with his offensive coordinator, Don Dobes. Don is now back in the Ivy League, as defensive coordinator at Dartmouth.

If you have elite level players, winning becomes easy, no matter the “system.” For an NFL example look at Adam Gase. Tremendous success with Peyton Manning and a super talented team in Denver. He had 1 scheme that he never wavered from. Did not work anywhere else. In fact in Miami and New York as head coach, he was thought of as possibly the worst coach in league.

Good coaches get the most out of their players and taylor things to their strengths. They find ways to put players in positions to succeed and ultimately find ways to win games. Bloomgren does none of that. His body of work over 4 years is frighteningly bad. At this point, it is fair to say HE IS A TERRIBLE COACH.