I would say at least 5 wins or bust due to our tough schedule
1. "...let's not forget that CPJ's offense was plagued by bad OL blocking in the latter years." Like, say, 2017, when we led the nation in rushing during the regular season and finished 3rd? Or 2018 when we finished 3rd again? Let's drop this while there's still breath left in our bodies. The problem was always on D (except for 2015) for all the Johnson years.
Completely agree. The defense was all pa ked in and our wr were not able to get open until late in year. We did continue to maintain wide gaps in ol which put pressure on the ol.
Yes, it mattered. We could have built the RPO you allege we ran off a transition from our old blocking schemes. We didn’t because we didn’t run RPO. We supposedly ran a spread scheme, well that’s what we claimed 2/3 of the way thru the year.
Many had chosen sides before the coaching change so every thread that even hints at disagreement with anything being run is now evaluated on allegiance to the new staff. I personally like many of the changes, other changes not so much but for some reason GT fans fall in love with certain assistants or coaches & seem to love them more than the school itself. You’d think we’d all want to win, but some are more enamored with certain coaches winning or losing so they can be right. Time for me to bow out of this thread. It’s never going to be about what type of offense the damn dude runs, will run, etc & all about whether or not you’re on someone else’s side of the argument.
1. You don't do so well at the very thing that every DC you come up against is expecting unless you are right decent at it. Take the VT game in 18. Bud was ready as could be and we still rushed for 465 yards and beat the snot out of them while throwing one (that's 1) pass that was incomplete. I think a lot of people here thought that because Paul used to ***** about OL blocking that it was actually all that bad. No. He bitched about it every year he was at Tech. Game after game after game. He was, shall we say, hard to please.
No doubt you know what Paul's response was to this. He'd look his interlocutor in the eye, calmly pull out his press guide, and review the very statistics (it took me all of 5 minutes) you say don't tell you anything that looking at our games did. You are right about our pass protection in general; we never tore up the pea patch at that. And neither did other spread option teams. All of them ran the ball. Very effectively. Every year. Behind OLs who were very good at blocking for the run.
But how much of that can actually be credited to the play calling itself and not the execution on the field? A lot of those incomplete passes you mention are very high percentage throws, that most other teams probably complete ~80%+ of, while Tech was probably around 50% or below. When you can’t throw the ball and the defense doesn’t respect the pass, it makes it extremely difficult to run. People talk about “abandoning the run” a lot on this board. So can someone point me to a game where Tech was having sustained success running the ball and then abandoned it? The only games I remember from this season where the running game was efficient were the Miami and NC St games. There’s also a ton of examples of the read option and designed runs from the gun in every game. When you can’t block, it doesn’t matter what plays you call, none of them will be successful.