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Good job Midline. I largely agree with you but one caveat. The offensive line, the defensive line and the secondary HAVE to be better because they simply cannot get any worse. This is a team that has a long way to go to be competitive but like a lot of people I have little regard for any of the teams in the Coastal. All of them have good players but none of them are elite and should not have our team intimidated. IIWIIGoing through this systematically:
What I think gets better:
🗺 Offensive Scheme and continuity of play - CCL seems to run similar packages on O with some similar reads but is a more proven P5 coach and has had success other places. I think our roster is fine, and certainly capable of winning 6+ given the schedule we face. I also have thrown a penny into every wishing well I know of that we’ll start calling better progressions of plays on O and return to setting up things and probing for weaknesses as opposed to our propensity last few years of calling vanilla sets seemingly based on 90% what we want to do and 10% or less what the D shows us. Improved Zone Reads should improve mucho here and help a great deal.
Offensive Line - CBK either is a fraud or he isn’t, this is the last year he has a chance to show he isn’t without needing some serious rehabilitation of his image. So you know he’ll be bought in. I personally don’t believe Saban hires and retains duds, period, so that alone gives me confidence. If our guys stay healthy (see S&C) we should be better here too. An improvement up front gives the O pluses across the board so this one is, if you’ll indulge me, Key to our development and improvement this year.
Tight Ends - I like the Syracuse transfer, I like the stuff CCL has previously run for this position and we almost never targeted them under CDP, so think this is an obvious upgrade area to focus on. Plus our RB pass Pro was fair to decent under CTC and getting better coverage skills from the TEs helps shore up weakness on the line. If we can get these guys leaking out for short to midrange passes it also opens up our running game for Sims to keep and go or feed our RB room.
Sims - I didn’t like hearing that JS kept needing to be told where to go with the football on pressers early on (young guys need coaching but I thought it showed CDP wasn’t developing him in a way that worked for him). A lot of the INTs this year were, imho, equally caused by bad line play or dumb bad luck but he can and should be better with the football this year. I am too much of an optimist to spend the offseason worrying he stays the same or regresses. Let’s just leave this as an improvement area.
Defensive Line and Pressure from up front - I believe in CMC and it is finally time for some of those war daddies we picked up the last few cycles to land themselves in our hearts and our opponents’ minds. We need better contain and pressure from the front set and I think we will get it.
Better Secondary Play - just coach our guys (and enforce that they do) to turn their head towards the ball and our secondary improves over night. Fixing the split coaching duties on the back end should help too. I just don’t believe we won’t be better back there, given the middling results we have previously had under this staff. New blood brings new expectations and hopefully improvement here.
Where we stay the same:
Running Backs - losing Gibbs sucks, but we didn’t really seem to scheme him into advantageous positions often last year so while we surely would be a better team this year with him than we are without him, I still think our production at this position can improve this year as a unit. 169 ypg off of 4.6 ypa, put us in the middle of the pack in conference last year (8th) so we should be able to at least hold our ground here (yeah I meant to do that one too).
I think I still like CLC? - he certainly did a lot of cool innovative stuff to keep our guys gaining during the Covid season, but I don’t know enough about S&C to have an opinion here other than we still seem to get pushed around up front and get injured often. Don’t know if it is fair to lay that at the S&C staff’s feet but I’m saying this is a push too. Nothing seems to have changed and I don’t suspect we’ll see much different here next year.
The kitchen sink and the rest - I just don’t think we did anything well enough or lost anyone important enough to think we will be worse in any other measurable area of our game.
I have always thought ( since I moved to Wisconsin 30 years ago anyway ) that Tech and Purdue have a lot of similarities. Engineering school, mostly playing 2nd fiddle to ND. Also has to compete with IU instate, and other Big 10 schools nearby. Jeff Brohm came in 5 years ago and has compiled a 28-29 record ( 7-6, 6-7 , 4-8, 2-4, 9-4). He came from Western Kentucky where he was very successful. Obviously his first 2 years he did pretty well with what talent he was left. He rebuilt in 2019 and 2020 and it paid off in 2021. That is just what ONE coach did at one school and should not be compared in any way to TECH ( tic)........
I don't think any of those teams except for UGA and maybe Clemson, should be regarded as automatic losses. On the other hand, none of them with the exception of Western Carolina and perhaps, Duke, should be regarded as sure wins. As always, the Coastal is up for grabs with chaos the standard of the day.I had to look up schedule this morning to try and think about how many we could win. No ND helps.
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I like your comments but one thing that I would add is in regard to getting the confusion out of the secondary could improve things a lot. It shouldn't be hard to correct issues regarding not knowing your zone coverage responsibility or if in man-to-man who your man is to cover. Or for that matter are we playing man-to-man or zone on this play. Getting beat physically is one thing but getting beat by confusion should be fixable.Going through this systematically:
What I think gets better:
🗺 Offensive Scheme and continuity of play - CCL seems to run similar packages on O with some similar reads but is a more proven P5 coach and has had success other places. I think our roster is fine, and certainly capable of winning 6+ given the schedule we face. I also have thrown a penny into every wishing well I know of that we’ll start calling better progressions of plays on O and return to setting up things and probing for weaknesses as opposed to our propensity last few years of calling vanilla sets seemingly based on 90% what we want to do and 10% or less what the D shows us. Improved Zone Reads should improve mucho here and help a great deal.
Where we stay the same:
Absolutely agree with this - a single coach for the back half of the D should help tremendously
And will the old Texas coach retire.
In short 6 regular season is the absolute minimum and in reality I think we need 7 regular season or 6 plus a bowl win. Geoff has lost the privilege of claiming moral victories.