I find that I have become more and more frustrated with our coaching as the years roll by. So I wanted to share my thoughts and see what others thought.
I have tried very hard to separate out the frustrations that come from losing football games because that in and of itself is not sufficient to the issue of coaching. I honestly think our talent level is such that we are never going to be able to take the route Clemson has taken, where they simply recruit pro type players and then can play and scheme they like and do it successfully because they have physical superiority. That has never been GT and never will be. Some will say our recruiting could be better. If true, I view that as an Administration issue, not a coaching issue. So I will speak no more to it here.
My coaching issues on each side of the ball:
DEFENSE-I find that I intensely dislike the vanilla "bend but don't break" defensive schemes that we play. I think in all cases when you are likely to face teams more talented than you (as we often will) that you must scheme to roll the dice to force errors. I am fully aware that such an approach may backfire, but it you are going to lose playing "vanilla" defense, does it really matter if you lose by a larger score because you decided to games on defense?
As an example, I spent yesterday's 3rd quarter really watching our defense. I watched how we lined up on every snap, how we played each play. Here we are, trailing by two TD's in the 3rd quarter against a team that clearly had equal to or slightly better talent on the field. Might this not be the time to gamble a bit on defense? Nope, not GT. We lined up in our standard package on every play. Only once did we shift our defensive players after our initial line-up. Only once did we blitz. Once in an entire quarter. There was NO attempt to disguise or confuse the QB. And there was NO attack or gamble on defense.
One can call this successful because we held on all but one series. I call it a failure because we did not play to win, we played to make it look good. We played a game where the only way we could have won was to hope that our opponent made the kind of dumb mistakes we made in the 1st half. I would much prefer to play a game where we game and try to force such mistakes. It seemed very likely to me by the 2nd half that Miami wasn't going to defeat themselves. Does it really matter to anyone that we lose 35-21 vs 49-21? Not to me!
And an attacking, aggressive Tenuta style defense was the ONLY way we realistically could hope to get back into the game. Without any turnovers or short fields, we would be doomed to getting at least 3 long TD drives in the 2nd half simply to force OT. With only 5 possessions likely, that's a very tall order.
OFFENSE-Once again, I want a scheme which recognizes the reality that we don't have the best athletes and still gives us a fighting chance to win games against superior opponents. For that reason, for the longest time, I have supported and liked CPJ's offensive scheme. However, the last two years, in watching this offense and others, I have decided that there is a problem. Essentially, the problem is that I think too many players have to execute well on any given play for our offense to work well. This shows up as "execution problems" or offensive line problems, when in reality it is that too may guys have to execute their assignment on each play for it to work and when just 1 or 2 guys fail (and often it isn;t just a lineman, often is is an A back or WR) then the play blows up and looks horrid.
When I watch some of th either offensive schemes out there, specifically the type of schemes that Clemson runs (for example) I notice that most passes are extremely short throws that can be executed so quickly it is almost impossible to get a pass rush on the QB. Heck, in the 1st half of our game with Clemson, their O line could have simply stood in our way without even trying to block and we couldn't have gotten to Watson on the vast majority of his passes. What that offense demands to have a chance is a good QB and some (a few, maybe 2) really superior WR's.. The number of guys who have to execute well on any given play is, often 2. The QB and the WR. The line doesn't matter because the pass is so fast their blocking becomes irrelevant.
I am no offensive genius, so while I use Clemson's scheme as a comparison, I am NOT claiming we could have the same success they have with it. They have superior athletes at every position and can execute many more plays and possibilities in ushc an offense than we could.
My point is simply that in CPJ's scheme, too many moving parts have to all work. While in other offenses, it appears to my uneducated eye that they can sometimes be effective with fewer moving parts working at the same time.
[Sid note,: I do also think that our opponents had some initial disadvantages in playing agains this scheme the first 5 years or so, but all have now gotten used to it and play it effectively on defense. However, that doesn't mean we have been "figured out". I think it means their players react more quickly now because they have seen it over and over again where in the first few years it was till new to them.]
This shows up in coach speak as discussions about how we need to simplify our offense. But CPJ will never really change this offense...it is what he knows and when it works it is a thing of beauty. I am not sure I would argue for CPJ to change things...but I am arguing that we change both our offensive and defensive schemes to recognize our physical disadvantages, and give ourselves a chance for the occasional upset.
I do tend to agree as well that CPJ hasn't done a good job in ht hiring and retention of assistants. This isn't a matter to me of looking at guys like Charles Kelly or Womack who have had some success elsewhere (they have also has failures, and much of their success is related simply to the superiority when they had great athletes.) But our line play has been such an issue for so long and we just really haven't made any changes there.
At any rate, my bottom line is that GT is likely to remind 6-6 or 7-5 type of program because we will not do the thing necessary to recruit superior athletes, BUT we could give ourselves a better chance sometime with more aggressive defensive schemes and simpler offensive schemes that take advantage of the skill sets of a few players. We might have lost to Clemson by 52-7 playing that way, but we might have beaten Miami 38-35 playing that way.
Just my 2 cents. I am really now bored with what I see with GT football and feel like the results are quite predictable.
