daBuzz, fire away, man. It's more a tone issue with me. Being critical and backing it up with analysis while keeping your tenor reasonable is welcome in my book.
Partial threadjack:
OK, here are my both my observations from the first two games:
Positives
1. I like the resiliency of the team a lot and I am very encouraged by the level of effort on both sides of the ball and special teams.
2. I think Justin Thomas is electric and his speed causes problems for defenses. I'm also really impressed with his arm strength.
3. Smelter has become a very complete receiver. If his 40 times are decent at the NFL combines, he may potentially move up to a 3rd or 4th round pick (right now I would put him as a later round pick). Regardless, I expect him to be a very productive receiver in the NFL because he blocks well, catches the ball very well and knows how to get open. He may not have 4.3 speed but he is definitely fast enough to play on Sundays.
4. The defensive scheme has been purposefully vanilla to this point because the coaches want to have something in the tank that better teams haven't seen. Even with that, the secondary has looked pretty good to my untrained eye.
5. You have to be encouraged by the # of kicks that Butker is putting out of the end zone. Against teams like Clemson and UGA, that can be a big positive if you don't let 4.3 speed guys have a chance to run a kickoff back.
Negatives
1. We have played very, very poorly in our first two games. I know with 100% certainty that our coaches had planned to use these first three games to not only build quality reps for our starters but also to try and get a lot of reps & experience for our backups in games that were expected to be lopsided. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to put those teams away until the 4th quarter in both games and it precluded us from building the type of depth that we want and need.
2. For all Justin's positives, he has two glaring problems in my opinion:
- first, he needs to learn to put some air under the long throws. I suspect we will be around the 20-30% completion mark on long throws with him until he learns to throw to a spot and let the receiver run to the spot. It's very difficult to hit receivers in stride when they're 40 or 50 yards downfield.
- more importantly, ball security is a problem with him. He looked great in the first game but he still has the habit of carrying the ball like a loaf of bread at times. Even with his speed, he will get hit from behind and that will happen more & more as we face better teams. It does us no good if he breaks a run for 45 yards to get the ball to the 20 yard line, if he then gets stripped on the next play and fumbles the ball. Also, he is a bit risky with the pitches at times. The pitch that resulted in the fumble the other day is one reason. Sometimes, it may result because of the difficulty in keeping pitch relationship with a super fast QB on the option, but that play was different. It happened because Justin pulled the ball on the mesh and was covered. He tried to immediately pitch it to the A-back (Zenon?) but the pitch was happening before Zenon had an opportunity to get proper distance to be able to receive it. Couple that with a high pitch to the face mask area and it was a bad decision. In this offense, the QB's are told, "When in doubt, keep the ball and turn up field. Get whatever yards you can get but hold onto the ball and live to fight another play.
3. So many people want to blame last season on Vad and his "lack of commitment" but I was told by someone who would know that "That's horses**t. Vad was 100% committed to being the best QB he could be while he was here. He may not have liked running the ball so much but he worked as hard as you could expect your QB to work. He was a vocal leader and everyone in the program was convinced he was going to be really special, given enough time. The whole 'lack of commitment' thing didn't come up until after the season. He felt like he had the potential to possibly play in the pros one day and didn't feel like throwing the ball only a few times per game was going to give him a shot at doing that, so he left."
I personally think that many people are overlooking many of Justin's negatives just because they want him to be really good. Not that it matters what you and/or I think so much, but people talking about Justin "progressing" from game one to game two have to be (in my opinion) overlooking quite a few negatives to think such. I'm not saying that we should sit him because I think he's far & away our best QB. But I also believe in calling things like I see them. And I think Justin played a very poor game against Tulane.
4. Defensive line and pass rush is very concerning to me at this point. It's hard to tell what the final product will look like because we haven't shown our complete package yet, so I'll reserve judgement until then. But it bothers me that we have played 2 of the worst 3 teams on our schedule and we haven't really pressured the QB a lot.
5. Lack of passing in the last game. I know what Coach Johnson is saying about them playing us in such as way that the run made more sense than the pass. But I also know that our assistant coaches find it difficult to recruit receivers when they have to try and explain why we only attempted 8 passes versus a lower-tier talented team. I was told flat out, "It's damned hard to recruit receivers for this offense".
