Quote Originally Posted by dawgday166 View Post
saw this on another board. It's a quote from one of the other SEC coaches. Sorta sums it up to me real well.

[I]"They're kind of boring schematically when you really watch them and break them down. They don't do a whole lot that concerns you. Mullen does a good job -- it's just not particularly creative. You'd play (Steve) Spurrier back in the day and he'd see something he'd like in the NFL on Sunday and you'd see it with him the following weekend. With Mullen, he kind of has his things he likes and that's what he does. There's no newness there."

That's why you hear the same thing from Dan every week. "We didn't execute well". And for the last 3 years "We're young" (even tho in 2015 we weren't young).

Not gonna out execute the upper tier defenses Dan. Especially recruiting OLs & WRs like we recruit them. When we had someone else calling plays in 2009 and 2010, I thought they did well with the much lesser offensive talent than we have now.

There's only so many ways to run bubble screens, hooks, curls, spots, trap plays, and QB draws (boy does he love the QB draw ... especially inside the 10 yd line). That's why 4 times a year our offenses show up and score 20 or less points (10 or less against Bama).

Now in Dan's defense some, our Defense didn't show up to play last 2 games at all either. There's no excuse for our safeties getting burned on so many trickery plays like we have in last 2 games.
The quote you posted is from an Athlon article over the summer that contains multiple quotes about each SEC team that were supposedly made by other SEC coaches. (The quotes are posted anonymously.) Shotgun posted that same anonymous coach's quote a couple of months back to jump off a similar discussion. In response, I noted that I could see how a coach could say that Mullen's first few years' worth of offenses weren't "schematically creative" enough to cause much "concern" among opponents. From '09 to '13, our scoring offense in SEC games was ranked in the bottom half of the conference every year (7th, 11th, 9th, 8th, 10th), and we ranked in the top half of the league in yards per play in the same span only once (5th in 2012, 8th or lower in every other year). And it was no better according to advanced stats -- from '09 to '13, the offense's national FEI and S&P+ rankings were between 50th and 73rd every year but one.

But then in '14, '15, and '16, the offense, "boring" or not, had to "concern" at least most of our opponents. We were in the top 6 of SEC scoring offenses in SEC play all three years (4th, 6th, and 5th), and were in the top 4 in the SEC in yards-per-play in two of those three years, too. Further, the FEI and S&P+ advanced-stats systems never had our offense ranked below 37th nationally in each of the past three years (and the S&P+ rankings had us in the top 16 two of the three years).

More to the point, though, there's this:

"Schematically, though, they're one of the teams that you really admire. They have some good stuff in the playbook. Dan Mullen, some of the stuff he does on offense is just really well-respected from the standpoint of figuring out what defense you're going to be in and figuring out how they can beat you. They do some stuff to attack you and put your weak link in conflict on the edge."
That's an anonymous coach's quote from the 2016 version of this exact same Athlon series.