Fitz had 127 yards passing for the entire game. Is that your definition of opening it up? It took him an entire half and the backup one series to figure it out today.
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I get that the team has not consistently executed his plays, but I'm pretty sure Nick and the rest of the offense could have executed a handoff to Aeries or Kylin a few more times than they did this year. Assuming JM stays here for several years, there will be years that he has his Perfect QB and years he won't. Same thing happened to Mullen, but he made things easy for Relf and Tyler where he could. I just hope Joe learns that from this season.
I don't think he realized what it takes to win in the SEC. game 1 of the season itwas obvious with the undisciplined play that he was running a much looser ship. That may fly at Fordham but not in the SEC.
He should adjust his offense to the strength of his personnel, something Mullen was good at. It took joe multiple shitty games to do this and he still threw up a shitter or two afterwards.
I will say again...it will be 5+ and prolly 10 years before we MAY see another defense like this one. We should have 2 losses max rite now and more like 1 or zero if jomo pulls his head out of his ass sooner...but even as I say that it's not like we've done much against a good defense. UAB is movin the ball all over the field on a&m and that was the one go to the jomo fan club could point to.
I hope he figures it out and I think he might end up a decent coach for us but to think this season wasn't a waist based on the on field talent is absurd.
You are not correct we had an excellent defensive class last year and another one coming in this year. Brian Baker and Terrell Buckley are excellent coaches and recruiters and Shoop is in the top 5 DC's in the country. If we can hold all this together there won't be much fall off on defense.
Fitz lit them up in the 3rd quarter and if stayed in would have continue to do so. He was responsible for 5 TD?s personally, KT 1 when Ark was done. KT did great when he came but him doing great doesn?t mean Fitz was ?ok?. I swear people it?s ok to say Fitz was hot and on fire the 3rd quarter, it was a great quarter in the stats as well. Doesn?t any less for either QB
AU counts and had a pulse when we played them ... that was a good game plan by Joe, unfortunately he didn't use it the rest of the season. TAM counts a little too ... don't think they're that great on D tho, especially passing D. But, we did exploit their weaknesses in passing D.
I think the game plans and play calling in our 4 losses left a lot to be desired. I do like that Joe loves to pound inferior competition. Mullen tended to squeak by at times against those teams. Joe now has to figure out how to game plan against the upper tier defenses.
Joe said in his PC that most of the stuff we ran yesterday were reads off inside zone with some screens off of that, then the rest was true play action and some drop back passes. Not much if any RPO. That's what this offense can do, including not just Nick but the Oline & WRs too. It helped to have Aeris in there too. If we had done this all year long, we'd be 10-2 or 11-1 now IMO.
So IMO, we sacrificed this year to install his offense. Joe's needs to get his offense drilled into the guys. In our 4 losses I believe the guys were thinking too much and not playing, and we have some playmakers on offense. The thinking part is why we saw so many penalties, false starts, missed assignments, etc. The one time it seems Joe told Nick to go out, read what he read, make a decision and just play and do what he does was against TAM ... and Nick had a good game that game. That and the pass protections were set up better in that game than in our losses.
Plus, Joe was getting his feet wet playing LSU in BR, Bama in TTown, etc. Big time environments and may have overwhelmed him some.
We need to come out and pound OM this week. If we do that, then maybe he'll hunker down and work himself, his staff, and the offensive personnel harder to get his offense fully implemented. While he may not have a great offense against upper tier teams next year, we better be scoring at least 13 to 20 against them next year IMO. Not 7, 6, 3, and 0 like this year. Anything below 10 is really not good.
Fitz was hot in the third quarter. It doesn't take away or add to his play for the entirety of the year. I'm sorry but I expected more from him this year. He regressed and the coach isn't to blame. You work until you fix the problems if your the team captain. He stinks it up with any lively defense.