You can question anyone who?s making $5 million a year to coach a game. By the way, we didn?t hire him just to have guys in shape and not have ?me guys on the team.? I will never understand this coach worship that some people engage in.
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I don?t want Leach fired after 4 games either. But I just do not agree that it?s as simple as saying ?it worked for 20 years, no adjustments needed.? This is a different league with different coaches and more athletic players. Guess what, he?s never had a game in those 20 years without an offensive touchdown. Now he has.
You have to have the right qb in the air raid to make it work. The right arm with natural born instincts and athletic ability. Until you have that, you will have to add variations to the scheme that are easy to execute, but it won't work as consistently as the correct quarterback, doing only air raid things.
KJ was probably the best fit for typical defenses but who knew he would struggle so much against a zone. Schrader was your zone buster and I still think was the best qb for this year in the system based on how we have seen teams react.
Against normal defenses accuracy is the biggest trait in this offense. However against this 3-8 zone taking what the defense gives you means running the ball and if the qb is taking the ball for 5-10 yards a pop every play then dc can’t stay in that defense.
I honestly don’t think leach thought he would see every team change their defense so much when they play MSU. I also don’t think he thought KJ would have such a hard time against it
Up to this point, why should he change? He has never HAD to change because his offense has always been successful both in the Big12 and PAC12. I mean maybe not so much in the Apple Cup but its easy to explain that away as a talent differential when the offense was still good the other 11 games in the PAC12. Now if he can't defeat the rush 3 drop 8 defense IN THE SEC when he gets a full spring practice and some more of his players in here then he will HAVE to adjust or he will be out of a job. I don't think Leach is a guy that takes failure well so I find it hard to believe he won't make some adjustments if it becomes obvious that we can't defeat the drop 8 scheme in the SEC with the way he is currently doing things.
All I am saying is we hired Mike Leach to be Mike Leach. Will he adapt and make subtle changes? Maybe. But everyone is going to have to be patient and wait for him to get the players (mainly OL) in to run his system. It really doesn't matter what subtle changes he makes right now because at the end of the day, we don't have the OL to do what he does.
Bitching about firing him is a waste of time. We are not firing him anytime soon. It's no different than GT hiring G. Collins and giving him time to turn the roster over from the roster built to run the option to a roster built to be balanced. We are going from a run oriented spread offense to the Air Raid. It's not going to happen in half a year. It's most likely not going to happen for a couple of years.
Especially when his track record has already shown that his first year or two at a new program has never been all that good. I would at least like to give him a full Spring practice to really ingrain his system with the players before we say he can never be successful here. I don't believe you can just take a brand new group of players and try to install a new system in a shortened Fall camp with a lot of players that don't even fit the system and expect for things to be smooth sailing. I do believe that having things go so well at LSU really blew the expectations of our fans way out of line. No, we shouldn't be as bad as we are on offense, but nobody should just throw out the baby with the bath water only 4 games into the Leach tenure with no Spring.
I haven't seen anyone in any thread on this board say Leach should be fired ... I have said as others have that he could make things easier on his current personnel by implementing more run, diversion, misdirection, closing down the line splits, and playing a better QB.... or anything else to slow down a hard charging DL that is just laying their ears back and coming as hard as they can without fear of having to protect an opening / gap against a running play .... the running game we currently have is not much more than a draw or delayed handoff with no lead back blocking and nothing has worked for the last 3 games ... sorry, but when it comes to scoring one touchdown against Arkansas, NO offensive points against Kentucky, and only ONE touchdown against aTm folks are going to get restless .