I stand by my previous point

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westcoastgopher11

westcoastgopher11

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This team will only go as far as the offense (and by extension Mitch) can carry it.

The team has the talent and quality of play to be 10-2 (7-1). I think this team ends up at 9-3.

Beat Wisconsin and get a rematch with Ohio State in the CCG.
 

My take, Rodney Smith is our RB. Our D can be among the best in the country. As much as I want to put this Offense
on Leidner, our play calling, again was completely vanilla by Limegrover. He's our biggest achilles heel. ZERO jet-sweeps.
With this really injured and patched together O-line, Leidner had just about never to throw the ball. As soon as he would
three step drop, cock to throw it, he was hit.

Who honestly thought we'd beat #2 TCU playing for the playoffs? We played them damn good, especially on defense.
Gotta get healthy, gotta get consistent. The rest of the B1G west must be aware.
 

Gopher028 I totally get where you are coming from.

But stepping up and winning games like this is the difference between "we're coming" and "we've arrived."
 

The LT position is a big concern.

Rodney Smith needs to be our main RB.

Mitch still needs to be more consistent, but he needs more help too.

All in all, if we don't make some major mistakes early in the game we win. The future is bright.
 

Gopher028 said:
My take, Rodney Smith is our RB. Our D can be among the best in the country. As much as I want to put this Offense
on Leidner, our play calling, again was completely vanilla by Limegrover. He's our biggest achilles heel. ZERO jet-sweeps.
With this really injured and patched together O-line, Leidner had just about never to throw the ball. As soon as he would
three step drop, cock to throw it, he was hit.

Who honestly thought we'd beat #2 TCU playing for the playoffs? We played them damn good, especially on defense.
Gotta get healthy, gotta get consistent. The rest of the B1G west must be aware.
Click to expand...

With a banged up line and the speed TCU has on the defense, a jet sweep might be the single worst call he could make.

Also, I would believe that the coaches are familiar with the concept of the jet sweep, and have decided that is not a strength with the personnel and other options they have.
 


I will criticize Limegrover once we have something even remotely close to an average D-1 quarterback. Until then, dude is calling games with 2 hands tied behind his back.

Sadly, I don't see any improvement from our team this year. I think our D could be better, our running game may not be as bad as I thought, but my gosh, our QB position is still terrible. All of this propaganda about Leidner going to the passing camp, and having the best practices of his life apparently means absolutely nothing. There is no way there is another major D-1 QB who throws as ugly, inaccurate balls as him.
 

Paging Seth Green.

If you complete 60% of your passes you could win conference player of the year and be a Heisman finalist.
 

I admit that I was wrong and the Gophers didn't get blown out.

However, the team has to address Leidner aka Christian Ponder 2.0. The sooner we move on from him, the better.

Just admit that he's holding us back from being great and start someone else!
 

gopher7 said:
I will criticize Limegrover once we have something even remotely close to an average D-1 quarterback. Until then, dude is calling games with 2 hands tied behind his back.

Sadly, I don't see any improvement from our team this year. I think our D could be better, our running game may not be as bad as I thought, but my gosh, our QB position is still terrible. All of this propaganda about Leidner going to the passing camp, and having the best practices of his life apparently means absolutely nothing. There is no way there is another major D-1 QB who throws as ugly, inaccurate balls as him.
Click to expand...

I thought it was quite obvious in the off season how Kill was doing all he could to build up ML's confidence.....and everyone else's at the same time.

ML is no greenhorn any more. He is what he is......and it's not good. I like what we saw from Smith.

Why do we always start the game so poorly?
 



station19 said:
I thought it was quite obvious in the off season how Kill was doing all he could to build up ML's confidence.....and everyone else's at the same time.
Click to expand...

Yeah, my bad for buying into that.
 

westcoastgopher11 said:
This team will only go as far as the offense (and by extension Mitch) can carry it.

The team has the talent and quality of play to be 10-2 (7-1). I think this team ends up at 9-3.

Beat Wisconsin and get a rematch with Ohio State in the CCG.
Click to expand...

Thank goodness we got AWeb to mentor Leidner. We're not going anywhere with a qb that can't throw a 5 yard pass. And to top it off we have one receiver that can get open and he's a converted running back. Year 5 and still an incompetent offense. It's a shame.
 

Gopher028 said:
My take, Rodney Smith is our RB. Our D can be among the best in the country. As much as I want to put this Offense
on Leidner, our play calling, again was completely vanilla by Limegrover. He's our biggest achilles heel. ZERO jet-sweeps.
With this really injured and patched together O-line, Leidner had just about never to throw the ball. As soon as he would
three step drop, cock to throw it, he was hit.

Who honestly thought we'd beat #2 TCU playing for the playoffs? We played them damn good, especially on defense.
Gotta get healthy, gotta get consistent. The rest of the B1G west must be aware.
Click to expand...

The one thing you don't want to do against a TCU is purposefully run horizontally. I didn't see much to criticize from Limey. The truth was our OL was a bit overmatched. He couldn't leave his tackles alone too much because they got abused which limits how much you can stretch the field. Mitch missed a few throws but he also made some and constantly had pressure. Not to mention the fact that we couldn't consistently run the ball. Considering our offense was extremely young at the skill positions and outside of KJ Maye didn't have anyone out there that played a lot last year, and also considering that we played one of the best defensive coaches in the country with an entire summer to prep for us and considering the fact that we're playing a team that will likely field one of the nation's best defenses again, it could've been worse. If Nugget didn't have that fumble it's a different narrative.
 

station19 said:
I thought it was quite obvious in the off season how Kill was doing all he could to build up ML's confidence.....and everyone else's at the same time.
Click to expand...

Kill has not been a BSer about his expectations. Even after tonight I have more confidence in Mitch than last year. That is a hell of a D we played against last year.

The good news is that I would bet that TCU never scores fewer than 23 points the rest of the season.
 




Anyone blaming Mitch Leidner tonight should just stop watching. People in this town expect every quarterback to be an all American or pro bowler. If they're not then they suck. It's getting ridiculous.

Leidner played find tonight. A couple miscues, but overall pretty good.
 

Unregistered User said:
With a banged up line and the speed TCU has on the defense, a jet sweep might be the single worst call he could make.

Also, I would believe that the coaches are familiar with the concept of the jet sweep, and have decided that is not a strength with the personnel and other options they have.
Click to expand...

And we knew that because we tried it and it didn't work?? With a banged up line, the proper thing to do is try and run between the tackles then I guess?.... c'mon
 

I have yet to see anything from Jim Zebrowski being the "quarterback whisperer" title bestowed upon him by Kill once upon a time. I fail to see improvement from our QB or the passing game.

One of these times, a project that we recruit to play QB is going to pan out and then hopefully we can recruit some real talent at QB. Until then we will essentially be the same team as we've hit our glass ceiling. 8-4 or 9-3 is great but leaves you wanting more.
 

POSITIVITY ALERT:

Cobb rushed for 44 yards last year vs. TCU. He's in the NFL now. TCU was unranked at the time.

In rolls #2 ranked TCU tonight. Rodney Smith rushes for 88 and a TD.

Mitch was Mitch, but racked up almost 200 yards, a TD and no interceptions. His sack/fumble was due to a lookout block. He made some bonehead plays, but we knew he'd do that. It's a wash from last year.

We weren't playing Northwestern.

Do I want a different quarterback? Yes. But he's ours, warts and all. Every god-darn wobbly pass and all. Man, those hurt to watch.
 


Going up against the #2 team in the country without a WR that would even get playing time on Some of the better teams in country and with the Oline not giving him anytime or getting any push I thought that Leidner played very well. I think that he will show everyone this year that he is a good QB. In my opinion Leidner was the best offensive player on the field for the gophers. He will lead us to the Big ten championship game, and next year If our OLine and WRs all improve he will be the second best qb in the conference outside of whoever starts for ohio st. He looked confident today, and the rest of the team needs to rally around him. There is no doubt that he is the Leader of this team.
 

Smith excellent but probably can't carry on every down like Cobb did. Somehow Mitch has to hit at least at 60% to win the big games - don't know how that will happen. This is the fifth year and we still don't have a B10 level passing QB (and we didn't have a 60-70% QB years before that - won't they come here?). D was first rate. Offensive play calling dull and unimaginative. Kicking game very good, as usual. Overall, 17-23 much better than I expected.
 

mnsportsgeek said:
Anyone blaming Mitch Leidner tonight should just stop watching. People in this town expect every quarterback to be an all American or pro bowler. If they're not then they suck. It's getting ridiculous.

Leidner played find tonight. A couple miscues, but overall pretty good.
Click to expand...

AA or pro bowl? Get serious. NO one expects that. Average would be nice, but he is not. Even the announcers dissed him. That doesn't happen very often. He did not play fine.

To be fair, our whole offense sucked. I've been concerned about our offense for a long time. Time to quit the excuses.
 

station19 said:
AA or pro bowl? Get serious. NO one expects that. Average would be nice, but he is not. Even the announcers dissed him. That doesn't happen very often. He did not play fine.

To be fair, our whole offense sucked. I've been concerned about our offense for a long time. Time to quit the excuses.
Click to expand...

You expect better than 55% completion and 200 yards? It's not gonna happen. Not with anyone on the roster. Not with this sorry bunch of receivers. TCU's receivers made our route running look like a High School JV team.
 

Mitch doesn't need to be an all-American for us to win, he needs to be a game manager and make the routine throws. Hopefully he can improve but I'm not to optimistic since he's a damn junior now.
 

Great Plains Gopher said:
Smith excellent but probably can't carry on every down like Cobb did. Somehow Mitch has to hit at least at 60% to win the big games - don't know how that will happen. This is the fifth year and we still don't have a B10 level passing QB (and we didn't have a 60-70% QB years before that - won't they come here?). D was first rate. Offensive play calling dull and unimaginative. Kicking game very good, as usual. Overall, 17-23 much better than I expected.
Click to expand...

Other than maybe a few jet sweep attempts, what else did you want to see?
 


Gopher028 said:
And we knew that because we tried it and it didn't work?? With a banged up line, the proper thing to do is try and run between the tackles then I guess?.... c'mon
Click to expand...

Yes. Our strength is our interior OL. And maybe you don't get this concept but TCU absolutely WANTS teams to run outside. Their entire run defense is built to spill things to the outside to the alleys. That's literally their scheme. You're saying we should run sweeps just to try them even though its exactly what TCU wants. That's just not good football strategy. Quick hitters up the gut are what actually worked and were our best chance to run the ball
 

mnsportsgeek said:
Anyone blaming Mitch Leidner tonight should just stop watching. People in this town expect every quarterback to be an all American or pro bowler. If they're not then they suck. It's getting ridiculous.

Leidner played find tonight. A couple miscues, but overall pretty good.
Click to expand...

+1 There was nothing wrong with Leidner's play tonight. He was going against ONE OF THE BEST DEFENSES IN THE COUNTRY WITH OFFENSIVE LINE PLAY THAT SUCKED.

Plenty of things that went wrong tonight but Leidner wasn't one of them.
 

Mean Joe said:
Going up against the #2 team in the country without a WR that would even get playing time on Some of the better teams in country and with the Oline not giving him anytime or getting any push I thought that Leidner played very well. I think that he will show everyone this year that he is a good QB. In my opinion Leidner was the best offensive player on the field for the gophers. He will lead us to the Big ten championship game, and next year If our OLine and WRs all improve he will be the second best qb in the conference outside of whoever starts for ohio st. He looked confident today, and the rest of the team needs to rally around him. There is no doubt that he is the Leader of this team.
Click to expand...

Well, Brian Griese, a man who played at a pretty high level and has watched and studied hundreds of quarterbacks, thinks Leidner is the person who's holding this team back. I think I trust his evaluation a little more. Leidner literally threw two passes tonight end-over-end. He's not very athletic and has a very poor arm. We'd be better off with Streveler running the read-option or even the wishbone than having Leidner out there. Yes, he will have a few good games against lesser competition. And there will be times when he even kinda looks the part of a D-1 QB. But make no mistake, he is the reason this team isn't better. There's no question about it. Even when he audibles, he does so into plays that result in little or no yardage. He simply doesn't have what it takes. And finally, for whatever this is worth, I know for certain there are more than a few players in that locker room who believe Streveler is more effective than Leidner. Our coaches believe Leidner gives us the best chance to win, but that's taking into account the plays they want to call. If they designed an offense around Streveler, it would be interesting to see what would happen. He's a highly confident, very cocky, very athletic and extremely competitve kid. He's got that intangible attitude that Mitch just doesn't innately possess.
 

I haven't seen anything mentioned about how we were leaving behind the no-huddle, then proceeded to run it past on multiple drives. That wasn't vanilla limegrover play calling!
 

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