This offense is a work in progress. So is Fisch

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Bayfieldgopher

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I can not sweep our poor offensive performance under the rug from the last five games in 08. Same with the poor D against Iowa and KU.

That is what we are building on with this team, its new coordinators and an inexperienced OL. Right where we left off last year. And there is a ton of improvement to be made for us to be competitive.

Thank goodness the offense and Weber got their act together and put together the last two drives. Weber was 7 of 11 the last drive. But execution was a big problem for most of the game and Weber timing and accuracy was bad until he settled in the 4th quarter.

Our veteran D need to play well and hope our offense can improve steadily. Our LB's did well today but I expected much more from Brown and Small.
 


I leave this more to the players for poor execution versus play calling. Was Weber out there point shaving? What a HORRIBLE performance by him and the O Line again!
 

Weber was 19-42 passing today!

That 19-42 was not done with a lot of pressure in his face. There were a lot of balls that we just thrown into the turf because he was moving his feet to much and doing goofy things like jumping aroud when he did not need to. Until the 4th quarter it was like he had forgotten that he has been a decent QB in the past. What happens when the heat starts to come and we get hit with a team that actually has a pass rush. Throwing the ball 42 times is not a very balanced approach. Especially when it looked like Bennett could have gashed them in the first half. Stoudimire had some success and then we go completely away from it and he barely touches the ball. Forced passes to the tight ends on multiple occasions. There were at least three times where Weber had the ball all day were talking about 13 to 16 seconds back there and still could not find an open guy. How about remembering the fact that Weber has two feet and can run the ball a little bit. He has wheels let him get moving if there is nothing open down field. Weber has been over coached a bit and needs to remember that he is a good athlete that can make plays with his feet when he needs to. I will give Weber a muligan today but he needs to be much sharper next week, we face a better opponent next week.
 

Well, Weber was underwhelming today and stats truly do not tell the whole story. IF he does not show improvement in the next 2 games, it would not surprise me to see Gray replace him. At least Gray will be more open to using receivers not named Decker.
 


Pound the Rock

Is nothing more than a catch phrase. Coach Davis, just what does he do? 42 passing attempts and we want to be more physical, we want to run the ball. This game was very illustrative. We are still are a shot gun offense. Maybe a spread or not. All the talk about Wills, the conditioning, Careful. And we run it 32 times for 112. Please take the sign down, and never utter another word about Pounding The Rock, or playing smash mouth football. That second quarter 3-1 that became the 4-1 that became a Syracuse touchdown was a teaching moment the offensive line failed. I also question Coach Fish on the formations and play calls. Where is the go to place on this line. Who can combine to make a hole? I would think Careful and Wills. An off takle slant.

That having been said, the defense had one good stat. They were able to hold Syracuse to a 1-12 on third downs. Shut them out in the second half and Overtime. That is a half time adjustment, something that has not been seen in these parts in over 25 years. Maybe, just maybe if we can hold teams as Bayfield says to less than 20 we can win some games.

The play in the overtime. Something we had no clue about against Wisconsin in 1999. At that time we looked lost. This time not so much. The defense looked like they had a chance, and then that third down intereception by Nate. My only question was why couldn't we score a TD, answer, because a field goal was all we needed. And good for Ellestad. We will need him, again and again if we are going to win some defensive battles.
 

husker70 said:
Is nothing more than a catch phrase. Coach Davis, just what does he do? 42 passing attempts and we want to be more physical, we want to run the ball. This game was very illustrative. We are still are a shot gun offense. Maybe a spread or not. All the talk about Wills, the conditioning, Careful. And we run it 32 times for 112. Please take the sign down, and never utter another word about Pounding The Rock, or playing smash mouth football. That second quarter 3-1 that became the 4-1 that became a Syracuse touchdown was a teaching moment the offensive line failed. I also question Coach Fish on the formations and play calls. Where is the go to place on this line. Who can combine to make a hole? I would think Careful and Wills. An off takle slant.

That having been said, the defense had one good stat. They were able to hold Syracuse to a 1-12 on third downs. Shut them out in the second half and Overtime. That is a half time adjustment, something that has not been seen in these parts in over 25 years. Maybe, just maybe if we can hold teams as Bayfield says to less than 20 we can win some games.

The play in the overtime. Something we had no clue about against Wisconsin in 1999. At that time we looked lost. This time not so much. The defense looked like they had a chance, and then that third down intereception by Nate. My only question was why couldn't we score a TD, answer, because a field goal was all we needed. And good for Ellestad. We will need him, again and again if we are going to win some defensive battles.
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The upside is that we won on the road against a Big East team to start the season. All things considered, we overcame a lot of self inflicted problems to get a road win. The old saying is that in football, the most improvement will be between the first and second games. We'll see. I just hope that isn't true for Air Force too. Hopefully they peaked Saturday.
 

Wildcat

I liked the Wildcat formation with Stoudemeir, but let's not get carried away with it. To all the doubters, let's just remember that this was our first chance to hit and execute against someone other than ourselves. If you're going to have a "thank God it was a W" day, I'd much prefer it being the first game of the year and an away game. I believe that if we want to score a bunch of points this year and not rely totally on our defense to win games, we will need to go with Marquies. Weber is not a threat to pull it down and take off and is not the physical specimen that Marquies is. One of the most disappointing things to me over the years about our squad is how we annoint a player as quarterback for life and rarely if ever pull him for performance issues. With all currently due respect to Tony Dungy, Adam Weber's passing today reminded me of some of Tony's passing performances for which I still owe Tony an apology for the things I said about them. I enjoyed my visit to Syracuse. Thanks to a friendly Syracuse tailgating group, I scored a free ticket to the game. I think I may have been the only Gopher fan not sitting in the endzone. I had a few veiled threats tossed my way while trying to get off campus, so it felt like an Iowa game in that regard. My food experiences in Syracuse we average with the mentality seeming to be quantity over quality, the exception being a nice pine nut salad I had at a health food restaurant on M Street. I think I'd also like to see Kevin Whaley get the ball here soon - I was impressed with his spring game performance especially his speed and quickness. I suspect Bennett may have a season like Maroney's last with him being dinged up by nagging minor injuries. I hope the squad works hard this week making adjustments. We'll be fine against AF - Cal, now there's the game where we'll need to be clicking on all cylinders and needing a huge pash rushing game.
 

It's possible that if weber is hitting his recievers we're a lot happier with the play calling. Things would have been considerably different if he didn't suck so bad in that first half.

That being said, I'm really tired of first down passing, and then 2nd and 10 running. I really am hoping our TOP issues of last year are over, but if that's going to be our approach it's not too likely.
 



What I don't understand is why did we run the Wildcat play with Stoudamire which got us a 1st down only once? Stoudamire exploded through the line and that was the last time we seen it.......

Our best plays were Play-Action, we executed those very well.......

EDIT: We ran it twice.......
 

I've posted elsewhere about Wills problems and the O line situation. My real question is this: What was our offensive scheme? I looked back at the game again on TIVO this morning and I'll be danged if I can tell you what we were trying to accomplish at any point. Were we a running team? A passing tam? A short passing team? An option team? None of the above? Someone else posted somewhere that it looked like we were drawing up plays in the sand.

Not only did we not execute, it didn't look like we had anything to execute. Tell me I'm wrong.
 

ncgo4 said:
I've posted elsewhere about Wills problems and the O line situation. My real question is this: What was our offensive scheme? I looked back at the game again on TIVO this morning and I'll be danged if I can tell you what we were trying to accomplish at any point. Were we a running team? A passing tam? A short passing team? An option team? None of the above? Someone else posted somewhere that it looked like we were drawing up plays in the sand.

Not only did we not execute, it didn't look like we had anything to execute. Tell me I'm wrong.
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We had no identity yesterday.......

Our best plays came on long pass plays though.......
 

Still concerned about Weber's decisions...

I was very glad to see Weber involve more receivers, and I know that you need to get the ball to Decker and let him make plays. But there was one play that was just inexcusable. The SU D had totally rolled the entire coverage over to Decker and Weber tried to thread the needle into QUINTUPLE coverage. It looked like they zoned Decker's side with everyone else and left Stoudamire with single coverage on the other side. Troy was open for a big gain.

Weber needs to look at Decker first most of the time, but he has to check down when the opposing D is determined to take Decker out of the play. If the D is going to commit that many guys to one WR, you have to make them pay by finding the open guy. That will get Decker more room to work as well.

He gets a mulligan, but this could be the key to the Gopher's success. He has the other weapons now, he has to use them.
 



Pound the rock is not a philosophy for this team

They have signs, they have t-shirts but they have no interest in pounding the rock.
Running the football is not the flashy thing to do and does not turn recruits heads. It doesn't sell tickets and pounding the football does not make ESPN highlights. The only guy's that would
get excited about pounding the rock are the offensive lineman, fullbacks and running backs. What pounding the rock does is keep's the other teams defense on the field, wear's them out and takes the opponents will away to make plays and win the football game. This is a spread team with spread type athletes right now at the skill positions. This team seems better when they are throwing the ball, but when that fails there is not much there.
Weber is best when he is in shot gun and throwing the ball. Problem is when he is not sharp there are a lot of 3 and outs and the defense plays the whole game and wears out. It's a conundrum, but they have to be a little better at running the ball. Bennet averaged 5-6 yards a carry but a lot of those were tough physical runs with him breaking tackles. Very little mis-direction or vanilla play calls for the running game that might have been by design.
 

ncgo4 said:
I've posted elsewhere about Wills problems and the O line situation. My real question is this: What was our offensive scheme? I looked back at the game again on TIVO this morning and I'll be danged if I can tell you what we were trying to accomplish at any point. Were we a running team? A passing tam? A short passing team? An option team? None of the above? Someone else posted somewhere that it looked like we were drawing up plays in the sand.

Not only did we not execute, it didn't look like we had anything to execute. Tell me I'm wrong.
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You're wrong. They had something they tried to do, but they couldn't get anything done on the ground and Weber wasn't hitting his passses. Therefore, they had to change their approach.

The problem wasn't scheme, it was execution. It is a multiple, pro-style offense. The whole point is that it can't necessarily be defined.
 

I thought the distribution of the ball wasn't too bad. I initially thought weber was too focused on Decker but then I looked at the box score and it was pretty typical of any team with a stud reciever on it. I'm not going to draw too many conclusions from this game regarding play calling and Fisch. If Weber is making his throws in the first half and we're moving the chains a bit more I think we would be seeing things a bit differently.
 

QBs having a bad passing day should be pulled, as baseball pitchers are...I've always believed that, but it is rarely done. They can come back another day.
 

Gray outplayed Weber in the spring game going against the lst team D. Why not give him one series?
 

Great Plains Gopher said:
QBs having a bad passing day should be pulled, as baseball pitchers are...I've always believed that, but it is rarely done. They can come back another day.
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I'm with you, especially when you have someone as talented as MarQuise Gray on the sideline.
 

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