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Thoughts on 2014: Still treading water
Auburndawg
Member Posts: 362
In 2009 Sark immediately took the program from 0-12, to 4-5 in the conference, 5-7 overall. Since then the only “improvement” has been due to playing a weaker non-conference schedule. We usually beat the bad teams and usually lose to the good teams. We continued to tread water in mediocreville this year.
I thought Petersen would bring immediate improvement. Why didn’t that happen? Let’s look at our 5 losses.
Oregon is what it is. We weren’t ready this year to win in Eugene
The defense let us down against UCLA, but that night Kikaha was hurt, Shaq was playing offense, and we had just lost Peters and the defensive backfield was a mess. I would love to play UCLA again now.
The defense shut down Stanford, ASU, and Arizona, but the offense scored one TD against Stanford, one FG against ASU, and their mistakes completely cost us the game against Zona.
Bottom line: the offense definitely cost us three games. The defense was excellent almost every game. In this era of high scoring, our D held 9 of 13 opponents under 25 points (and we should’ve held Arizona to under 20).
Why did the offense struggle? It was clearly a combination of two things:
Bad QB play:
Miles has certainly improved, but his inability to throw on timing cost us a lot and made us one dimensional in some of our losses. And when Miles was out, Lindquist and Williams completely failed to move the team.
Mediocre Oline play:
The Oline was dominated by Stanford and ASU, and they were never the dominant force I thought they would be, given the depth and experience we had.
What caused these problems? Now we get into speculation:
Bad Oline recruiting. Hatchie is our only 4 star linemen. Tanigawa, Atoe, and Shelton were all 2 stars
Oline injuries and changes. Riva was out the whole year. Charles was hurt a lot. And the Tanigawa/Criste shuffle at center was not helpful.
Miles missed Spring practice. That had to set back his development
Miles missed two games. Playing against Hawaii would have given him another game to develop. And would we have beaten ASU if he had played?
Bad player development by Sark. Why wasn’t Miles more developed? Why weren’t our linemen better?
Bad coaching/play calling by Petersen/Smith. Clearly the coaches struggled to find an identity for this offense. The play calling was highly questionable at times. Execution was often sloppy; too many fumbles, too many penalties.
We all feel good now because we beat the Beavs and Cougs, (and no blow outs or 3 game losing streaks) but 4-5 is nothing to celebrate. Given how well coached the defense was, how much improvement we saw, and how hard the team played, I lean towards trusting Petersen, and blaming Sark for this year’s mediocrity. I still think Petersen is going to be the next great Husky coach, but there were enough coaching issues this year to create uncertainty. We are just going to have to be patient
Next year we lose 6 starters on defense, and 5 of our top 8 Olinemen. We are probably going to be too young to see a big breakthrough. One more year treading water is likely; but after that there must be a big leap forward.
I thought Petersen would bring immediate improvement. Why didn’t that happen? Let’s look at our 5 losses.
Oregon is what it is. We weren’t ready this year to win in Eugene
The defense let us down against UCLA, but that night Kikaha was hurt, Shaq was playing offense, and we had just lost Peters and the defensive backfield was a mess. I would love to play UCLA again now.
The defense shut down Stanford, ASU, and Arizona, but the offense scored one TD against Stanford, one FG against ASU, and their mistakes completely cost us the game against Zona.
Bottom line: the offense definitely cost us three games. The defense was excellent almost every game. In this era of high scoring, our D held 9 of 13 opponents under 25 points (and we should’ve held Arizona to under 20).
Why did the offense struggle? It was clearly a combination of two things:
Bad QB play:
Miles has certainly improved, but his inability to throw on timing cost us a lot and made us one dimensional in some of our losses. And when Miles was out, Lindquist and Williams completely failed to move the team.
Mediocre Oline play:
The Oline was dominated by Stanford and ASU, and they were never the dominant force I thought they would be, given the depth and experience we had.
What caused these problems? Now we get into speculation:
Bad Oline recruiting. Hatchie is our only 4 star linemen. Tanigawa, Atoe, and Shelton were all 2 stars
Oline injuries and changes. Riva was out the whole year. Charles was hurt a lot. And the Tanigawa/Criste shuffle at center was not helpful.
Miles missed Spring practice. That had to set back his development
Miles missed two games. Playing against Hawaii would have given him another game to develop. And would we have beaten ASU if he had played?
Bad player development by Sark. Why wasn’t Miles more developed? Why weren’t our linemen better?
Bad coaching/play calling by Petersen/Smith. Clearly the coaches struggled to find an identity for this offense. The play calling was highly questionable at times. Execution was often sloppy; too many fumbles, too many penalties.
We all feel good now because we beat the Beavs and Cougs, (and no blow outs or 3 game losing streaks) but 4-5 is nothing to celebrate. Given how well coached the defense was, how much improvement we saw, and how hard the team played, I lean towards trusting Petersen, and blaming Sark for this year’s mediocrity. I still think Petersen is going to be the next great Husky coach, but there were enough coaching issues this year to create uncertainty. We are just going to have to be patient
Next year we lose 6 starters on defense, and 5 of our top 8 Olinemen. We are probably going to be too young to see a big breakthrough. One more year treading water is likely; but after that there must be a big leap forward.
Comments
Positives: The team played in a lot of close games and was competitive in every game but two. The team improved the last 3 weeks of the season. Player development looks to be pretty good. Every single starting DL made big strides. The secondary was much better than expected after the Eastern game. Even the offense was much better the 2nd half of the season.
Negatives: 8-5 with this schedule is bad. 1-3 at home in conference is unacceptable. This is hopefully the last time Petersen loses 3 games at home in a season. We didn't make winning plays in the close games.
The season was pretty blah. It was truly a transition year. The transition was rockier than I expected. The coaches fucked up because of unfamiliarity with the players, and the players didn't always play to their best ability. There was a lot of thinking going on during games, not just from Miles. With time, that will certainly get better.
On the whole, I like what Petersen is doing. Recruiting the lines, emphasizing fundamentals. I have no doubt we will have solid teams under his watch. I'm still unsold if we will be great under him. We will find out in time. I do agree that 2016 is THE year of judgment, but I don't think we will be as bad next year as I initially thought. Young lines will probably hold us back from truly contending, but I think we will be better this year.
Shelton made a nice leap from last year to this year; I'd guess he went from a 3rd or 4th rounder to 1st or 2nd.
The Hudsons are a result of coaching, especially Andrew Hudson.
Gotcha.
And every week that goes by more and more of the blame/credit lands on Petersen
In September, it was that our DC was an idiot and clearly over his head. Why didn't Petersen make room for Wilcox who was previously on his staff in Boise?
In October, it was that Smith was an idiot and in way over his head as a play caller. Why didn't Petersen spend more money to go get someone that actually had called plays in the conference before.
Most glossed over that in September we were playing how many true freshman in the secondary? Most glossed over that the coaches were using the early season games to try to figure out what the young kids could and couldn't do. And most importantly, the young players were broken down in those games such that they had no choice but to listen and be coached up.
In the preseason games, there was nothing that we were going to learn about the offense until we started to play conference games. We learned that Miles had significant limitations as a passer in the PAC and that missing the Spring really hurt him. We learned that we had an OL that had probably maxed out on most of their abilities (although they did get a little better the 2nd half of the year). We learned that we had RBs that during the early part of the season weren't ready for prime time with nobody ready to take over the job (very similar to what we had at the start of the 2012 season after losing Polk). We learned that Kasen wasn't fully recovered from his leg injury, Ross was limited as a WR to only a few routes, Mickens was who we all knew he was, and that outside of that our WR group was beyond pedestrian. The offense was so strong that we went through a 3-4 game stretch where we moved Shaq to RB to not only spark the offense (notice that the OL started to play better after that happened - I tend to think it is because they started believing in who was carrying the ball and that their efforts would be rewarded). We finally started to figure out what Miles could do well and all of the things that he couldn't do well.
In the end, if you look at this season as a collection of what it was, in all honesty, this is a flawed team that was more or less a .500 team in the conference. Calling out the coaching only magnifies that more was possible with little growth in areas. The easiest place to point was the coaching ... but it's misguided on what reality really was:
1) Everybody cites the fake punt call against Stanford as a play that cost us the game. There's no guarantee that had we punted there that we would have won the game. The limitations that we had on offense early in the season were magnified in that game. Certainly, that call didn't help our chances. But at the same time, you don't call that play unless you trust your defense ... and the defense proceeded to give up a long drive for a TD.
2) Miles had a concussion and missed a week of practice against ASU. A little better offensive execution would have won that game. But on the other hand, one of the benefits of Miles not playing that game (regardless of him being cleared after missing a week of practice) was that it showed to him that he wasn't guaranteed anything as the starter and that IF his performance didn't improve he was subject to being removed as a starter. The before/after play by him was night and day different.
3) The laundry list of execution mistakes that were made in the Arizona game goes way beyond Chartgate. As has been documented by many on here, the number of similar/comparable situations where coaches run the football in the exact same situations is almost universal. And even if the play wasn't the right one, the onus is on Cooper not to fumble the football there. The fumbles that Miles made in that game were 100% avoidable. The snap on the extra point is 100% avoidable. You can rail on coaching all you want, but the players still have to execute. To me, one of the hallmark of Sark coached teams are that when the going gets tough, the number of people that make plays in adverse situations isn't a large number. Talk about all the culture changes that you want, but that's one of the biggest that needs to be moved through the program.