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Situational Football and Jonathan Smith:
godawgst
Member, Swaye's Wigwam Posts: 2,450 
A couple of weeks ago, Matt Ryan basically called out Kyle Shanahan for being a dumb shit and not running the ball three times from the 20, with three minutes left, make New England use all their time outs and kick at worst a 37 yard fg (with a 90% plus chance of it being good) to go up by 10 in the Super Bowl and put the game away, and that got me thinking about our OC and his lack of understanding and/or implementation of Situational Football
I re-listened to the TSIO USC podcast, and was reminded of our failure to use the clock at the end of the first half so that SC wouldn't have any time left to do something with it, but instead kept snapping it with 12 on the play clock instead of two. That mistake made us down by two scores at half
During the WSU game they score after half to make it 35-17. Our next position on 3rd and 2 we try a fly sweep with Fuller (the only one all year iirc) for a one yard gain when the Cougs hadn't stopped Lavon or Gaskin all game for less than that.
Pac-12 Champ game against Colorado: After Turner's int at the end of third, we go Sample over middle for 8 yards, incomplete pass, incomplete pass (what makes that even better is we all know how accurate Jake was that game, yet the calls were both fade's to Ross in the back of the end zone and neither were CLOSE.) Hey Smith, you really wanna know what makes that a successful drive?? Run the fuckin football two times and burn a couple minutes off the clock. At that point it's not about points, it's about getting to 00 on the clock. The extra 3 or 7 points is the cherry on top of the ice cream
Drive versus Bama before half. That doesn't even need to be addressed.
We also had the Utah game with Jake's int. that gave them life when we had that game in control by running the football and making Troy Williams do something to get them back in it.
Look, there are 10 games this year where our talent and coaching advantage is great enough to where this shit won't matter regardless of the schemes we run, tempo, etc etc. But in the Pac-12 Champ game (it will be USC unless Darnold gets hurt) playoffs, next year versus Auburn, when we play Ohio State, Michigan, etc those are the Things that can be the difference between Playing for and winning NC's and not.
Last August Pete talked in fall camp about the need to start games faster as in 2015 we started Horribly most 1st quarters and we saw what they did last year.
I pray this year we hear him speak about the need to be smarter when it comes to game management.
I re-listened to the TSIO USC podcast, and was reminded of our failure to use the clock at the end of the first half so that SC wouldn't have any time left to do something with it, but instead kept snapping it with 12 on the play clock instead of two. That mistake made us down by two scores at half
During the WSU game they score after half to make it 35-17. Our next position on 3rd and 2 we try a fly sweep with Fuller (the only one all year iirc) for a one yard gain when the Cougs hadn't stopped Lavon or Gaskin all game for less than that.
Pac-12 Champ game against Colorado: After Turner's int at the end of third, we go Sample over middle for 8 yards, incomplete pass, incomplete pass (what makes that even better is we all know how accurate Jake was that game, yet the calls were both fade's to Ross in the back of the end zone and neither were CLOSE.) Hey Smith, you really wanna know what makes that a successful drive?? Run the fuckin football two times and burn a couple minutes off the clock. At that point it's not about points, it's about getting to 00 on the clock. The extra 3 or 7 points is the cherry on top of the ice cream
Drive versus Bama before half. That doesn't even need to be addressed.
We also had the Utah game with Jake's int. that gave them life when we had that game in control by running the football and making Troy Williams do something to get them back in it.
Look, there are 10 games this year where our talent and coaching advantage is great enough to where this shit won't matter regardless of the schemes we run, tempo, etc etc. But in the Pac-12 Champ game (it will be USC unless Darnold gets hurt) playoffs, next year versus Auburn, when we play Ohio State, Michigan, etc those are the Things that can be the difference between Playing for and winning NC's and not.
Last August Pete talked in fall camp about the need to start games faster as in 2015 we started Horribly most 1st quarters and we saw what they did last year.
I pray this year we hear him speak about the need to be smarter when it comes to game management.
Comments
Let's start by going back to the Utah game and everybody's favorite decision of going after the decision to throw the ball that got Utah back in the game. I watched the 1st half last night and we were doing a lot of things well with the passing game in the 1st half that actually put us in position to get those scores in the 1st half. The play was there on the INT but Jake did 2 major things wrong on that play. First, he stared down Chico and led the safety right to the throw. But second, and perhaps most importantly, Jake made a very flat throw that allowed a S that didn't get proper depth to really undercut that ball instead of putting air under it and allowing Chico to run under it ... it was definitely a situation where there was the potential for an "if even he's gone" type of throw and Jake just missed it big time and knew it right away.
The more that time goes by, the more I look at the SC game as indicative of a team that was playing on that stage for the first time, got punched in the mouth, and collectively panicked. You heard that out of Jake this week where he said he was trying to hit big plays with every throw. We had a great drive leading into halftime where we had a chance to take a lot of momentum into it with a 14 play drive that took over 6 minutes of clock that ended up in a FG. If you look at the way the drive played out, we had a 4th and 1 at the 31 that we ended up getting an 11 yard run from Gaskin on that was snapped at 5:01 left in the 2nd. Our next snap was at 4:26 on 1st down (makes sense because the play clock is going before the clock starts back up after the 1st down). Our next snap/end of play was at 3:51 (so if you assume about 5 seconds for the play to take place that's snapping with about 10-15 seconds left on the play clock ... not terrible but definitely not great. Then, our 3rd down play ended at 3:28 ... this was where it was pretty bad because we went really quick there and it ended up in a sack on a 3rd and 2 play. Could we have made a better play call there by taking some more time? Quite possibly. We had timeouts left at that point and you could definitely make an argument for running the clock down on such a critical play and ensuring that you got the right play called there. We did run the play clock down on the FG and it went through at 2:34 left. The killer was that the defense allowed SC to march right down the field on 9 plays. Looking back at the SC game it really was a team effort on the loss.
The fly sweep against the Cougs was just being too cute ... just like the reverse to Ross the 2nd play of the game against USC was being too cute.
Against Colorado ... only thing that I can offer for support was trying to find ways to a) get a little rhythm/confidence for Jake and keep Colorado at least somewhat honest.
10-7 at the half against Alabama was where it needed to be ... we tried to be safe with our play calls and Bama caught us putting our hand into the cookie jar.
We'll see during the season what Babushka has learned in this regard ... but you're right that there will only be a handful of games this season where game management will really matter.
The twitter devs got it right with the 240 character post limit.
If you can't make your point in 240 characters, take a writing class.