Simple Question for the Bored

Doogles said:

I'm... I'm embarrassed.

Great observations @Doogles ...

JAGs get exposed when there aren't a lot of them on the field ... at the highest level that smallest of margins get exposed time after time and that's what happened against Penn St.

I'm interested to see Nick Harris at C because that's a position where very rarely are you in a position where you're in a 1 on 1 pass blocking situation. Hopefully he can leverage his strength as a real willing and try hard run blocker at C. But this is now 2 years in a row where against better athletes he's been abused in bowl games and if you want a real theme of our losses the last 2 years on offense, it's when we've played better teams and the run game gets stuffed for large stretches.

I like Fuller enough to say that he can and should be part of our WR rotation in 2018. That being said, he's a 20-25 catch receiver at best (he was 2nd on the team this year with 26 catches ... think about how sad that is for a second) that should be a 4th or 5th WR option on this team. He's short, not big, and his best chance at being successful is being able to be in a position where he's going against other JAGs.

Myles Bryant is a nice player for a mid-tier PAC12 conference team. He clearly can make plays. But at the same time, when playing at the highest levels, his physical limitations get exploited by those with genetic advantages. This is the fundamental problem with JAGs. Against 75% of our schedule, Bryant looks like a great player and can make a number of plays where you confuse yourself into thinking that he can beat the odds. But then he's forced to go against guys like N'Keal Harry, any of Stanford's big physical WRs, etc. and he just gets beasted. He's lost before the play ever starts. And when playing against teams that can exploit him, that's what they are going to do. It's not rocket science.

Dennis had a post where he was going through JAGs on our roster, etc. and the coaches that recruited them. Pease and Strausser show up often.

The whole concept about our 3rd down defense to me highlights where we have some JAGs in place where teams specifically are able to exploit those advantages and put themselves in positions to convert. Moreover, one of my bigger complaints this year looking at the defense was it's general lack of playmakers on the team. Turnovers on the whole were down and the ability to consistently create negative plays for an offense whether as a sack or penalties to force teams into long down/distance situations was lacking at times. In some ways, if you go look at the trending of the Seahawk defense from the 2011/2012 time period until now and there are parallels to this year's UW team. While in a lot of ways this year's defense was statistically better than last year, I'm not sure that I'd agree with the idea.

If there's a maddening aspect about Browning it's that he doesn't really check the ball down. You can tell that he has taken the "no turnovers" to heart and given his lack of arm strength it's probably a good thing that he knows his limitations. That being said you can definitely tell that he doesn't like throwing the ball away when he should and that leads me to thinking that he likes to protect his stats just a little too much. When you combine that with situations where he has breakdowns in his line, he kind of just walls himself up and accepts the sack versus finding a way to get out of the situation and throw the ball away. Those yards that he willingly gives up kills not only the existing offensive drive but can often change field position putting the defense in a bad spot and at best further puts his offense against the wall when they get the ball back.

The question then comes back to talent right? How do we move out of the JAG territory and into the elite category? The challenge is that unlike the NFL where you can drastically change your roster each year with the draft and free agency, in college you only have recruiting to fall back onto. And while some may completely disagree with this, the reality is that very few kids coming in from a recruiting standpoint are ready to come in and play, much less be difference makers, early. Generally speaking, freshman are going to have their own physical limitations (not strong enough comparatively against a Senior) and be sufficiently inconsistent. So what you're really looking at in a lot of regards is a 2-3 year process to really turn around the quality of any positional group.

A great example of the above will be the WR group next year. With the exception of Chico, I expect that 3 of our top 4 WRs will come from a group including Ty Jones, Terrell Bynum, Marquis Spiker, and Austin Osborne. That's all 1st and 2nd year players in the program. We're literally in a position where we have 2-3 classes worth of WRs in our program that frankly aren't good enough. WRs have the ability to come in and play early as the physical limitations can be mitigated there. But when you look at the OL, or the DL, or even with respect to edge rushers, you are probably looking at more like 2 to 3 years in a program for those players to really make their mark on a normal basis. If I see a starting OLB/DE as a true freshman, then the kid is either elite (think Clowney) or he's playing out of necessity. If Clowney, awesome. If out of necessity, then that whole conversation about good teams finding weak spots to attack, there's a weak spot. That young player is likely going to have the run game targeted in their direction over and over again.

We're moving in the right direction ... and we're definitely well positioned in the PAC12. The key to me is that every year that goes by the ability to easily identify the JAGs continues to decrease. We're getting there and this class is a tremendous start. But we're still going to need to continue stacking these classes year after year to get to the level that we want to be at.

I don't know why you give me that question