Spring Game Part 1: Offense
This past Saturday was our spring game, which is the culmination of spring practice and the 60 minutes that the media will mercilessly pick apart and draw amazingly specific but wrong conclusions from for the next six months. In recognition of that fact, I will try to refrain from making predictions and only discuss observations.
The other thing I wonât do much of in this is discuss statistics. In fact, this game is a case study of how bad statistics are at telling you what you have as a football team, particularly as it relates to quarterbacks. Case in point, Swoopes was 17/31 for 159 passing, 23 long, whereas Heard was 20/29 for 177 passing, 25 long. So as far as the numbers are concerned, both quarterbacks were pretty much equal, with Heard having a slight edge on accuracy. But itâs easy to forget that there are two players involved in a pass. For a reason that I donât understand (but probably has to do with not having to break through the defensive line), if a ball is thrown 5 yards, subsequently caught, and then run for an additional ten yards, that counts as a 15-yd pass. On the other hand, it is obviously true if a ball is thrown perfectly but is not caught due to a mistake made by the receiver, thatâs an incomplete pass. So through absolutely no fault of the quarterback, the first situation results in an additional ten yards on his statistics whereas the second results as an incomplete pass on his record. In fact, that was never more apparent than in this spring game. both quarterbacks were fine and I would feel comfortable with either of them starting, but from what I saw, I am much more comfortable with Swoopes making long, downfield passes than I am with Heard. The numbers donât reflect that, but Swoopes made a couple downfield passes and then he had a few more that were dropped (mostly by Dorian Leonard), including one that, if it were an actual game, probably would have been reviewed and ruled a touchdown. On the other hand, Heard was quite good at making short passes, but he didnât attempt a lot of long passes, and most of those which he did attempt were pretty inaccurate, and in several cases not particularly good decisions. However, Ty Templin and Lorenzo Joe had fairly good days, whereas Swoopes directed a bunch of passes to Jacorey Warrick and Dorian Leonard, and it just wasnât their day that day, and so no matter how accurate the passing was, that shows up as a knock on Swoopesâ record. So despite what the numbers might say, I thought Swoopes was a much better passer in that game.
As far as the run game goes, J-Gray only played a few downs, I guess because we didnât want to risk him getting injured and he has a good enough work ethic that we donât need to force him to play in this sort of situation. Besides that, though, what we lack in depth at the RB position we make up for in talent. J-Gray should be really good, but I was particularly impressed with DâOnta Foreman. He had a net of 81 yards, which isnât so bad for a spring game, and he looked pretty good on his feet. Additionally, both quarterbacks looked well above average at running. They have very different styles, in that Heard is fast and agile, whereas Swoopes is a tank, but both should be effective. In fact, both completed their opening drives with really nice running touchdowns. That will be a strength this year. Well, as long as we have a decent offensive line, which brings me to my next point.Â
No matter how much ESPN and other sports media tabloids may try to convince you that our biggest problem last season was at quarterback, by lightyears, our worst unit was the O-line. I mean, you see all the guys down at the bullshit department at ESPN insisting that our 59 total yards of offense against Arkansas were entirely due to an inadequate quarterback, but anyone who watched the game saw a quarterback who did make some panicky decisions because he was being stormed by a bunch of 350 lb linemen who werenât being held off by anyone, and he had nowhere to run, nor did any of our running backs. As I said earlier, statistics are a great way to obscure facts. If we want to have an effective offense, the first thing we need is an effective offensive line. Now, the âpro-styleâ offense, if you can call it that, that we ran last year is not a formation that is particularly friendly to the offensive line. Specifically, in order to create holes, you have to actually overpower the guy youâre blocking and move him out of the way most of the time. The new spread offense that weâre running is a little easier on the O-line in that sense because instead of having to push 350 lb men out of the way to open up holes, they simply have to keep them from moving forward. The flip side of this is that the quarterback actually has less protection from linebackers, and so the result is that run plays are easier while pass plays are harder for the quarterback but easier for the receivers. Because weâve undergone this scheme change on offense, itâs hard to say with any degree of accuracy if the increased number of holes opened up were a result of the improvement of the O-line or a direct result of the scheme change. Itâs probably some combination of the two, but in any case, itâs a godsend to highlight our talented running backs and our mobile quarterbacks.Â
As for the passing situation, given the amount of hype that the coaches have placed on our receivers, Iâm content to assume that it was just not a great day for them and theyâre better than they looked. That being said, they looked pretty bad, and if they did that during a game, then it wouldnât really matter how good they were at practice. So they need to be more consistent, but I donât believe that theyâre actually as bad as they were during the spring game.
As far as other observations go, I did notice that we used tight ends a lot. that was interesting. Andrew Beck looked pretty good. Also, holy special teams! I would not have believed that that was the same Nick Rose who kicked for us last year. Punting was unremarkable but not bad.Â
Defense will have to wait for the next post.
