You hit the nail on the head. This team has enough talent to win. The coaching staff needs to put them in the right position to win. We cannot afford unforced errors on the sideline. Also, Billy calling trick plays has been a disaster. He either needs to develop a better feel for when to call them or just stop calling them.
“Trick” plays always have a certain amount of risk. I agree that our trick plays have been awful. But I also think the trick plays we’ve run, that I recall, were slow developing and required an extra ball exchange behind the line of scrimmage. Those plays were blown up not necessarily because of the timing of the call but because, our OL was so overwhelmed. I feel pretty good about our OL heading into this season. We will see.
I’m reminded of the fsu game, we had huge momentum, got the ball on or near the 50 yard line, and we call a double reverse pass. Here’s the thing, our OL so far was unable to stop their pass rush so to call that play had almost no chance of succeeding. We were thrown for a 15 yard loss, ended up punting, fsu goes the length of the field and scored a td and the entire game shifted. My concern was how in the world could you call this trick play when we had issues pass blocking the entire game. I have to believe those kinds of glaring mistakes won’t happen or will be greatly reduced.
Billy seemed to be trying to compensate for Mertz being out by resorting to flummery instead of fundamental FB. He seemingly did not trust Brown to run the full O effectively and that lack of confidence may have contributed to a loss. That was then and this is now. Mertz is back. The not ready for prime-time backup has departed and been replaced with the best HS QB in his class, which leaves Billy as the only constant. We'll see if he's upped his flummery game soon enough. Of course, an improved OL would obviate many questions.
Kirby’s trick play made him look like a complete idiot but he somehow overcame that with better players.
