A Portrait of Offensive Malaise

Sadly.

Not much to add here.
I could go through all the things that make a spread attack (and spread-option) attack effective. This offense does none of them.

But whoever writes for the Fire S.A. site has made two very salient points in the last few weeks (I’m just getting around to reading his stuff for first time; sorry if lengthy):

After Miss. St. Game:

Addazio talks about "staying on schedule" to avoid 3rd and long situations….Addazio’s stubborn over-use of this philosophy is one of the root of the problems for the Gator offense.
1st and 10 becomes 2nd and 6. 2nd and 6 becomes 3rd and 2. 3rd and 2 becomes 1st and 10. That’s the idea. The problem, Steve, is that defensive coordinators know that your goal on 1st down is to get 4 yards, so that’s what they defend. So now your safe 4 yard play becomes a 1 yard play, and we’re putting ourselves in long yardage situations anyway. 58 times this year Florida has run for 2 yards or less on 1st down.
…sometimes you need to try and get 40 yards on 1st down rather than 4. The defense is loading up the box so much that a 4 yard run is no more likely to be successful than a long pass play is…When we "waste" a long pass attempt with an incompletion, at least we’ve accomplished something by telling the defense that they’re going to need to back off some or it’s going to hurt them.

After the UGA Game:

…if Trey Burton is going to be able to run the ball for us against good teams, he’s going to have to throw the ball a bit to keep the defenses honest….the defense sees Burton at QB and expects a run, but then at the last second Brantley runs back there and lines up to throw the ball….So, we now have the defense fooled, thinking run, with the box stacked, but have the ball in our passer’s hands. So what do we do? Throw a short, quick pass right into the heart of where the box is stacked to stop the run.
What’s the point? We go through all this effort to get a team to commit to the line of scrimmage, then trick them by throwing right at that spot? That play should have been designed to go downfield, that’s the only way it makes sense.

Yes, its Monday-Morning Quarterbacking, but from every corner of my mind it seems to be not only blatantly obvious, but correct.

For all the flack that some of us more “pessimistic” fans got earlier, I think everyone’s come around to the belief that this is much more than a down year in the natural progression of things. For all the talk of unrealistic expectations and fans not being satisfied with 10-2, the fact of the matter is that this disaster was obvious even during our early season wins and underscored twice over with every loss thereafter. This reeked of a five-loss season then and now I think we’ll be lucky to escape with even that. In fact, I’d say our odds of losing out are greater than those of winning out and I expect at least one and likely two more losses before it’s all over, unless changes are made. Get rid of Addazzio (completely now), bench Brantley and Thompson, move Pouncey over to guard (and consider other changes up front), rest the injured backs completely, play the youth up front on D so they can get their feet wet in this lost year, etc. I still believe this season could have been saved had the changes above (fairly obvious ones for the most part) would have been adopted early enough. Oh well, there’s always next year…

Dear God,

I love you, why do you hate me?

Love,
LSU fan