I've showed you 4 games where the "great" offense could have been better.
That's not make believe. You just chose to make like an ostrich and bury your head in the sandpit.
The amount of new offers is alarming
- Thread starter chugspig
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I've showed you 4 games where the "great" offense could have been better.
That's not make believe. You just chose to make like an ostrich and bury your head in the sandpit.
Haa!! I'm willing to bet that one went on for more than 10 pages. I thought that was back in the Britton days...but I could be mistaken
We could always revisit that topic since its slow
I can't think of many offenses I'd rather have than ours last year. Certainly not any in the Pac-12.
Thanks Ed.
Any word from your old buddy Loyal Coug?
Hope he’s doing all right these days.
FWIW, dgibbons is more correct here. We all know that our offense could have been better.....but we also know that if our defense wasn't terrible, we would have won 9 games last year with that flawed offense. UCLA, ASU, and Oregon were games where the offense scored plenty of points but the defense was shredded at critical moments. It's an absolute travesty that we had to score 54 points to beat Oregon State by one. At 9-3 (6-3), we would have played in the Red Box Bowl against Illinois, who was falling apart at the end of the season and we would have likely beat (without our crappy defense) to finish 10-3 and ranked in the Top 20.
The offense was flawed, but last years failures fall completely on the defense and everyone that is objective knows it. The bad news is that the flaws in our offense are more easily fixed than the lack of dudes that we are suffering from on the defensive side of the ball. So.....I wish that the people saying that the defense is fine were right....but they aren't and that sucks.
Missing wobbly baby deer leg scrambles by Connor Halliday ending in the patented stuck cleat slide....
My argument was that the offense could have been better. I wasn't arguing the defense could have been better. I wasn't even arguing about the defense because it is a world is round type of argument unless one is a Flat earther(not a dig on your screen name)
I agree that we could have won 8 or 9 games with a better D but you really hit the nail on the head w what I was trying to say about the d.
My stance is needed our Offense to be perfect as there was no hope for the defense this year.
That's a fair enough position. Our offense is going to need to average 35+ points per game for us to make a bowl game. It's not fair to put the burden on the offense, but who said life was fair? My only nitpick with the discussion is when we have people saying that when we lose games, it is because of a failure of the offense to score more points. It's one thing to say that because of the known weakness of the defense, the offense needs to be great. We can't change reality so that's the truth.
At the same time, it's kind of silly to blame the offense for our loss to ASU when our offense scored with 2:30 to go in the game to take the lead and the defense just couldn't get the one stop that we needed. Same for Oregon. Take a lead with 1:00 to go and the defense folded up like origami. It doesn't matter how good the offense is when the defense is completely inept in crunch time. In the UCLA game, the offense motherf'ed the defense with turnovers, but it wasn't the offense that gave up 131 yards in two plays in the 3rd quarter that allowed UCLA to make the game close enough to matter. We had a 32 point lead and lost the game. Even bad defenses need to be better than that.
So, I agree with your position that our offense needs to be excellent for us to compete in 2020, but I disagree with those that insist that anything less than absolute perfection constitutes failure for the offense. That's just a silly, capricious double standard that doesn't make sense. We may suck and lose a lot of games this year, but if the offense is scoring 35+ points per game again.....it will be dumb to say that they should have been better.
Actually you can't show us where THAT defense could play better because they were equally bad from start to finish.
When you are a defense genius and that is where you place your emphasis and best players, you better be good play in and play out, game in and game out. If you build a team that can score 21 points and your legacy is your defense you better only give up 17 a game.
This is where stats lie. Take the UCLA game. UCLA scored 67. 14 where on special teams. That puts 53 on the defense. Three scores came from 30 yards or less because of turnovers. That puts that defense at 32 points given up and doesn't take into account the effect of two more turnovers.
WSU was 3-6 in conference games, .333. If the offense was more efficient, not turning the ball over they probably lose two conference games. That would have tied us with Oregon and the Pac 12 title with two loses. Bad use of timeouts against ASU, and not being efficient enough , Harris running out of bounds with a minute thirty left, make the clock burn. Simple stuff like that.
DESPITE the defense I think Biggs can make his argument.
It is like the plus/minus system one of my daughter's AAU basketball coach would use. If for example a kid scored 20, but her player she was guarding scored 26, that is a minus 6. Same principle when talking about yards and scoring. If you get a lot of that against the weakest teams you play, but score 13 and 14 against UW and Utah, it means something.
Why is that not "fair". If you construct a roster that way, that is your calling card I am not sure that is "unfair".
Yes Madeline...the "tell". What was the "tell" again. I find something amusing?
Imponderables continue. At what point does the offense reach perfection? Scoring on every drive? A first down or a TD on every play? The other team forfeiting rather than playing the game? And ultimately you're saying that a failure to reach perfection was the problem while the defense just stunk.
The offense 's failure to reach perfection = offensive failure despite finishing in 7th in yards and 11th. Sucking on defense = good enough to win in the Pac-12 title. That's your reasoning here. It's totally illogical.
And I can show you that the defense could have played better in every game because there was terrible tackling, fundamentals, alignment and assignment errors, and all the other nonsense we saw all season long. If you're going to say the "offense could have been better" than the defense certainly could have been better too. If you deny that, you're just lying. Total intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy. Like I said above, the offense reaching A+ territory but the defense remaining an F has much less effect on the GPA than the offense remaining an A and the defense going from F to C-.
I didn;'t mean perfect to be taken literally. I have to remember to speak in literal terms with you.
You can't have a 3 and out and scoreless drives against Air Force. You can't have crappy red zone productions against Oregon. Yes, I am aware Arcando was playing volleyball on that one interception.
You can't drop back your own end zone and throw the ball on 3rd and 25 when the defense is just sitting there waiting for it which resulted in a pick 6. Even Todd McShay was commenting on that before the snap.
For F Sakes...how many times do I have to say the defense was garbage. I've probably said it at least 5 times in this thread. Go back and re-read before calling someone a liar aka your favorite adjective.
I agree with you. The defense was horrible. Almost Paul Wulff horrible.
Do you continue to argue in the court room when you agree on a subject and call them liars?
So define perfect. All you're saying now is in hindsight not good enough. And giving the defense a hall pass for every terrible play the entire season.
Don't have to call you a liar. You pretty much kill yourself in the foot Jason Gesser style every post.
An attorney accusing someone of being a liar. Now that's funny.
You also just equated a message board poster,who is talking about an innocent topic such as football, with Jason Gesser
Get your head examined dgibbons.
Do you really think that Leach made a conscious decision for the defense to suck and have poor personnel? I had kind of gathered that he was proud of the improvements on the defensive side and he often talked about the importance of being successful on offense, defense and special teams. So frankly, yes, it is unfair to say that the offense has to be great because the defense is going to suck. Now, the truth is that our defense sucks and there's no immediate cure for that....so our offense has to just suck it up while Rolovich and his staff try to cure that issue. Given Rolovich's reputation....it might not happen fast. That's not fair...but as I said above, who said that life had to be fair.
Again, my nitpick is when someone says that it's the offense's fault that the defense let ASU and Oregon march down the field with almost no resistance. It's insane to think that no matter what happened offensively against UCLA, we were able to blow a flippin' 32 point lead in less than 20 minutes. Token resistance against UCLA would have yielded a win. Now...to be fair (heh), the offense does hold a lot of responsibility in that UCLA loss too.
What I find laughable is when I see people cherry picking mistakes of players and pointing that out as massive failures. What's really insane is when you realize that the mighty Joe Burrow threw 125 incompletions and 6 interceptions. 24% of the time.....he FAILED! OMG...he's the worst! Gordon threw 16 interceptions out of 689 attempts or about 1 out of every 43 throws. Jalen Hurts threw 8 interceptions in 340 attempts...or slightly more often than Gordon. OH MY GOD! JALEN HURTS SUCKS DONKEY BALLS AS A QB! Justin Herbert only completed 67% of his passes. HOW CAN THAT GUY BE A PRO PROSPECT?
At the end of the day, as mentioned above by others, you are assigning these incredibly high standards for our offense and ignoring the intensely fast decline in our defensive performance. Even the greatest offenses make mistakes. Was the 2019 WSU offense as good as it could have been? Probably not, but this constant silliness of pretending that they should be perfect is just that....silly.
Your brain doesn't work. I said kill yourself in the foot Jason Gesser style because Gesser was the person that said WSU killed itself in the foot after the 2001 Apple Cup. But whatever. If you want to claim victimhood, go ahead.
It reaches balance and closer to perfection by not turning it over . You already have a bad defense , throw gasoline and take a match to it.
I'll try to make everyone happy here:
- The offense was borderline top 10 by most measures (e.g., #11 in FEI at Football Outsiders) and the defense was preposterously bad (#107 by that same metric, FEI). There is no way to explain last year other than as an offense that was good, perhaps even "great" by most typical standards, and a defense that was absurdly terrible. If it was something like the #25 offense and #70 defense, it still would be pretty clear, but at least arguments wouldn't be ridiculous. It pretty much is ridiculous given what the stats actually were.
- I admit to thinking the offense could have made plays here and there to perform even better (e.g., bumping up a 92 grade to a 94 grade), and that alone may have resulted in two more wins, perhaps even three. E.g., avoiding one of the fumbles against UCLA (or Gordon not having that one three and out with three straight incompletions), or doing a few things better against Oregon, could have gotten those wins.
This is tempting and, frankly, accurate. Just about any unit on the team wasn't perfect at all times. Just bear in mind that this is in the context of saying that the A- student should have gotten an A, though, bumping up the grade a couple points, rather than saying that the F student who showed up hung over in the back row once in a while maybe should have cracked a book and tried to at least get a D.
So, while it may be true the offense could have instead been not just very good but among the very finest in the country, better than many with elite talent, and done even more to overcome the deficiencies on the other side of the ball ... I suppose the best response to that is, well, "OK." That's true about any unit in the country.
- The offense was borderline top 10 by most measures (e.g., #11 in FEI at Football Outsiders) and the defense was preposterously bad (#107 by that same metric, FEI). There is no way to explain last year other than as an offense that was good, perhaps even "great" by most typical standards, and a defense that was absurdly terrible. If it was something like the #25 offense and #70 defense, it still would be pretty clear, but at least arguments wouldn't be ridiculous. It pretty much is ridiculous given what the stats actually were.
- I admit to thinking the offense could have made plays here and there to perform even better (e.g., bumping up a 92 grade to a 94 grade), and that alone may have resulted in two more wins, perhaps even three. E.g., avoiding one of the fumbles against UCLA (or Gordon not having that one three and out with three straight incompletions), or doing a few things better against Oregon, could have gotten those wins.
This is tempting and, frankly, accurate. Just about any unit on the team wasn't perfect at all times. Just bear in mind that this is in the context of saying that the A- student should have gotten an A, though, bumping up the grade a couple points, rather than saying that the F student who showed up hung over in the back row once in a while maybe should have cracked a book and tried to at least get a D.
So, while it may be true the offense could have instead been not just very good but among the very finest in the country, better than many with elite talent, and done even more to overcome the deficiencies on the other side of the ball ... I suppose the best response to that is, well, "OK." That's true about any unit in the country.
Well said.
The offense was given almost no margin of error all year. I imagine it's more difficult to execute when you know failing to score when on each possession might cost you the game. Opponents were able to establish long drives, convert redzone opportunities into TD's, and limit our number of possessions.
I will acknowledge how easy it looks to just be a bit better, because it's a one or two more plays a game difference between wins and losses. These players aren't machines. They will sometimes run the wrong routes, take plays off, make the wrong reads, or get beat. The strengths of Leach's offense was execution, effort, and simplicity. I want to acknowledge the vulnerability of his Air Raid to teams that can execute their game plan to stop it. Im unconvinced adding to the complexity of the offense, which would make it harder to stop, would yield better results because of the dip in execution we'd take.
Lateral? Not in his mind. 1) SEC of any position is an upgrade over Pac12 to some. 2) proximity to top recruits 3) easier recruiting to MSU than WSU 4) more $$$ for recruiting 5) more $$$ for assistants 6) indoor facility.
That's an upgrade to Leach.
Yes, that infamous thread was before Scott. In fact, deleting it was one of the first things that Scott did once he came on board. Probably received a number of requests for him to do so. Not sure how many pages it went. I lost count after I ran out of fingers.Haa!! I'm willing to bet that one went on for more than 10 pages. I thought that was back in the Britton days...but I could be mistaken
We could always revisit that topic since its slow
He will never sniff a league title. Ever. If he wants the things you listed, he got them. If he wants to compete for titles, he was better off at WSU.
Everything is relative. If I make $100k in Kansas it’s not an upgrade to make $120K in Seattle.
MSU you may have a bigger budget in a more talent rich area but look at who you are competing with in your general geography. He’s basically in the same spot as he was at WSU relatively speaking.
His offense doesn’t do well against sound talented defenses. He proved that every year at WSU and he stacked talent on that side of the ball. It’s not gonna change at MSU. He will win his non conf games and a few easier conference games, get cleaned up by Bama, LSU, Aub, Fl, GA, etc. He won’t care he’s making more money, closer to home, and it’s his last stop before retirement.
I think the key words in Fffws' comment was "Not in his mind," meaning Leach certainly doesn't think his offense won't do well against sound talented defenses. It bears repeating, Leach has sought what he may consider the ultimate challenge of proving Air Raid detractors wrong about whether he could be successful in the best conference & teams in the NCAA. He's a pretty confident guy about what he can accomplish. After all, he took a WSU team that rock bottomed under Wulff and built a consistent bowl team. He no doubt thinks its possible to elevate MSU as well.
Glad Cougar
Good for him, I’m sure I’d be confident if I were him too. Facts are facts he banged his head against the same wall every year, it’s not gonna change. He’s won a lot of games at tough places to win and deserves what he’s been paid, but to think he’s gonna get MSU in the hunt in that division after what we saw his offense do against the best defenses in our conference is laughable.
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