re: Offense Fix

Great post tmc yet again. So many Ags want to shift back towards the old style of defense over offense, but if anything this season shows me we need to go all in on offense.

The kind of talent it would take to have an elite SEC defense would take YEARS to build via recruiting. And that is only if we get access to that kind of defensive recruit for that long of time- if Texas or someone else local gets elite while we are building it will all be flushed down the tubes. We simply don't have the margin of error to ever be a defensive minded team again. Or, let me say, until we win a few modern national titles we don't have the margin of error to be a defensive first team.

Unlike offensive, defense is obivously WAY more about talent than coaching (or otherwise Snyder would have ruined our best player). I don't see an A&M stockpiling that kind of D talent in my lifetime, at least not without a lot of success on the field caused by a great offense.

Meanwhile on offense we have rebuilt the thing TWICE this year alone and we still lead the SEC in many categories. Unlike on D it is easier to mask deficiencies in talent and expect good results without years of coaching. We need to jump up the food chain quickly, and offense is still our ticket. The real question for me this offseason is not if we are going to focus on defense at the expense of offense as that won't happen until Sumlin is gone. The real question is:

At what point does being a good recruiter not make up for being a poor coach?

From the start Sumlin put a priority on good recruiters, and it brought us a great result last February. But now we are at a point where it doesn't matter how good of a recruiter a Snyder is and his crappy coaching hurts more on the recruiting trail.

Or look at WRs- they are terrible. Dropped balls everywhere. I think I could coach them better. But we can't make a change at that position because our best recruiter coaches WRs. I mean, that is a problem. Can't Beaty have some job that doesn't actually coach? Of course the answer is no because any job like that would be a demotion for him and his career. But the Catch 22 created in that position is a microcosm of the recruiter vs coaching issue that is at the core of where we go from here.