What to expect from Jimbo (from an FSU fan)

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OFFENSE

Jimbo's offense can be ELITE. Not just good, but elite, with a big IF on having the right pieces to properly run it. It's crazy to think that a pro-style offense is the minority in college football. I don't know if ya'll have realized it (see my usage of “ya'll”!??), but numbers likely say the majority (maybe 65-75%) of college programs run a wide open spread attack now, most with a dual threat QB. NOT the case with Jimbo. He runs a pro-style offense that at times is honestly the most beautiful thing to watch in college football (I know that's my bias, but as the years go on, I think it will soon be yours). When Jimbo gets into a flow, and his offense has momentum, there are very few teams in CFB that can stop it. This is because it is not only a minority (i.e., defensive coordinators spend the majority of their weeks preparing for other teams that run the spread), but also because it is pretty complex, and therefore hard on both the opposing players and D coordinators.

I say his offense can be elite with a big IF, because that IF is sometimes all that matters. IF his offense has the right pieces, it will be excellent. By that, I mean IF he has a QB who can understand it and run it properly, you can expect big things. Jimbo will call all the plays, and is a former QB himself (and a pretty successful one if you look it up), so he expects a lot from his QBs. They are the centerpiece of his offense. While Jameis was and is amazing (yes, get over it, he is amazing; his 8,000+ passing yards in his first two seasons is the most of any QB in NFL History), me and my buddy used to say that Jameis was simply the best medium to make Jimbo's offense run properly. Not sure if you know this, but the 2013 FSU team, get this...scored the most points...in COLLEGE FOOTBALL HISTORY. I'll repeat that. In the history of College football, no team scored more points than did the 2013 Seminoles. And here's the thing - they didn't run hurry up, and they didn't run Jameis often. It was simply the fact that Jimbo's offense was that good. If you get someone who can run Jimbo's offense correctly (and don't forget that Grant Gunnell, a coveted 5-star QB recruit who Jimbo has loved for years while at FSU, is signed with the Aggies), you will see a legit, big time offense.

Of course, nothing is perfect, so with Jimbo's elite offense, comes some cons. For starters, there will be a learning curve by all players. The offense isn't simply, 'know the plays and execute.' Jimbo prefers linemen to zone block with different schemes depending on the play, he prefers wide receivers to play the defenders rather than just run specific routes based on the play call, and he expects a hell of a lot from his QB (call out the mike, call out blitzes, check down to different plays, etc.). Any single play can feature any number of players making a number of different decisions. While this seems great, there's a major problem - if some of the players don't understand it, Jimbo won't trust them in the offense, and therefore won't play them, nor have them featured in the offense. There have been countless times when Seminole fans have screamed, "I don't care if he's not running the right route, or not understanding the offense! Just run a play that guarantees the 5-star WR get the ball, and let him do 5-star work on lesser talent!!" Nope. Seminole fans have watched a number of talented WRs go to waste. The Seminoles have an extraordinarily low number of WRs drafted (something like 2 in the last 7 years), and that has been used against them in recruiting. Some will argue that Jimbo is overly loyal to our current WR coach, and has kept him on staff even though he couldn't properly teach the offense to the WRs. But there's still the argument that Jimnbo himself could simply call plays that are specifically designed to get the best person on the field the ball. Jimbo will NOT do that - he will stubbornly run his offense, and run it with those who can best understand it.

And with that comes another con. Jimbo is stubborn and traditional, sometimes to annoyance. He will not run the QB that much (if at all) even though it will often serve as a major advantage. And perhaps most annoying is his unwillingness to go for it on 4th down, even though the numbers say it is beneficial. Here's a quote from TomahawkNation - "FSU has only attempted 50 fourth downs from 2010-present. That is dead last in the nation, and it’s not close. The next-closest team is LSU, with 74. That’s an incredible 48% increase from last to second-to-last. All other FBS teams have 90+ attempts in that span." Those stats are outright ridic.

The argument against this is that there is still the success rate stat, and overall without looking it up, I think Jimbo’s offenses have pretty good success rate numbers. More importantly, you can't deny what matters most is that Jimbo wins games. How he does it however, may be a bit frustrating. Jimbo plays the game in the moment. He will not look bigger picture, nor look to run any given play for the sake of it; rather, he is likely to hone in on the game's particular situation. This sometimes leads to pure frustration. If the team is playing poorly against Wake Forest, for example and finds itself up by 7 later in the game, Jimbo will play the situation, and protect the 7 point lead to win the game, rather than just running his regular offense (e.g., 3 runs to run the clock, and a punt to trust his defense). This is cool in that he wins games, but I GUARANTEE you there will be times when the Aggies will beat a team like Vanderbilt by 5, and people will be mad, saying "The game shouldn’t have been a nail bitter! We have so much more talent, we should have blown them out!!" That's not how Jimbo operates - he operates to play the situation and win the game. You may remember this back in the 2014 season, when the Noles went on a spree of barley eeking out wins, to the point where the playoff committee invented the “game control” stat which ended up hurting the Noles (*eye roll emoji). In the end, the outcome was an undefeated regular season, and no one would trade that for anything. But the argument can be made that if not for a few lucky breaks, the 14’ season could have featured 3-4 losses. [***Side note if you're an optimist: it is interesting to look at this from the converse as well. From around 2012 - 2016, Fisher has had 2 huge losses (Oregon and Louisville), but other than those, you can go back and see that the majority (if not all) of his losses come by a touchdown or less, meaning that if not for a few unlucky breaks we’d be looking at a massively impressive record from Fisher.]

To end this offensive stuff on a positive note, I'll throw out one more pro. Jimbo HAMMERS home his complex offense to QBs. As such, they are WELL prepared for NFL concepts. Aside from Jameis (#1 overall draft pick), don't forget that EJ Manuel and Christian Ponder were drafted in the first round, and that Jamarcus Russell (Jimbo's QB at LSU) was also number one overall. Why? Because Jimbo's offense is more complex than some NFL offenses (that's not hyperbole, that's true. It's been noted that Jameis has come out and said the Buccaneers playbook was more simplistic than FSU's). When Jimbo's QBs go on that Gruden show, or draw things out on the whiteboard for NFL teams, it's pretty straightforward for them; they have been doing it for Jimbo for at least 3 years. This then leads to attractive recruiting - there's some kind of stat out there that shows how many millions of dollars Jimbo's QBs have made from the NFL, and it dwarfs any other coach/team.

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Jimbo will not only never cancel a practice, but his players will find themselves in a heap of shite if he finds out they consider not having practice a good thing. I tell this story because it's representative of the hard nose type of coach Jimbo is. He's not necessarily an outright hard arse to the media by any means, but damn does he take his football seriously (see the countless times he will grab a QB by the face-mask and SCREAM at him). If you watched Hard Knocks this year, there's a clip of Bobo Wilson, dissing his own NFL team's practice, saying "at Florida State, we compete". It's a whole scene, but he's essentially saying his practices at FSU were more intense than an NFL team's practices. This too is representative of the type of hard nosed football you’ll see from Jimbo.

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Sooo.... from a pot banger (NAggy? perspective we are getting a guy who refuses to tailor his system to what he has, can't adjust if things aren't working, runs a glacial pace offense, somehow can't get WRs into the NFL when he has been recruiting in Florida, is conservative with his game management to a fault, will move us to a 3-4 that we are in no way prepared to run, stocks his coaching staff with buddies he refuses to fire, and will give us even less information than Sumlin typically did while peppering his pressers with life lessons from Jack Handy!

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i'm not gonna lie, this is a VERY impressive glass half-empty take!

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