re: Jimbo can’t coach

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100% agree with this, something needs to improve next year. Maybe losing King was bigger than we thought (who knows) I'm sure we'll find out next year

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Actually I think the better statement would be that losing King was as big as we thought. We lost 3 very close games and one close game. Having a very limited QB hurt badly. Calzada is a tough SOB (whining Insta post aside that was likely responding to LSU trolls) but in the end he can't run, he is terrible at pre-snap reads, and he gets nervous under pressure and has the tiptoe 20 yards behind the LOS habit.

That meant we could not rely on him to run for anything (though he managed a couple of surprising runs ironically in his very limited attempts on scrambles. Thus we could only have a run game focused on running backs with no Read Option. King dramatically changes this.

The lack of pre-read snap ability was even more painful though. It meant that the play called from the sideline had to be the right one because Calzada couldn't see "There are 8 guys in the box and I have 4 wideouts with a RB and the call is a run. Maybe I should audible out of this off tackle run and throw the ball to a WR that is 1 on 1." That was Mond's biggest strength and something Calzada struggles with mightily. If you had King the reads may or may not be better but he has FAR better improvisational ability because of his athleticism.

The tiptoe habit combined with the lock on to WR habit were really tough when combined with those first 2 issues. He improved as the season went on but when he got under pressure like he did with LSU he reverted. You could tell Jimbo was working with him but it's just hard to re-program natural instincts under pressure. We saw enough of King he was an improviser and certainly wasn't afraid of blitzes, if anything he looked at a blitz as an opportunity to run or to make a quick throw. He's a lot more of a gunslinger.

Much of those issues would also have been less had we had a more experienced OL, especially in the early losses. Having a talented but inexperienced OL combined with a QB like Calzada was going to result in an inconsistent offense.

BTW, none of this absolves Jimbo. He's the HC in Year 4 and he owns it. He also owns some tactical errors like "Why didn't we have a LOT more formations with Achane and Spiller on the field at the same time, especially with our lack of WR talent?" Occasionally we would have Smith and one of the RB's but very rarely did we have Achane and Spiller, we saw some of the result with Achane at WR as well against LSU. Why we didn't have them moving all over the place and confusing defenses made no sense. Plenty of other tactics to criticize as well.

In the end though King going down made our path to the Playoff much, much harder and left very little margin for error. We ended up 8-4 which if you look at the predictions after King went down are about where we thought. The surprise is that we beat Bama and lost the 4 games we did but inconsistent QB play will do that.

Sorry for the rational football discussion.