Does This Scheme Work Against Elite Defenses?

When we hired CKD the concept was that we were bringing in one of the most elite offensive minds in the nation.

We were in theory going to evolve as a program into a team that would stress defenses like Kirby using vertical passing concepts and start out scoring teams like we did from Kiffin on under Saban.

The problem is that even setting aside the Milroe era which I don’t blame on him really it hasn’t happened thus far against similar tier teams with top 15 defenses:

2026
UGA: 17
TN: 10

2025
UGA: 24
UGA: 7
OU: 21
OU: 34
IU: 3

Granted, 2025 had major OL issues and an injury at QB. Neither of those factors exist in 2026.

My hope is that two subpar gameplans caused what had been an ultra elite offense to temporarily break and we can adjust and become a team that can score at a level at which you can win games against elite competition.

But I’m starting to question if this systems base concepts just don’t work against defenses of the caliber we see a couple times a year. The same 3 move routes that created explosives against mediocre defenses get you sacked in elite matchups because they take too long.

If we aren’t going to gameplan to take what teams give us and we can’t force our concepts to work against what they’re doing we have what amounts to an offense that isn’t going to scale against elite teams and that’s a huge problem without a peak Saban era defense.