Gary Danielson says Eason wasn't the issue....

I totally disagree. We have good TEs. HA! Erroneous, Gary.

LOL, Hopefully we have some playmakers at receiver this year.

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Well that's way off.

...it's like 7 or 8 other positions.

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This. TE was just fine. Slot receiver was a strength, though of course IMac is gone. Improvement at RB was not needed. Certainly not a bad thing to get Nick a year further removed from the injury and Sony not playing on a recently broken arm, but those guys weren't the problem last year. I think most have been pretty fair in the assessment that it was a combination of the following:


Freshman QB starting :: Blame goes to Eason, but honestly he did about what you'd expect.

WR corps :: One thing that really hurts a freshman QB is when they do everything right and it still doesn't get you the result you want. Critical drops did nothing to help reinforce Eason doing the right things...

Shotty OL :: I'll put this one mostly on talent, but partially on coaching as well. You had guys who simply were ill equipped to handle the position they were in, but it was compounded by an approach that said "hey it's ok if you suck at this, we're going to do it anyways..." At some point, you do have to adjust to say what *can* we do with the talent we've got here.

Poor play calling/offensive approach :: Blame Chaney... seriously. Some atrocious offensive play calling throughout the season, never seeming to account for deficiencies and rarely able to make defenses pay for loading the box. Going to have to be better this season in order to make all of the above concerns better. It wasn't what was predicted by many Arky/UT fans, in the "abandon the run game when it's working" sense, but the hell if anyone could find a rational fan who agreed with his approach more often than not. Pretty sure we could have had Kirby's kids out there with a Playstation dialing up offensive plays and been more successful. "You know what would be great here? A third flea flicker in a row... that'll fool 'em."

40/40/20 IMO, Freshman Eason, Weak OL and Chaney all contributed to our Offensive woes last year...

This year should pinpoint any issues that are out there...

Eason was inconsistent, but showed a ton of promise as a freshmen. It hurt having a miserable offensive line and no receivers who actually use their hands to catch the ball.

Eason was the least of our problems. The line play was abysmal and the receivers weren't much better. Dropped passes, poor routes, poor blocking, and poor separation. Danielson is right.

Eason has to get better, but if the line and receivers don't play any better than they played last year, it's not going to matter. Tight ends were good, but Chaney didn't use them enough. The two areas Eason must improve on are accuracy and hitting the check down when nothing is open.

Danielson is contradicting himself. I like his commentary, but he's contradicting himself here.

If you sit in the pocket for 4 seconds and don't throw the ball, you will make any line look bad...

Ummmm Chubb and Michael are probably the best tandem of running backs in the league. Bet Bobo wouldn't have struggled with a competent game plan with them alone. Our problem last year was play calling. Run up the middle, between the tackles, on first and second down then pass on third. If we didn't have a first down we punted. Chaneys fat arse was the problem. OL wasn't good but he couldn't/ didn't ever attempt to come up with a scheme to assist our lack of OL talent. We may not have had a deep threat like AJ Green but WR's have to catch the ball, it's hard when it's 3rd and 12+ yards and the defense is pinning their ears back. Gary is a clown. Wish he would have retired with Vern.

ETA: when we tried throwing the ball, Eason would over/ under throw receivers. No reason we didn't win 10 games last year with our schedule.

I don't necessarily disagree with your post but much of the reason our play calling was so vanilla is the fact we had a true freshman at QB and our line struggled learning the blocking scheme. When CSP and CJC simplified the scheme we saw some improvements. Granted it's the coach's job to recognize the trouble with the execution of the scheme and adapt. That probably took too long to happen.

Also, Eason definitely missed his receivers at times but, in his defense, the receivers often struggled to create separation and dropped tons of passes.

Our problems can't be simplified to one specific thing. The coaching, play calling, poor line play, receivers' failure to create separation/dropping balls, and Eason's accuracy/decision making all played a role in our ineptitude.

Trying to solely place the blame on any one of those issues is pointless because the all played a role.

I have confidence that, if the oline can improve/master the scheme CSP wants to run and receivers can get open/catch the ball, we will see better play from Eason and CJC will improve his play calling because he will have confidence in opening up the playbook.