re: Kirby Smart's Offseason Checklist

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1. Fire Coley

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Kirby is not going to fire Coley. He will be our OC next year (unfortunately).

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This will be an unpopular opinion but I think Kirby has already peaked as HC at the University of Georgia. Recruiting appears to already be eroding on the strength of big game losses where coaching was the obvious weakness. Unless he is willing to change his philosophy and become a CEO type with great coordinators, UF or (don’t laugh) UT will win the east next year and what we will have going forward is a defensive minded, edgier version of Richt. Did we fire a 10 win a year coach for an 11 win a year coach that still can’t win the big one? Only time will tell.

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Every coach has to reinvent what he’s doing every few years or they turn into Mark Richt/Les Miles/Gus Mahlzan

1. Simmons and Landers need to go to the scout team. They both have hands of stone. LSU could have let them run their routes uncontested and they still would have dropped the pass. Jake could have handed the ball to them and they would drop it.

2. Move the offense into the 21st century. The days of running between the tackles is done.

3, Find an OC and OL coach that can recruit as good as Pittman.

4. Be prepared to go 8-4 next season.

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was hated I mean hated worse by our fanbase

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Same with Bobo

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Simmons and Landers need to go to the scout team. They both have hands of stone. LSU could have let them run their routes uncontested and they still would have dropped the pass. Jake could have handed the ball to them and they would drop it

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Isnt simmons a senior? Non offseason issue. Dont write off landers. He cant catch, but if he makes improvement, he is an athlete who can run any route (assuming he learns his responsibilities).

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Find an OC and OL coach that can recruit as good as Pittman.

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Umm. Maybe hire ed orgeron for OL coach? I dont think there is a better recruiter at OL than Pittman. Kirby needs to find a best available though. NFL pedigree would help here if the right fit is available.

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Be prepared to go 8-4 next season.

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Defense will be more talented next season. We just need an offense that can effectively pass to give our OL a chance in the run game. Huge opportunities for WR/TE (both freshmen and transfers) next year.

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It sure is interesting to watch the guy who brags about seeing the big picture struggle to see such a big part of the picture:

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I don't think you understand the big picture which is why you think that those missed throws are the "most glaring" problem we have.

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Fromm consistently missing on 7 points is a major problem.

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It is a problem. It's even a major problem in our current offense and with our season-long offensive struggles. This goes back to what I've said all season that our overall dysfunction on offense highlights those misses. If we were consistently moving the ball, picking up first downs, and scoring points, Fromm's misses would be minor annoyances more than anything. The reason why those misses have been so major is because good drives have been scarce, especially in the second half of the season. It's why context is important. Because our offense sucks overall, each Fromm miss hurts us more than if our offense didn't suck overall. The same can be said about our receivers not doing their jobs, as well.

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Contrary to your claims, It is worthy of the criticism it has received. It is an appropriate and rational point to make.

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Not in relation to the other issues we've had, no. We've had these heated discussions about Fromm/Fields all season, but rarely have I see threads created throughout the season blasting our WRs for their play. Those comments have been tertiary to the QB discussions. And it's certainly a rational point to make that Fromm has been inconsistent. My issue hasn't been that criticism but the lack of root cause analysis that has been performed to try to understand the inconsistency. There are several reasons why a QB can miss the mark that go well beyond him simply being a mediocre QB, which is the general consensus by the peanut gallery.

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I know it’s not the only problem with our offense, but it’s the most glaring. It’s certainly the easiest one to quantify.

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Not exactly. It's not the most glaring issue by a long shot and it's certainly not the easiest, either, though it is easy to quantify. You can quantify issues all over the place, yet Fromm's misses have been the ones getting the most attention.

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It’s also the easiest one to assign blame to, which is likely your main problem with it. Your emotional attachment to Fromm is real and it’s a problem. It explains why you seem to be the only one ignorant or clueless enough to constantly try to downplay its negative impact on a game, an offense, a season, a program.

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Incorrect on every front. First, there are a lot of easy things to assign blame to. We've dropped passes all season and our receivers not getting separation is obvious and can be observed, to name two things. Secondly, the fact that it's easy to blame Fromm for those passes is not something I have a problem with at all. For the ones that are obvious that it's entirely on Fromm, I've been happy to call him out as I've done in game threads for the entire length of his college career. The obvious missed throws are actually very easy to diagnose and assign blame.

I say "obvious", though, because some aren't so obvious, which you still don't seem to get. Sometimes the reason why a ball sails 10 yards passed a receiver is due to the receiver being held or interfered with. Sometimes it is because the receiver ran a bad route and didn't end up where the ball was placed. And yes, sometimes it's just obvious that the QB made a bad throw, which are the "obvious" ones I'm talking about and which I have no problem calling out.

I have no emotional attachment to Fromm. I like him as a person and I'm appreciative of what he's done for our team, so much so that I'm not as quick to assume blame when blame isn't obvious. He's done well for us for two seasons and maturity for a player like him should only help him improve, not regress, so the conventional wisdom hasn't matched the output on the field, which gives me reason to pause and analyze rather than assume he just sucks, as some here think.

I'm not being ignorant or downplaying Fromm by himself. I'm talking about Fromm within the greater context, which you still seem to be ignoring. As I've done plenty of times, when Fromm makes a bad play, I see it for what it is. However when he's been "bad" all season, I'm not willing to assign him complete and total blame like you have no problem doing because I know there's more to the game than mere statistics. It's why I've called out the WR group so much. You might not like the fact that our QB is a pocket passer with limited mobility but that hasn't been a huge problem for us before this season when we had the tools in place to be successful with such a QB.

Bottom line is that I know a lot about football, though there is always more to learn. I know that there is a lot more to the game than what we see on the field and there are a lot of moving parts that must work together for a team to be successful. Everyone contributes to the success or failure of a football team and I'm not willing to downplay the overarching themes of our failures on offense because it's easy to judge the QB in a vacuum.

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Fields doing so well has only made it more frustrating, and Kirby deserves heat for that decision. Hope he learns from it.

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CKS deserves no heat for Fields' decision to leave, IMO. It was a bad situation we were in where Fromm was good enough to start and Fields wasn't ready yet didn't want to wait and gamble. It sucks but situations like that happen. Hell, Hurts is playing in the playoffs while Tua is sitting at home injured. It certainly is frustrating that Fields left the team but it's not as cut and dried as you're making it out to be regarding bad decision making by CKS. Just like Fromm isn't alone with our offensive struggles this season, CKS isn't alone in the outcome of Fields transferring.

We adapted. That failed as well.

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You cant understand the big picture while downplaying a big part of the big picture.

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Understanding the big picture is necessary to know which aspects to downplay or focus on. You've got this backwards: you are judging the big picture based on specific aspects of it rather than looking at everything holistically first and then making judgements.

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Consistently missing open tds will never be a minor annoyance. Its always been one of the most important plays in football. Thats why Each miss is painful.

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Again, you're missing the big picture. If our offense is more successful moving the ball, we don't have to rely on the big plays as much, making each miss annoying but not critical to our success.

Yes, it's a big deal to miss a wide open receiver, but Fromm actually hasn't missed many of those. He's missed on several low-percentage passes this season, and some of those likely would have resulted in TDs. That's the nature of football, though, which is why those throws are considered low-percentage, meaning that they aren't successful most of the time for most QBs.

You ignored my point, though. The felt pain of those missed throws has been exasperated by the lack of consistency in production and scoring. If we're scoring 40+ points a game, we wouldn't care so much if Fromm missed a TD throw here or there because our offense wouldn't need every one of those throws in order to be successful. We feel it more acutely because we have to rely on those low-percentage throws (which is the majority of the ones you're saying he's consistently missing) to have success on offense because of our struggles to move the ball down the field with regularity. Dropping and losing $20 bill is felt more by the poor man than the rich man.

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As they should. Missing 7 points on 1 play, especially from a distance, is a big deal in the grand scheme big picture.

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You're wrong. You'd be right if those misses were the only things we were doing wrong on offense, but they weren't. We've had dysfunction from many places all season, and missing 7 points in a high-scoring game isn't as painful or important as missing in a low-scoring game. You have to ask yourself why our offense was in such a position this season to rely on those low-percentage throws for TDs. What changed between last season and this season?

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Not really. Drops on good and open passes have been very limited, and I cant recall one that cost us 7 points. We have had trouble bringing in well defended or poorly placed balls, but thats on the Dbs and QB more than the Wr.

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I don't think you really understand what WRs are tasked with doing. You seem to think that all a WR has to do is hold his hands out and that the QB is supposed to hit him in those hands every time and that the WR will always catch them. We've had drop all season where the balls were right on target. You could argue we lost the USCe game because of that INT in OT where a well placed ball simply bounced off the receivers hands.

WRs are supposed to run their routes and catch the balls that are thrown there way. Many times the QBs can't throw the ball right between the numbers because the defenders can get them. Sometimes the QBs are going to be inaccurate from 40 yards away so WRs will need to adjust and make a play. Sometimes the DBs are going to try to make a play and the WRs need to use their hands and bodies to catch the ball while blocking out the DBs. WRs need to run good routes so that the timing doesn't get thrown off. They need to know how to position themselves to get leverage on the defenders. There is much more to the passing game than simply throwing a perfect pass and it's unrealistic to expect perfect throws on every passing down; it's why players like AJ Green get paid so much money.

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Your efforts in these non game threads indicate otherwise. Hell, in the SECCG game thread, you tried to downplay him miss to Robertson, which was all fromm, because Simmons missed an earlier pass. Thats an exampel as to how bias can affect analysis. That QB coach of Fromm's looks like an idiot right now. Like him, You arent objective at all when it comes to fromm.

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You're wrong. My statements about D. Rob not catching that ball were in relation to the ball that Simmons dropped prior to that play. It wasn't a good throw, though it was a catchable ball. My point was that instead of putting the entire blame of that busted drive on the throw to D. Rob like you and others were more than happy to do, the context showed that fault lied all over the field, including with Simmons who dropped a near-perfect pass to start the game. If Simmons catches that ball, the pass to D. Rob doesn't even happen.

My statements weren't due to my own bias but your own bias, and those who were quick to blame Fromm for the lack of success on that drive while forgetting about the critical play that happened a minute before. My emphasis was in reaction to anti-Fromm bias.

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Those are the ones I speak of. You always deflect them in an effort to defend fromm.

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Not at all. A bad throw is a bad throw, but the problem we have here is defining what constitutes a bad throw. Sometimes a ball is placed imperfectly on purpose to lower the likelihood of being intercepted. Sometimes what looks like a bad throw is actually the WR not running his route correctly. I've gone through this too many times to count. It's only the ones where the route was run well and the timing was there and the receiver was wide open but the ball was misplaced that really falls under this category to me, and there aren't a lot of those throws to speak of but when it's obvious that it occurs, I say so.

You want to lump in the Herrien throw (even conceding the wet ball), for example, with a ball that was 6 inches out of reach 40 yards down field with two defenders on the heels of the receiver. Those aren't the same.

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Then its an effort attachment. You have invested a lot of time into Fromm doing well.

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Again, not true. I also made several videos of Justin Fields last season at the request of others. I'd do it with other players and even our defense if I had the time. I've spent the time to make those videos even when I didn't want to re-watch the game, like the '17 Auburn game (version 1) or the LSU game from last season. I enjoy the hobby of doing it, but because I have spent the time, I have watched Fromm's throws more than the casual observer so I know what I'm looking at.

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Of course there is, but the problem is you choose to give Fromm the benefit of this doubt, even when there is no indication its worthy of such benefit. Even at times when its more likely on the QB. You wouldn't do this without a strong commitment to Fromm.

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Fromm does deserve the benefit of the doubt due to the circumstances that surround him, which I've covered ad nauseam, regarding his prior two seasons of good play and the WR turnover we've had.

It's what I was talking about with the bigger picture. You are looking at our offense like everything is fine but the QB and it's the QB that is causing all of our problems in spite of his success the past two seasons with more seasoned WRs. So yes, Fromm deserves the benefit of the doubt given his history and the lack of a consistent supporting cast around him. He also deserves criticism when he doesn't play up to the standard that he's set, but you can't ignore the fact that an offensive unit is still a unit that requires several pieces to work together for it to be successful.

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Kirby has already peaked as HC

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he has. we all thought he was a great recruiter, and likely still is, but not stellar. He´s not able to deliver on his promises.

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dynamic athletic QB's in innovative wide-open offenses

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I think he captured Fields with this idea, but never followed through (nor had any intention to, nor any idea how to).