[stupac2]

I'm not opposed to this theory, in fact I think some of that thinking probably played into game preparation. However, don't you think that by the fourth quarter when it was clear that the game was in serious jeopardy Shaw would have taken off the gloves a little bit? Open up the playbook?

One would think we'd do that, and I think that, in fact, we did. I mentioned it in the game thread with the perimeter runs, they were open all through the first half but they only started to do them in the second, and started getting nice gains. I think that was an example of a thing we hadn't really planned to do but started to do once we had to.

There are two confounding issues here:

1) You're somewhat limited in terms of what plays you can run based on what you practiced. If WiM's hypothesis is correct, we probably ran only our base plays. Sure, we had practiced stuff earlier, but if everything's going haywire do you really want to call something you haven't ran in a month?

2) Chryst was really playing like garbage all night. There's only so much you can do when a QB plays that poorly. It's conceivable that we would've had more success literally only running the ball, but all it takes is one stuff or holding call and suddenly you more-or-less have to throw. When the QB can't...

Anyway, I think that this is partly true. I think it's likely that the coaches were treating this somewhat like a glorified scrimmage, like we did the Rice game, given that ORST appeared to be barely better than Rice. But without Love and with half the team forgetting how to play, it didn't work. We shouldn't do that.

[stupac2]

I'm not opposed to this theory, in fact I think some of that thinking probably played into game preparation. However, don't you think that by the fourth quarter when it was clear that the game was in serious jeopardy Shaw would have taken off the gloves a little bit? Open up the playbook?

One would think we'd do that, and I think that, in fact, we did. I mentioned it in the game thread with the perimeter runs, they were open all through the first half but they only started to do them in the second, and started getting nice gains. I think that was an example of a thing we hadn't really planned to do but started to do once we had to.

There are two confounding issues here:

1) You're somewhat limited in terms of what plays you can run based on what you practiced. If WiM's hypothesis is correct, we probably ran only our base plays. Sure, we had practiced stuff earlier, but if everything's going haywire do you really want to call something you haven't ran in a month?

2) Chryst was really playing like garbage all night. There's only so much you can do when a QB plays that poorly. It's conceivable that we would've had more success literally only running the ball, but all it takes is one stuff or holding call and suddenly you more-or-less have to throw. When the QB can't...

Anyway, I think that this is partly true. I think it's likely that the coaches were treating this somewhat like a glorified scrimmage, like we did the Rice game, given that ORST appeared to be barely better than Rice. But without Love and with half the team forgetting how to play, it didn't work. We shouldn't do that.