[stupac2]

What works is brilliant, and what doesn't is stupid.

That's the essential problem with these arguments (besides the fact that no one actually tallies up the scores for the liked/didn't like worked/didn't work punnett squares to see if their post hoc impressions are accurate at all). It's really easy to look at a game where nothing worked and say "The playcalling sucked!" But as you run down with MSU, sometimes nothing is working. You can say that's a problem with coaching, and sure, I suppose, but that 2013 team had some serious flaws. Didn't we complete <10 passes to TEs that year? We had no possession receivers who could work the middle, so the gameplan was "run it a bunch and throw deep/screens". It worked okay, and hell, if it weren't for a few bad breaks (that uncatchable PI on Lyons still pisses me off) it would've won that game too! But we didn't get all the breaks we needed, MSU was a really good team, and we lost. Shit happens.

At any rate, literally any coaching staff will have games like that. What the hell happened to the Patriots against the Dolphins a few weeks ago? You like Shanny and Jimmy GQ in SF? Well good thing Shanny doesn't have a history of farting away big games with dumb playcalls! I sure haven't spent this entire NFL offseason seeing postmortems of that, no siree bob. Good thing Nick Saban has never done anything stupid to lose a big game at the last minute, good thing Urban Meyer has never been blown out, and good thing Dabo Swinny never loses to unranked teams. It's just stubborn old David Shaw sitting there with his winning percentage in the same league as those guys with less talent and (most years) a harder schedule, derping away games because he's a dumb-dumb. Yeah, that's the ticket.

[stupac2]

What works is brilliant, and what doesn't is stupid.

That's the essential problem with these arguments (besides the fact that no one actually tallies up the scores for the liked/didn't like worked/didn't work punnett squares to see if their post hoc impressions are accurate at all). It's really easy to look at a game where nothing worked and say "The playcalling sucked!" But as you run down with MSU, sometimes nothing is working. You can say that's a problem with coaching, and sure, I suppose, but that 2013 team had some serious flaws. Didn't we complete <10 passes to TEs that year? We had no possession receivers who could work the middle, so the gameplan was "run it a bunch and throw deep/screens". It worked okay, and hell, if it weren't for a few bad breaks (that uncatchable PI on Lyons still pisses me off) it would've won that game too! But we didn't get all the breaks we needed, MSU was a really good team, and we lost. Shit happens.

At any rate, literally any coaching staff will have games like that. What the hell happened to the Patriots against the Dolphins a few weeks ago? You like Shanny and Jimmy GQ in SF? Well good thing Shanny doesn't have a history of farting away big games with dumb playcalls! I sure haven't spent this entire NFL offseason seeing postmortems of that, no siree bob. Good thing Nick Saban has never done anything stupid to lose a big game at the last minute, good thing Urban Meyer has never been blown out, and good thing Dabo Swinny never loses to unranked teams. It's just stubborn old David Shaw sitting there with his winning percentage in the same league as those guys with less talent and (most years) a harder schedule, derping away games because he's a dumb-dumb. Yeah, that's the ticket.