12-29-2017, 12:32 PM
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As for Costello not keeping, it would be pretty strange for the coaches to call a read option but say "don't read the DE, just hand it off." That's... not the point of calling the read option. It could be happening, sure, but I don't think our coaches are idiots.
To me the offense in the second half just demonstrated that Costello is a first-year starter, whose practice time as the #1 guy as limited to a few weeks in the season. He missed some plays that an experienced guy makes. He made some bad throws that he's fully capable of making. He read some coverages wrong. He didn't really know what to do against TCU's blitzes. Now, could our coaches just be failing to teach him this stuff? Again, I suppose it's possible that we've been one of the best teams in the country over the past 7 years despite our coaches not knowing how to teach fundamental football, but it strikes me as improbable. Most likely we're just seeing a guy playing a really good defense in his 7th start of his career making the mistakes you expect a guy to make in that situation.
If I were going to have a gripe with our gameplan it would be running our jumbo packages on standard downs, which we did a few times early in the game. It didn't work at all and I'm not sure why the coaching staff thought it would (I can only assume they saw something on film, because, again, they're not idiots). But they realized that it wasn't working and stopped doing it and we scored a bunch despite Costello's limitations. I find it hard to pin this on them.
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How many of those seven years of success had Andrew Luck or Kevin Hogan at the helm? Those were two QBs with innate abilities to compete and win and that Shaw was unable to enhance or improve upon. His record with any other QB is mediocre at best,