11-09-2018, 09:42 AM
In the aftermath of the election (I swear this won't be meaningfully political) I've seen a lot of people lamenting that Oakland's mayor, Libby Schaff, was reelected. After all, they say, Oakland has a lot of problems and in her four years they haven't all been fixed. When asked why they wanted someone new, how that would actually help, I never see a response.
I tend to think that playcalling criticisms are largely meaningless, for reasons the author indicates, but it's sort of frustrating to tell people that you have to be an expert in something to actually meaningfully criticize it (even if that's something we all very eagerly understand in our areas of expertise, don't even get me started on the people talking about quantum mechanics who couldn't tell a Hamiltonian from a ham sandwich). Those frustrations, though, aren't necessarily meaningful. As WiM points out ad nauseam, how many playcallers have gone from obvious idiots to hot new things? Kyle Shannahan was widely derided in his first year with the Falcons, now he's one of the toasts of the NFL. His replacement, our good old friend Steve Sarkesian, was, again, widely derided early on, but has turned it around and I've been seeing plenty of talk about how he's calling great games now. Has anything actually changed in their approaches? Or is it players executing better? Or any of the myriad things that can cause an offense to appear to underperform.
The one exception in my mind is run/pass ratio. Now obviously you can still say the things about failures to check into the right play, but runs and passes are fundamentally different, and it's easier to examine them from a macro perspective. It's not easy, but easier.
I tend to think that playcalling criticisms are largely meaningless, for reasons the author indicates, but it's sort of frustrating to tell people that you have to be an expert in something to actually meaningfully criticize it (even if that's something we all very eagerly understand in our areas of expertise, don't even get me started on the people talking about quantum mechanics who couldn't tell a Hamiltonian from a ham sandwich). Those frustrations, though, aren't necessarily meaningful. As WiM points out ad nauseam, how many playcallers have gone from obvious idiots to hot new things? Kyle Shannahan was widely derided in his first year with the Falcons, now he's one of the toasts of the NFL. His replacement, our good old friend Steve Sarkesian, was, again, widely derided early on, but has turned it around and I've been seeing plenty of talk about how he's calling great games now. Has anything actually changed in their approaches? Or is it players executing better? Or any of the myriad things that can cause an offense to appear to underperform.
The one exception in my mind is run/pass ratio. Now obviously you can still say the things about failures to check into the right play, but runs and passes are fundamentally different, and it's easier to examine them from a macro perspective. It's not easy, but easier.