[BostonCard]

I'm not over crapping on him. For the past five years the clock management has been abysmal. This is something that should be fixed. He needs to recognize this as a shortcoming and come up with a plan to improve upon it.

...Wut? When has this been an issue? Unless you include "burning TOs early to avoid delay of game" in which case that's fair, I suppose, but not really a time management issue.





I think I've made this comparison before, but whenever this topic comes up I'm always reminded of discussions about local politics (and especially BART). There's a lot of griping about problems, but often very little grappling about what causes those problems, if they're fixable, or how the knee-jerk "fire the bums" would actually help. In order to really evaluate performance you need to be able to run counterfactuals, which is impossible here. Sure, there are some isolated cases (such as the above DoG issues, or some cases of incorrect decision-making on 4th down) where you can say "this is objectively the wrong decision", but every coach does that sometimes (this weekend wunderkind Sean McVay kicked a field goal on 4th and inches when it was very obviously the wrong decision!). But in general taking a look at the whole program and evaluating whether we're exceeding, meeting, or failing to meet expectations is difficult-to-impossible for the average uninformed fan unless things are very far off to one side (Walt was terrible, the early part of Shaw's tenure phenomenal).

So what are we to do? Personally I prefer to stick to things where there are very sound arguments for doing it one way (ie always recruit a QB, always fill the scholarships, don't punt on 4th and short from opponent's territory, etc). For one thing those are the spaces where criticism might actually effect change. For another, we can actually have informed discussion about whether the correct decision was made, especially now with the various win probability models, etc. But things like staffing decisions? How many people in here think they can honestly judge whether an OL coach is doing a good job? Could identify a good gameplan for attacking next week's opponent? Is it even one? Sure, there will be cases where long periods of subpar results justify action (KC firing Bob Sutton was pretty justifiable), but are we actually seeing subpar results?

Perhaps I'm excessively cautious. After all, this talk is mostly harmless, it's not like the AD cares about the whiners on message boards. But I do wish people would take a second to think "do I actually know what I'm talking about here?" before posting vitriol. (I also wish I could win the lottery, which actually has a chance of happening.)

I think that's part of why I appreciate this place so much, for the most part opinions are considered. For the most part people do admit that they don't admit everything. It's refreshing.

While it's an over the top complaint (in the list of ten things where there is room for improvement for Shaw, this would rank at or near the bottom), but I think you can fairly point to a couple of circumstances when clock management has been left wanting outside of burned times-out or delays-of-game (which, by the way, if anyone was looking, improved substantially once Costello got some experience).

But you can reasonably complain about substituting during the two minute drill, which burned clock off against UW, and forced a desperation pass from the UW 34 with time running out.  Considering the drive started with 2:05 remaining on the clock, and we only ran 8 plays (plus one spike), I think it is reasonable to conclude that clock management could have been better.  Specifically, there was at least one time when the team substituted with the clock running, resulting in UW being able to substitute and force us to tick precious seconds off the clock.  Looking at the play-by-play, there is a 31 second gap between our second and ten completion to Weddington and our third and one Bryce Love run for first down, a 26 second gap between our first and ten pass from Costello to Love for eight yards and our second down pass to Wilson, and then a 31 second gap between that play and the ensuing first down pass to Weddington (all the worse because the first down paused the game clock while the chains moved).

I think Shaw could have managed that situation better.  But I think the comment decrying the situation was a bit over-the-top.

BC

[BostonCard]

I'm not over crapping on him. For the past five years the clock management has been abysmal. This is something that should be fixed. He needs to recognize this as a shortcoming and come up with a plan to improve upon it.

...Wut? When has this been an issue? Unless you include "burning TOs early to avoid delay of game" in which case that's fair, I suppose, but not really a time management issue.





I think I've made this comparison before, but whenever this topic comes up I'm always reminded of discussions about local politics (and especially BART). There's a lot of griping about problems, but often very little grappling about what causes those problems, if they're fixable, or how the knee-jerk "fire the bums" would actually help. In order to really evaluate performance you need to be able to run counterfactuals, which is impossible here. Sure, there are some isolated cases (such as the above DoG issues, or some cases of incorrect decision-making on 4th down) where you can say "this is objectively the wrong decision", but every coach does that sometimes (this weekend wunderkind Sean McVay kicked a field goal on 4th and inches when it was very obviously the wrong decision!). But in general taking a look at the whole program and evaluating whether we're exceeding, meeting, or failing to meet expectations is difficult-to-impossible for the average uninformed fan unless things are very far off to one side (Walt was terrible, the early part of Shaw's tenure phenomenal).

So what are we to do? Personally I prefer to stick to things where there are very sound arguments for doing it one way (ie always recruit a QB, always fill the scholarships, don't punt on 4th and short from opponent's territory, etc). For one thing those are the spaces where criticism might actually effect change. For another, we can actually have informed discussion about whether the correct decision was made, especially now with the various win probability models, etc. But things like staffing decisions? How many people in here think they can honestly judge whether an OL coach is doing a good job? Could identify a good gameplan for attacking next week's opponent? Is it even one? Sure, there will be cases where long periods of subpar results justify action (KC firing Bob Sutton was pretty justifiable), but are we actually seeing subpar results?

Perhaps I'm excessively cautious. After all, this talk is mostly harmless, it's not like the AD cares about the whiners on message boards. But I do wish people would take a second to think "do I actually know what I'm talking about here?" before posting vitriol. (I also wish I could win the lottery, which actually has a chance of happening.)

I think that's part of why I appreciate this place so much, for the most part opinions are considered. For the most part people do admit that they don't admit everything. It's refreshing.

While it's an over the top complaint (in the list of ten things where there is room for improvement for Shaw, this would rank at or near the bottom), but I think you can fairly point to a couple of circumstances when clock management has been left wanting outside of burned times-out or delays-of-game (which, by the way, if anyone was looking, improved substantially once Costello got some experience).

But you can reasonably complain about substituting during the two minute drill, which burned clock off against UW, and forced a desperation pass from the UW 34 with time running out.  Considering the drive started with 2:05 remaining on the clock, and we only ran 8 plays (plus one spike), I think it is reasonable to conclude that clock management could have been better.  Specifically, there was at least one time when the team substituted with the clock running, resulting in UW being able to substitute and force us to tick precious seconds off the clock.  Looking at the play-by-play, there is a 31 second gap between our second and ten completion to Weddington and our third and one Bryce Love run for first down, a 26 second gap between our first and ten pass from Costello to Love for eight yards and our second down pass to Wilson, and then a 31 second gap between that play and the ensuing first down pass to Weddington (all the worse because the first down paused the game clock while the chains moved).

I think Shaw could have managed that situation better.  But I think the comment decrying the situation was a bit over-the-top.

BC