I suppose the question that many of us have been asking ourselves since Coach Petrino got hired is, "what's going to be different this year?" If as Coach Fisher has said, a dig is a dig, an over is an over, and so on, the offense shouldn't differ wildly, should it?! Well, yes and no. For the route tree, I would say both coaches as OCs have comparable route trees, with Petrino having much more timing based reads, but more on that in a second. Let's look a little more deeply into what I mean.
1. Jimbo has doggedly stuck with the "solution based" concepts that worked so well for him early on in his career as an OC. It is heavily reliant on everyone seeing the same things from defenses, from base call to adjustments, to the offensive checks on routes, protections and even the drop from the QB. To everything the defense does, there is a counter. When it works, it works efficiently. Kellen Mond, despite some limitations of his own and some in his receiving corps, proved that. So did Calzada and even King, in their moments. But overall, Jimbo's offense hasn't translated well enough to the modern game. Jimbo's offense's were built on having 2-3 adjustments and those mismatches in his favor most of the time. DCs caught on to him a lot over time. He wasn't fooling them often enough and we simply weren't creating the chunk plays we needed. We depended on on long time consuming drives and limited possessions. Just can't score consistently like that.
2. Enter Coach Petrino. I'll be honest. He drove me nuts watching him call plays on the other sideline at Arkansas. I thought, "this isn't that fancy, why can't we stop them?!" As I watched a lot of the old highlights from those games, you know what I saw?! False steps. We couldn't help ourselves. From safeties to D Linemen, we just couldn't help looking at the eye candy. From motion to misdirection to trap blocks, we just kept buying what he was selling. Over and over, the same deep dig route was completed because our LBs kept biting on the play action. It was more of the same at Louisville, except he had Jackson to torture defenses even more. In the Spring Game, I think being short handed and not wanting to put too much on film played a role in the very vanilla showing. I would expect much more motion, rollouts, bootlegs come the season. I'd also expect a lot variety of calls out of traditional run (12 personnel) or pass (4 wide sets). RPO, I think he'll pick his spots. Bottom line, I believe Petrino wants to Conner to have a shot by making defenses show their hand earlier and that will make him a much more effective QB for us.
Gig'em!
1. Jimbo has doggedly stuck with the "solution based" concepts that worked so well for him early on in his career as an OC. It is heavily reliant on everyone seeing the same things from defenses, from base call to adjustments, to the offensive checks on routes, protections and even the drop from the QB. To everything the defense does, there is a counter. When it works, it works efficiently. Kellen Mond, despite some limitations of his own and some in his receiving corps, proved that. So did Calzada and even King, in their moments. But overall, Jimbo's offense hasn't translated well enough to the modern game. Jimbo's offense's were built on having 2-3 adjustments and those mismatches in his favor most of the time. DCs caught on to him a lot over time. He wasn't fooling them often enough and we simply weren't creating the chunk plays we needed. We depended on on long time consuming drives and limited possessions. Just can't score consistently like that.
2. Enter Coach Petrino. I'll be honest. He drove me nuts watching him call plays on the other sideline at Arkansas. I thought, "this isn't that fancy, why can't we stop them?!" As I watched a lot of the old highlights from those games, you know what I saw?! False steps. We couldn't help ourselves. From safeties to D Linemen, we just couldn't help looking at the eye candy. From motion to misdirection to trap blocks, we just kept buying what he was selling. Over and over, the same deep dig route was completed because our LBs kept biting on the play action. It was more of the same at Louisville, except he had Jackson to torture defenses even more. In the Spring Game, I think being short handed and not wanting to put too much on film played a role in the very vanilla showing. I would expect much more motion, rollouts, bootlegs come the season. I'd also expect a lot variety of calls out of traditional run (12 personnel) or pass (4 wide sets). RPO, I think he'll pick his spots. Bottom line, I believe Petrino wants to Conner to have a shot by making defenses show their hand earlier and that will make him a much more effective QB for us.
Gig'em!
