—Washington QB Jake Locker might switch positions while his thumb heals (6-8 weeks). I don’t like that idea. I know he wants to help the team, but he’s just too valuable to the Huskies to put him at risk of further injury.
—What is the deal with refs refusing to call safeties? First, there was the horrible non-call in the Cal-Maryland game a couple weeks ago and then another one in the Michigan State-Indiana game last Saturday. In each case, the defense clearly stopped the ball carrier before the nose of the ball hit the goal line.
It’s almost as if refs measure the gravitational pull around the football and determine that as long as its magnetic boundary extends to the goal line, then the ball has safely crossed the plain. Or maybe they measure the ball’s aura. I don’t know.
Why are refs so gun shy? What is the danger of a safety? Is it because safeties are potentially such huge momentum changers? I agree, but to NOT call a safety when it definitely happened can change momentum as well.
We need more safeties for other reasons, too, as it gives the SEC a chance to have those baseball-type shootouts that we all love to fall asleep to.
—Bad Tedford! Why would you even think of replacing Riley with Longshore? Bad! Bad!
—Austin Murphy elegantly reveals why we shouldn’t be surprised by Oregon State’s win over USC. I can’t believe I only picked the Beavers with the points. Especially after thinking that Oregon State would beat Penn State earlier in the season. Why don’t I just stick with my gut? I knew OSU had something…
—I just love every-week-in-the-regular-season-is-a-playoff-in-college-football polemics and Tony Barnhart does it as good as anyone.
—Just a thought: I think we were able to find a way to adequately measure two coaches against one another recently. In this case, I’m talking how Jim Tressel is much smarter than Mack Brown.
Main piece of evidence: The use of Vince Young vs. the use of Terrell Pyor.
Under Brown, Young was forced to redshirt and then sit most of the next season due to slowness in picking up the offense. One of the guys playing in place of Young was the great Chance Mock. By his third season at Texas, Brown realized that he’d better shape the offense to Young’s talents (not vice versa) or he might be out of a job, or at least permanently confined to the 10-2 gulag he had created for himself. The result of that decision? Uh, transformational player, 11-1 and 13-0, with a national title. But what if he had been given a shot earlier? How much better would he have been by year three with starter’s minutes under his belt? Does Texas win that 2004 title?
Meanwhile, Tressel has not made the same mistake and is already starting the guy who is, to me, as close to Vince Young as you can get. Pryor has already showed rapid improvement and I’m sure by the end of the season he’ll be pretty dang good. By the time Pryor takes his first snap against USC in 2009, he might be the best player in college football. Ohio State is not going to win the national title this year, so take your lumps now and then go terrorize everyone for the next two or three years. Sounds like a plan!
So, established: Tressel is smarter than Brown. Hope you all can breathe easier knowing that.
—HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!! Help me…can’t. stop. laughing.
Tressel would have never started Pryor if not for the stink raised by the Bucks and Boeckmann against USC. Tressel may be good, but this is not a good example you’ve taken.
Another reason Tressel isn’t so smart is because he has Mack Brown’s example to follow.
It’s a LOT easier to be the second guy in a “Me Too” strategy.
Your glossing over the Mack Brown/VY issue. It was nowhere near that simple. Had VY started earlier, he probably would have ended up as a wide receiver. Midway through the 04/05 season people in Austin were still calling for Vince to change positions. If he had gotten an earlier start, had less time to pick up the offense and build confidence in himself and his teammates, he might not have been the same player. I say might because I can’t see parallel universes like you can apparently.
Tressel is also smarter because he rotated Justin Zwick and Troy Smith in and out of the 2005 Texas-Ohio State game. Oh…wait…
The point is, Tressel has handled having this kind of guy at QB better. The fact that someone thinks Vince Young was on the verge of being moved to WR only proves how foolish Brown was at the time.
Your throwing words like foolish around pretty casually. Lets look at this a little more in depth.
The year VY red shirted Texas had been a fairly typical pro-style under center offense for Mack Brown’s tenure. The zone read was in the vocabulary of high school coaches and a hand full of 3nd and 3rd tier teams. Texas had Chris Simms at qb. He was certainly not the best qb Texas ever had, but he was better than Todd Boeckman is. Texas also had arguably its best receiving core in school history with Roy Williams, BJ Johnson, and Sloan Thomas. Cedric Benson was in the backfield and was actually good against college players. VY was 18 years old and was an incredible athlete, but an extremely raw passer. Mack put the best team on the field and put Texas in the best position to win. Texas went 11-2 that year with losses to OU and at Texas Tech. They went on to demolish a Saban lead LSU team in the Cotton Bowl. That LSU team is essentially the same team that went on to win the crystal football in 2003. The reason Texas won that game was because Roy Williams and Chris Simms were on the same page and both had monster days.
Moving onto VY’s red shirt season. Chance Mock was the starter to begin the season, but poor play, and a loss to Arkansas early on lead to split snaps between Mock and VY. After an embarrassing blowout by OU, VY took over full-time his RED SHIRT FRESHMAN SEASON. Chance Mock made apperances only 2 more times that season: on a 2 minute, game winning drive against Texas Tech, and in the 2nd half in the bowl game against Washington State. In the bowl game, VY was pulled at the half because he played terribly. All in all, Vince’s first year as a starter left Texas fans with mixed feelings. He had potential, but he wasn’t lighting the world on fire yet. He was also still a liability as a passer. That is the season that compares most directly with this years Buckeyes team. Think of the pounding by USC as compared to the pounding Texas took by OU.
Looking at VY’s RS sophomore year, there were still huge doubts until late in the season. Everybody remembers the Texas-Michigan Rose Bowl, but fail to mention how poorly Vince played earlier in the season. Texas fans will point to the Texas Tech or Oklahoma State game as the turning point in VY’s career, but I want to point out the 2nd to last game of that season. Trailing late in the 4th quarter to Kansas (before they were anywhere near good) Texas faced a 4th and 18. VY ended up running and getting the yards. Ask any Texas fan and they will tell you that they were praying that Vince didn’t throw the ball. Even at that point he still far from polished, and far from making good reads down the field.
If you want to say that Pryor is farther along at this point, thats fine, I probably agree. But making the comparison that you did is a little silly. The situations are different, the players are different, hell, in the age of parity, the game is different. Consider a hypothetical. If Pryor had gone to college a year earlier and been on last years Ohio State team, do you think he would have seen a single snap? I don’t think so.
And to your point about “handling this kind of quarterback better,” I will again point to Troy Smith. He was a serious running threat until his senior season, when he mysteriously stopped running. Some will chalk that up to Smith wanting to prove to NFL scouts that he was a legit pocket passer, but give me a break. Tressel had “this kind of quarterback” (granted not with the same upside) before and he failed to design an offense, or even an a single offensive package that complemented his strengths. I think Tressel has shown how smart he is over the past few years by handicapping superbly talented teams with “tressel-ball”.
Matt B.
I understand all the circumstances you went over. I am not arguing that circumstances weren’t in place that influenced Brown not to play Young earlier, but I still think it was foolish.
Chris Simms was a decent player, but Young was transformational. Young should have shared time as a true frosh and then started as a soph and junior.
Of course there were huge doubts about Young for a while, but I posit that the doubts would’ve been gone if he had been able to develop earlier with playing time.
I’m not saying Tressel made the right moves earlier with Smith. I’m just saying that he is doing the right thing with Pryor now, while Young waited too long.
Young waited too long? He won the freaking national championship almost single handed as a Junior. Exactly what did he wait too long to do?
I also don’t see any point in him burning a season a true freshman. So he would have technically been a Senior for the 2005 national championship campaign? And trust me in 2002 in Texas, fans and coaches wanted to get as far away from a two quarterback system as possible. Simms/Applewhite discussions still cause screaming matches in Austin. All things considered, even with hindsight, I don’t see any valid criticism of Mack’s handling of the situation. Maybe he would have won that heisman moneybags Bush walked away with, but I think Vince likes the hardware he got better.
I’ll make a deal with you. IF Pryor stays four years, and IF he wins either multiple national championships, or a national and a heisman, I’ll concede. But until then, you are just crystal ball gazing, and your argument holds no water.
The zone read, and similar type offenses have transformed the way dual threat quarterbacks are handled, and much of that credit has to go to Mack Brown for legitimizing it and utilizing it to win a National Title. Urban Meyer likewise gets similar credit for the spread.
To think that Mack could install an unheard of offense in fall practice for a kid only 3 months out of high school, without any knowledge of how it would work is insane. This offense is now so well known, that it is much easier to do – and this was all paved by Mack Brown and Vince Young.
There was also an obvious safety in the North Carolina – Virginia Tech game, intentional grounding from the end zone, that wasn’t called.
Also, more helmets seem to be flying off this year than ever before. Is that my imagination?
No safties because the refs are awful these days. Instead of being fire for stupid calls they just say, sorryyyyyy, and that’s it. Until game results are overturned then they could care less if they get a call right. Hell, the replay officals are wrong half the time. They don’t seem to wanna show up their lil buddies on the field.
Yes, helments are flying off and someone is gonna get hurt badly if things aren’t changed. To much hair, mostly bradied shit, to fit a helment right. It may seem snug but they just slide off the hair. Instead of some of the silly crap the NCAA worries about they need to have a dress code for saftey reasons. If you don’t wanna comply and cut your hair to a reasonable length then find another game to play. The rules should apply to any hair hangin down beyond the jersey neck opening. I had long hair in my younger days but not when playing football. I had a choice cut it or watch from the stands. These knuckleheads ain’t to good to comply.
Tressel nor Brown are very smart and benefit from being able to recruit at the main university in football rich states with large populations. Yet they only have two BCS titles to show for it so far and one of those is still in doubt.