It's not about saving the playbook for better teams, or we wouldn't have been running the same vanilla bullshit all throughout last season. Part of college football is running up the score on lower quality teams -- if we refuse to do this we will never be considered a good team.
It's not about saving the playbook for better teams, or we wouldn't have been running the same vanilla bullshit all throughout last season. Part of college football is running up the score on lower quality teams -- if we refuse to do this we will never be considered a good team.
Happens all the time now, particularly with teams in the middle that need to play long. Cal ran a very vanilla offense against Nevada and unleashed a whole bunch of new plays and looks against TCU partly. Wazzu uncorked new blitz looks against Wisconsin after doing base against Idaho. Wouldn't be surprised to see us try some new stuff next week.
Tedford did similar stuff, but had higher-level talent most of his time here because he recruited better, so we dusted most everyone.
Against TCU partly, and then the same boring plays throughout conference play. I have no faith that an open playbook is going to magically appear in year 3.
I think Musgrave is actually a great OC that has improved our offensive potential since he joined, but he needs to realize this isn't the NFL. And Musgrave and Wilcox both need to get their heads out of their asses in regards to seniority and just play our best players within the realms of safety.
And turtling against "lesser" talent is legitimately the worst possible strategy for college football. We won't be respected until we're beating UNLV's by 30. The moment the second half started and I realized what was going on, I wanted to turn the TV off. If Cal wants fans in the stands, it's beyond just poor marketing -- they need to show the students that we're actually competitive at a P5 level instead of showing that we're ready to be left out by the B1G and invite the MWC over to the Pac-12 since that's where we are.
I donтАЩt mind turtling against lesser talented teams and winning knife fights 20-14 against UNLV and other G5 teams IF it meant Wilcox is going 10-2 or 9-3 the rest of the season. That isnтАЩt the case here. In fact, I donтАЩt think we are тАЬturtlingтАЭ in season 6. Turtling is just an excuse to give Wilcox and his staff a pass for his poor offense. We arenтАЩt playing turtle, we are a turtle. We need to recognize that and stop deflecting for Wilcox. Was Dykes turtling his defense in year 4?
I agree that turtling sounds generous or like an excuse, but it might just be semantics. I think it's true in the sense that most quality P5 teams keep things vanilla for the B and C level OOC opponents. At least, on paper that's the right strategy.
The difference here, which is also an indictment on Wilcox's understanding of reality, is that Cal is not a quality P5 team.
We arent the 2016 Wisconsin Badgers (11-3) which from day 1 seemed to be the basis of Wilcox's not only philosophy but decision making.
It's great to aspire to that, and we would be happy to be there. But you have to build up to that first. And handling your business impressively against the teams you should beat is important to building momentum.
It's like nothing is actually building here. We're stuck in being a program modeled in the image of the 2016 Badgers but not having the coaching or recruiting to actually get there, or show any signs of at least moving in that direction. Just excuses and what-if's and "strategy" year in, year out, game in game out.
But whether Sonny Dykes beats UNLV 55-47 or Wilcox beats UNLV 20-14 is hardly relevant. The issue is that we would rather see something more along the lines of Cal beating UNLV 38-10, while still "turtling" and limiting the number of snaps and getting backups playing time because the game was never in doubt from start to finish, because they are a well coached team with a culture of winning who handles their business against middling Group of 5 teams.
And there will always be exception games here or there, but the problem is the rule not the exception in the last decade.
I disagree. CFB rankings are largely done via statistics, which have their own "eye test." If our margin of victory is 6 points against teams who rank in the bottom 60 of the FBS, we will never be ranked outside of the bottom 60 of the FBS. Because we sure as hell aren't blowing out the USC/Georgia's of the world like that.
The only way to overcome low margins of victory is to have 1-2 losses max on the season, and if you can't blow out the lower level teams you aren't finishing the season with 10+ wins. If you're going to turtle, get up by 30 first. Hell, we lost our one chance at a Rose Bowl because Tedford refused to blow out Southern Mississippi -- we should have learned this lesson the hard way.
Holding back the offense against Nevada while in the lead makes sense. What is the reason for holding the offense back against Nevada once we were losing?
You only can install so many plays during game week. Typically its 20 to 30 plays. The rest come from your list of staples. The plays you install can be run out of multiple sets to disguise them. Scouting and game planning are critical with respect to picking the right schemes for the game. No coach uses their entire play book early in the season, not just because they don't want to show it, but because they haven't practiced many of the plays enough. Over the course of the season the repertoire grows.
Teams usually rely on base on a given week and practice advanced looks specific to game opponent. So if Musgrave doesn't believe UNLV deserved anything more than your base sets the team probably didn't practice enough advanced looks to feel confident to throw them out there compared to your standard two minute offensive drills, which Cal should generally feel confident in executing but failed to do so last year because of numerous offensive limitations.
The thing about CFB vs. the NFL is that you have a revolving door of a roster because college and NFL drafts take away your players. If Wilcox/Musgrave need 3 years to be comfortable letting anyone use the full playbook we haven't seen thus far, we're royally f*cked.
At some point, you need to adapt and draw a line and stand behind. They need to figure out how to either simplify the playbook so that it can be executed at a college level without blue chip recruits, or they need to do a better job coaching up the players so that we're not losing to Nevada and UNLV every year. We may have won the game this weekend, but in my eyes that was a loss. We were f*cking outplayed by a G5 cellar dweller and managed to scrape out a "win" with defensive heroics for the entire second half while the offense took a dump on the field because their coaches asked them to. No wonder all our receivers transfer to different teams after 1-2 years.
And those same offensive limitations are present again in year 6 of Wilcox and year 2 of Musgrave so they seem content on just banging their head against the same wall and not trying to adapt.
It's not about saving the playbook for better teams, or we wouldn't have been running the same vanilla bullshit all throughout last season. Part of college football is running up the score on lower quality teams -- if we refuse to do this we will never be considered a good team.
Happens all the time now, particularly with teams in the middle that need to play long. Cal ran a very vanilla offense against Nevada and unleashed a whole bunch of new plays and looks against TCU partly. Wazzu uncorked new blitz looks against Wisconsin after doing base against Idaho. Wouldn't be surprised to see us try some new stuff next week.
Tedford did similar stuff, but had higher-level talent most of his time here because he recruited better, so we dusted most everyone.
Against TCU partly, and then the same boring plays throughout conference play. I have no faith that an open playbook is going to magically appear in year 3.
I think Musgrave is actually a great OC that has improved our offensive potential since he joined, but he needs to realize this isn't the NFL. And Musgrave and Wilcox both need to get their heads out of their asses in regards to seniority and just play our best players within the realms of safety.
And turtling against "lesser" talent is legitimately the worst possible strategy for college football. We won't be respected until we're beating UNLV's by 30. The moment the second half started and I realized what was going on, I wanted to turn the TV off. If Cal wants fans in the stands, it's beyond just poor marketing -- they need to show the students that we're actually competitive at a P5 level instead of showing that we're ready to be left out by the B1G and invite the MWC over to the Pac-12 since that's where we are.
I donтАЩt mind turtling against lesser talented teams and winning knife fights 20-14 against UNLV and other G5 teams IF it meant Wilcox is going 10-2 or 9-3 the rest of the season. That isnтАЩt the case here. In fact, I donтАЩt think we are тАЬturtlingтАЭ in season 6. Turtling is just an excuse to give Wilcox and his staff a pass for his poor offense. We arenтАЩt playing turtle, we are a turtle. We need to recognize that and stop deflecting for Wilcox. Was Dykes turtling his defense in year 4?
I agree that turtling sounds generous or like an excuse, but it might just be semantics. I think it's true in the sense that most quality P5 teams keep things vanilla for the B and C level OOC opponents. At least, on paper that's the right strategy.
The difference here, which is also an indictment on Wilcox's understanding of reality, is that Cal is not a quality P5 team.
We arent the 2016 Wisconsin Badgers (11-3) which from day 1 seemed to be the basis of Wilcox's not only philosophy but decision making.
It's great to aspire to that, and we would be happy to be there. But you have to build up to that first. And handling your business impressively against the teams you should beat is important to building momentum.
It's like nothing is actually building here. We're stuck in being a program modeled in the image of the 2016 Badgers but not having the coaching or recruiting to actually get there, or show any signs of at least moving in that direction. Just excuses and what-if's and "strategy" year in, year out, game in game out.
But whether Sonny Dykes beats UNLV 55-47 or Wilcox beats UNLV 20-14 is hardly relevant. The issue is that we would rather see something more along the lines of Cal beating UNLV 38-10, while still "turtling" and limiting the number of snaps and getting backups playing time because the game was never in doubt from start to finish, because they are a well coached team with a culture of winning who handles their business against middling Group of 5 teams.
And there will always be exception games here or there, but the problem is the rule not the exception in the last decade.
I disagree. CFB rankings are largely done via statistics, which have their own "eye test." If our margin of victory is 6 points against teams who rank in the bottom 60 of the FBS, we will never be ranked outside of the bottom 60 of the FBS. Because we sure as hell aren't blowing out the USC/Georgia's of the world like that.
The only way to overcome low margins of victory is to have 1-2 losses max on the season, and if you can't blow out the lower level teams you aren't finishing the season with 10+ wins. If you're going to turtle, get up by 30 first. Hell, we lost our one chance at a Rose Bowl because Tedford refused to blow out Southern Mississippi -- we should have learned this lesson the hard way.
Holding back the offense against Nevada while in the lead makes sense. What is the reason for holding the offense back against Nevada once we were losing?
You only can install so many plays during game week. Typically its 20 to 30 plays. The rest come from your list of staples. The plays you install can be run out of multiple sets to disguise them. Scouting and game planning are critical with respect to picking the right schemes for the game. No coach uses their entire play book early in the season, not just because they don't want to show it, but because they haven't practiced many of the plays enough. Over the course of the season the repertoire grows.
Teams usually rely on base on a given week and practice advanced looks specific to game opponent. So if Musgrave doesn't believe UNLV deserved anything more than your base sets the team probably didn't practice enough advanced looks to feel confident to throw them out there compared to your standard two minute offensive drills, which Cal should generally feel confident in executing but failed to do so last year because of numerous offensive limitations.
The thing about CFB vs. the NFL is that you have a revolving door of a roster because college and NFL drafts take away your players. If Wilcox/Musgrave need 3 years to be comfortable letting anyone use the full playbook we haven't seen thus far, we're royally f*cked.
At some point, you need to adapt and draw a line and stand behind. They need to figure out how to either simplify the playbook so that it can be executed at a college level without blue chip recruits, or they need to do a better job coaching up the players so that we're not losing to Nevada and UNLV every year. We may have won the game this weekend, but in my eyes that was a loss. We were f*cking outplayed by a G5 cellar dweller and managed to scrape out a "win" with defensive heroics for the entire second half while the offense took a dump on the field because their coaches asked them to. No wonder all our receivers transfer to different teams after 1-2 years.
And those same offensive limitations are present again in year 6 of Wilcox and year 2 of Musgrave so they seem content on just banging their head against the same wall and not trying to adapt.
I think they ran a magical forward-lateral once :)