This Coaching Staff's Biggest Issue: Failure To Anticipate Problems

The point he was making - and it was a very good point - is that in order to have given Landry any game experience last year we would have blown his redshirt. Bradford was rarely in any games during the 4th quarter last year. We utilized Halzle rather than burn the redshirt for Landry. It was a wise decision.

 

Yeah, Landry had no issues in the BYU or Miami games.

You may be right. Having Landry gain some experience
last year probably wouldn't have made any difference
this year. After all, this year's experience hasn't seemed
to make a lot of difference.

 

Can't totally disagree, but Stoops has never done an adequate job of getting the 2's & 3's game experience. The KING was the master at that and often you would see the starters come out after the half without their should pads or they would run the first series of the second half and be done.

Bottom line, this is OKLAHOMA and the drop off to the 2's should not be that great. As with the MLB position in '08, this staff did not have backups ready to play. Landry has done an outstanding job this season and we may have been well in the BCS discussion had the OL been ready to play.

BOOMER

 

HMMMM, there have been a lot of misses with the O-Line recruiting. When you're 10 years into it and your looking to Juco and Div 1 rejects, then there is definitely something that doesn't pass the smell test.

Boomer

 

Its not the players, its the coach putting the players in bad situations. A month ago the football world was saying landy was just as good as you can get. The kid had a bad game, if you watched the game you could see its not all his fault, inexperienced wide recievers, inexperienced line. How many times did the WR's gut routes short on blitzes= 0, how many of out routes are 15 yards down field=all, how is a line supposed to block while our WR's get jammed at the line and it takes longer to run long routes. Everybody keeps saying our o line doesn't run block, well we don't run. When we do its out of the shotgun, with no lead block, 5 o-line against 7-8 defenders= no run game. This O is not a good one. Last year I knew it had its flaws, *, and tcu exposed our run game. Bradford was smart enough to overcome. This year with what we have we should be running a simple offense just like we did wit Hybl. symple QB manages the game. D wins it. Look at Alabama, lost o linemen, new QB, run it down your throat, keep it simple. ITS NOT THE PLAYERS. IT THE ARROGANTS that is...

 

guys, nothing about landry jones has changed since he first went into a game except the amount of film that opposing coaches have on him. once you accumulate enough film, coaches will gameplan against your strengths while coming after your weaknesses.

his weakness is that he is a 1 read QB. this is being exacerbated by the fact that he is being given **** poor 1 read options (*cough* a slant to tennell on 4th and 2? *cough*). believe it or not, sam was that way 2 1/2 years ago. the major difference is that sam had an uncanny ability to throw it to the one place his receiver could catch it. sam early that year had a completion i just couldn't get over - he threw into quadruple coverage and got away with it because it was in a football size window that defenders couldn't cover.

rhino and i marveled at it then thinking either he's the luckiest sucker ever or he's going to be a special player. luckily for us, he ended up being a special player.

jones is a freshman, pure and simple. his head has to be buzzing with both the notoriety, the fact that he has to grasp the plays quickly, and he has to improve his play.

 

the OL attrition/career ending injuries have to end at some point. with 85 schollies you have at most 16 OL on scholly at any one point. losing 4 to graduation and 4 to offseason attrition is going to bite you every frickin time.

i mean think about the effect of attrition for a second. lets say you started at a company with 4 other people at the same time. you go to lunch every day for a year, train with each other, etc. then 2 of them run afoul of a random boss and are canned. you have to interact with that same boss on a daily basis. how does it affect your performance? do you do things out of fear? or out of desire? are you off weighing your options?

what a lot of people fail to grasp is that there is a variable margin between a good college player and an average college player on gameday. preparation, work ethic, desire can all narrow that margin.

 

Parity is much more pronounced in college football with the advent of spread offenses, 85-scholarship limits, true freshman having a chance to start with regularity, increased television exposure, high school systems far more developed thus recruits come in better, etc. This isn't the 70s anymore.

 

Backup and youth. We'll be back... SOONER than later.

 

It's called "Risk Management" anticipating and planning for known risks in whatever you are doing and also trying to foresee and plan for unexpected risks.

This is football it is a violent game injuries should not be unexpected the “Risk Management” portion has not been handled very good.

Before you lose your mind, “no we had no Bradford II nor Gresh II” sitting on the bench to fill in for the originals but this is OU this staff recruited everyone of the players.

They should be better as a group. (speaking mainly of the OL)

Stach will prove out to be very good IMO he had a bad day at the office, it happens, you ever had a bad day at the office?

 

No question... we need depth. Quality depth that could defeat most of our rivals. Well coached and loyal depth.

 

A poster on another thread said it earlier, I look forward to the day Josh Huepel takes over the offense. What worked with a great QB and AA tight end and WR's isn't working with Landry. A guy on ESPN was talking about our offense being stale and predictable.

 

To me, one of OU's consistent, chronic recruiting failures is securing an ace kicker who can perform in game situations. My gosh, what would OU's record be right now if we had a FG kicker that could hit one from the 35 yd line or a bit further? This is plain stupid. A HC that makes over $4MM/year needs to find a way to recruit a good kicker. My gosh, some of these Div. 5-A schools in TX has a better, more reliable kicking game than OU.

 

Funny, about 6 people green speked me for the post so I guess you are in the minority.

And BTW, isn't it funny that the team that rushes for the most yards in the RRS wins every, single year?

 

Not to mention that two years ago we had no expectation that this year's backup would have no experience. This year's backup happened to transfer to Michigan State. Which lead us to either burn a redshirt to play a third string player or live with the fact that our backup this year will go into the year w/o experience.

 

WE WIN EVERY GAME IF WE MAKE OUR FIELD GOALS
OL penalties are shameful

WE MAKE OUR FIELD GOALS and we are in the mix even though we would get smoked by BAMA or Florida - we could hang with most all others.

it was not Landry's crowning moment against Nebraska, that is not an easy place to play and I think the play calling by Wilson was absolutely pitaful - predictable.... The anouncers knew we should have run that flat screen two plays earlier - Pelini is going to make quick adjustments on D, and wilson got beat... period.

Landry would make a great play, get excited and make a bone head play - killing all momentum - I was extremely proud of the Defense getting up one series after another and shutting nebraska down. Also holding them late after that big run and a field goal would have beat us...

 

well, that is a story in itself. one of the things that i've talked about on this board before is the tendency of our new hires to completely bomb out on their first 2 recruiting classes. i personally refer to it as "moving on up" syndrome and it can be directly attributed to the resumes of the coaches we hire. stoops, rightly or wrongly, tends to pull guys out of lower division ball to come to OU. these guys have no idea how you evaluate an elite high school football prospect and tend to overvalue, by a large margin, athleticism over the ability to play the game. after the second set of busts, they tend to go back to what they know in evaluation and their recruiting rankings will go down but the talent level of the players will go up.

the problem is that you lost 2 years teaching them how to evaluate OU level talent which none of us pay attention too because they had current players that were brought in by a different coach that we see on the field every day dominating under the new coach.

think about the best and i mean best talent evaluator we've had on our staff for a young coach -> steve spurrier jr. savage, clayton? these guys were total unknowns. he also pulled in brandon jones, will peoples, antonio perkins, and ataleo ford who were all highly ranked. his one miss was on a player he begged to get a scholly for but they were more interested in guys like jamar mozee -> wes welker.

the difference was that sos, jr was around talent at florida. coming to OU wasn't a magical step up in the quality of athlete and he made the most of it. compare this with the guys who came from northwestern who have blown chunks on their first couple of recruiting classes.

one last point, you have to be excited about our defensive back 7's future when you watch our special teams. i watch some of our kick coverages 3 or 4 times because of how much effort some of those young guys give. i think brian jackson's growth this year can be directly attributed to demontre hurst's relentless motor. hopefully next year they'll bench travis lewis's overrated derriere and let ronnell lewis take over that slot.

 

I can't wait to see Hurst on the field next year at corner.

 

Ronnell Lewis gives me chills. Huge, fast, and great desire always have a place on the football field.

 

So jkm, why have we seen BV go away from his standard 4-3 defense so much this year? I think I saw 5 different personnel groupings based on situations and formation against Nebraska. It was like we really gameplanned for them or something.