Yep. Minus your best QB, best RB, best OL, and best TE. What a way to start your career as an OC.
REALISTIC expectations for 2023 football season
- Thread starter Pope
- Start date
Yep. Minus your best QB, best RB, best OL, and best TE. What a way to start your career as an OC.
Were using the term "best" very loosely there...
A big part of offense is play design and execution. If we have the right guy, we should see a significant improvement. I don't have a problem with CMC's offensive philosophy; we just need to make the plays. Minimizing mistakes on special teams could help as well.
I truly think the people are over estimating how much our offense needs to improve to make a bowl game. I think our defense will take a slight step back but still be at least top three in conference. Even if our starting DT is out 3 games, it’s the most replaceable position on our defense (WVU 2018). So if our offense can get to 10th-ish in conference we’ll be just fine. Not saying Nate will be like this but the conference championship last year was between two new OCs.
That's kind of the key. We don't know if it was Manning calling dumb short crosses in front of the sticks and shotgun handoffs on short yardage, or if it was Campbell forcing him to do it. Or I guess if the talent was so bad that that was the only thing we could do. Either way, Campbell is now tied to NS and Clanton. Either it works or we continue to go downhill and we're looking for a new coach in a few years. They've dug themselves a pretty big hole and it won't be easy to get out of it.
Campbell is tied to everything... he's the head coach. Manning kept doing the same stupid stuff over and over and over again... if Campbell had an issue with it, we would have seen it stop... or we should have anyway.
If we win 6 or more games this season, CMC should be Coach of the Year.
I mean, he fired him at the end of the year, so clearly there was an issue with it. Yes, he kept doing the same dumb stuff, but campbell also doesnt seem like the guy to rock the boat during the season by removing his OC. Regardless of who was making the playcalls, I'm willing to bet changes will be made. If i didnt know better, I would say being pessimistic is your hobby.
Thank you for the optimism! As long as the defense stays solid (and there is no reason that it shouldn't), it will not take much offensive improvement to move from the 4-8 of last year (aberration) to 6 or 7 wins this year. Let's Go State!
So do you think Campbell told Manning to change things up…. and Manning didn’t listen? Or was Campbell fine with what Manning was doing?
I think Manning was doing exactly what Campbell wanted, and Campbell did NOT want to let him go, but didn’t have much choice. Pollard needed to be able to sell hope in order to sell tickets, and the only way to do that was to make some serious changes to the staff.
Honestly, staff changes were coming whether or not Pollard called for them as you state. Now, as far as play-calling goes, hard to say. The TT game and the KSU game are the ones that stick out to me the most, when it felt like Campbell or Manning hit rock bottom from a play-calling standpoint. Sounds as if NS will have more control over the offense, although im not sure whether thats from a personnel aspect or play calls
I just don’t see the skill offensively to score enough points to win games. I look at it and maybe some freshmen will be there in a couple years, but I don’t see it right now. Hope I’m wrong, I just don’t know how they can score.
And if X drops a few more of the ones he caught, we'd probably have won 2 games. Goes both ways. He probably won us the Iowa game.
To me it seems like the rhythm of the offense has been pretty sporadic for several seasons and has nothing to do with the play calls and that kind of stuff comes from the top as a recurring theme just like special teams.
Last edited:
Yep. You don’t see well coached teams commit all the mental mistakes that we do year in and year out.
But we also have stupid play calls too.. no doubt.
That's the maddening thing. Staff preaches "winning in the margins" and doing the little things right. Team does the opposite. Now maybe we're too close and see our mistakes and not the ones that other teams make, but it sure seems like we do them more often than others. I know that we're usually not piling up penalties, but it feels like they always come at the worst times and a lot of them are just stupid. I'll say that early on in Campbell's first few years, we had trouble getting plays in on time and they fixed that for the most part. And we don't really fumble the ball much.
I guess to me, winning in the margins has a lot to do with special teams. And we haven't been good there outside of Mevis and Nwangwu. We've given up on PR, KR hasn't been good since Nwangwu left. Coverage improved last year I guess. But man, get a Kicker who can make short FGs and a Kicker who can KO into the endzone. Quit getting cute with protection schemes and getting punts blocked. It shouldn't be that hard to field good special teams. Walden did it and he had nothing to recruit off of. To me, just like the OL, it's gotten systemic at this point. Hopefully the staff changes can fix it.
I would say it was the OU game. We were down 10-7 and ran that 3rd and short delayed hand off out the shotgun got stuffed short of the line of scrimmage. I walked out of the stadium and went and did something productive the rest of the day. I figured if they didn't want to try there was no reason for me to waste my time being there. Did listen to it on the drive home, but got home and got some stuff done that I wouldn't have.
Yep... at times I swear Campbell is more conservative than KF... and that's saying something.
Do you want to win the game or not? Play to win it!
