Injuries are obviously a huge issue this season. You can't teach brand new players to play as if they've been on the field for even 1 - 2 years. Top 10 teams can somewhat get away with this because of the type of talent they are able to recruit but that will never be us so it's a moot issue.
Over the last 5 years we've also played a number of teams that have started or needed to bring in their backup QB. I forget who we played maybe last year, their starting QB and RB were out for the game and they were still able to play as if there weren't any issues. I don't know that I recall us playing a backup QB that didn't come in and look at least competent enough to win the game if the rest of their team played well. Other teams players just seem better prepared from top to bottom.
But this all falls on the staff. Offensive line should have been targeted in recruiting from day 1. I follow the recruiting board, I know we tried to recruit linemen on both sides. It should have been, or should be, a much bigger priority every single year. The line makes everyone else on the fields job easier and can help to hide deficiencies in player abilities. Especially for the type of talent we are going to be able to recruit year in and year out. That's compounded with all the players getting on the field for the first time or with limited experience.
The board has been saying since the first couple of years. Once Dino gets "his guys" in here we'll start to be able to develop some depth. It's year 5 and we are 2 - 3 years away from possibly developing any serious depth. That's assuming we can recruit players we've struggled to recruit moving forward. We have a supposed offensive guru and we can't recruit QB's and we bring in a huge amount of WR recruits and for the proportion that commit we still don't have the talent at that position you would expect.
* Watching the Liberty game again I was impressed with some of the WR play, even with the drops. It's against Liberty though so it's hard to know how that equates against a real team.
The players themselves look unprepared and unsure of what they're doing at times. That's not this year, people have been mentioning that most years. TD's dad said the players aren't running the right routes a lot of times. That's been an issue since at least last year it seems but it's been an issue at a lot of positions. Again, that's on the coaching staff.
We also aren't seeing the jumps in improvement you would expect since these are DB's recruits now. We saw some improvement from the o-line at the end of last year but its hard to quantify because they were so bad to begin with. We don't know if they were actually going to be a functioning unit over the course of the year or not. Going from the worst football has ever seen to better than that, I don't know that that's a success.
Then you have the playcalling. The inability to make adjustments in certain games, the time management issues since year 1, mismanagement of timeouts, a system that if there's just okay talent our opponents seem to have no issues shutting down.
I don't know what all this means but when DB came here I didn't expect recruiting, especially on the offensive side to just be marginal. I expected to see more growth with his own recruits from year to year, some players have improved but I can't say the team as a whole improves greatly from year to year. I expected that even in losses the offensive would be fun to watch. The offense is better than it was in the past but our offensive history overall isn't some amazing stat line. Even in the years we were gaining a ton of yards we still struggled to score. This offense is hard to watch sometimes, I can't blame the players for that in year 5, dropped balls or no dropped balls.
I just don't see where this team is going. I get that a program that won't be in the top 25 in recruiting will not follow a linear trajectory but what we have is one season that was special and the rest of the tenure has been a lot of "we're turning the corner" talk.
