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Message: [QUOTE="CA Monk, post: 3607097, member: 5268"] Things have a way of turning around despite this year's manifest ineptitude and stymieing tentativeness. I see w/my untrained eye, a tentativeness to try new plays, to improvise, to screw coaching and technique and just play football. Yeah we need WRs, OLmen and a QB real bad. But still we need to play more in the body and less in the mind. Maybe it's a coaching thing, but less assignment football and more intuitive football. If I was a fan of another college team (i.e. didn't have an investment in SU football), I'd say this team looks like a pre-programed automated team - lost and soulless (on offense anyway). The O feels like it's the opposite of thinking outside the box. It's plays way inside the box. Yeah, perhaps a function of talent. Hard to root for anyone on O (Rex excluded) but Tucker. There was one 3rd and long where Morgan rolls out and tosses it to Hackett, and you can see (everybody can see) Hackett will be hit immediately and not get the 1st down, but Morgan throws it anyway. Yup, he's a freshman w/coaches in his ear trying to keep the game simple. Other teams have QBs that can make that quantum jump from "oh it's a completion and I'm executing the play" to "this ain't gonna get us a first down, I don't care what the coaches say I'm peeling off and gonna look down field or run it - I want to win." The team will sense that determination and everyone's effort gets amplified. We don't do much of that. Especially w/o Dungey or the QBs of the late 80s and all of the 90s. Painful. If a skilled, field-aware QB improvises and shows the grit to win, the team will generally respond. If only one of the QBs could put the team on their shoulders - even a little - it might be a different story. A tall order? - maybe. But other teams do it and we aren't even close. The players don't seem especially motivated because the same nauseating pattern of 3 and out becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for the O and has the D gassed by the 3rd quarter. It all started w/Maryland last year. I was there. I couldn't believe it. Who were those guys? So overmatched. So predictable. So pissed. 2019 was so promising. We had an OU transfer at RB, a 4 star at QB and 4 star transfer Jackson @ WR, 2 NFL draftees at DE and it all went to sheet. When DeVito threw that "excuse me" interception deep in Clemson's territory after we had just intercepted and we're hanging around, well, it has been a slow descent since then. Kid couldn't throw it away when he needed to. So dispiriting. It happens. It happened to us this time. Yup just a game, but so frickin' maddening, just when we're on the cusp of relevancy it all came slowly crashing down. But, like I said, things have a way of turning around. Give us a serviceable QB to rally around next year, keep the D off the field 50% of the time and convert some god darn 3rd downs and suddenly we're in games and maybe the other team is self-destructing or out of gas in the 3rd quarter. I hope this scenario is possible. It better be. It's how I'm going to get myself psyched for '21. [/QUOTE]

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