10-02-2016, 07:23 AM
Your retelling is a bit off. The D in 2010 was actually quite good, and that's why that team was probably the best of Stanford's recent teams, otherwise we can't ever quite seem to align dominant defense and offense (2013's O had too many holes for it to count).
I independently came to the conclusion that Bloomgren doing both OC and OL roles might be an issue. As WiM has been pointing out our offense seems to need an unreasonable amount of returning talent on the OL to work. Given how highly rated our linemen tend to be, it seems that we're just doing a poor job of developing the backups, which points to the coaching.
Given the NCAA's asinine coaching limit I'm not sure who we'd axe to bring in a dedicated OL coach, or if that's even what we really want, but (even given that we're looking through a glass darkly at how this stuff works) it's starting to look reasonable.
I'm somewhat less convinced that the playbook or QB development is a problem. After all, one of the reasons we all assumed Chryst would be the guy is that Burns looked horrible in Spring 2015. Clearly he has developed since then! And it's not like he's looked uniformly bad in games, he's certainly flashed in stretches (opening of the KSU game, end of UCLA) and looked mostly competent outside of those, unless he's getting pressured. It's pretty non-ideal that his pocket presence is quite bad, but he's a first-year starter and I still maintain that no one would've succeeded against UW when getting sacked 6 times in a half (and it's not like they were all his fault).
I'm left not knowing what to think about where we are right now. My inclination is to say that UW was a confluence of factors (short week, away game, really hobbled team, extremely good opponent, game just snowballed on us) that won't likely repeat and hope for the best against WSU. If we look as listless in that one as we did on Friday then we can panic.
I independently came to the conclusion that Bloomgren doing both OC and OL roles might be an issue. As WiM has been pointing out our offense seems to need an unreasonable amount of returning talent on the OL to work. Given how highly rated our linemen tend to be, it seems that we're just doing a poor job of developing the backups, which points to the coaching.
Given the NCAA's asinine coaching limit I'm not sure who we'd axe to bring in a dedicated OL coach, or if that's even what we really want, but (even given that we're looking through a glass darkly at how this stuff works) it's starting to look reasonable.
I'm somewhat less convinced that the playbook or QB development is a problem. After all, one of the reasons we all assumed Chryst would be the guy is that Burns looked horrible in Spring 2015. Clearly he has developed since then! And it's not like he's looked uniformly bad in games, he's certainly flashed in stretches (opening of the KSU game, end of UCLA) and looked mostly competent outside of those, unless he's getting pressured. It's pretty non-ideal that his pocket presence is quite bad, but he's a first-year starter and I still maintain that no one would've succeeded against UW when getting sacked 6 times in a half (and it's not like they were all his fault).
I'm left not knowing what to think about where we are right now. My inclination is to say that UW was a confluence of factors (short week, away game, really hobbled team, extremely good opponent, game just snowballed on us) that won't likely repeat and hope for the best against WSU. If we look as listless in that one as we did on Friday then we can panic.