[jayasena]

Hasn't this coaching staff by now shown that they're willing to evolve? You can argue that it came too late, but I can see why Shaw was hesitant. The offense basically worked against U$€, we just had an extremely unfortunate series of essentially unrelated disasters. I think if we switch the Army and U$€ games we probably beat U$€ by 2 scores just from the extra time to get the kinks out. And the loss to ND was against a top-10 team, on the road, and we nearly won. After the WSU game where we moved the ball well enough, how clear was it that we had a problem with the base offense and not a simple execution issue?

I've had faith in Shaw's willingness to change, especially after the ASU disaster (as I posted in the immediate aftermath). And, as above, I attributed the lack of a change prior to the ASU game to Shaw being conservative and not willing to change until there was conclusive evidence of our offensive woes.

That said, one thing I've wondered is why the coaching staff needs to rely on game performance to come to this conclusion. I have a hard time believing our base offense works well against our defense, which is tougher than any of the opponents to date (unless there's some specific mismatch that I can't fathom). So, surely, the staff had to have seen this in practice. And hopefully the staff isn't so full of themselves to think there are no other defenses out there that can come close to our own (i.e., that struggling against our D is not indicative of a problem worth fixing). Or is it that our defense is so good that our offense looks bad in practice regardless of the scheme?

Anyway, when questions are raised about the coaching staff on these boards, a lot of folks offer the defense (and rightfully so) that the staff has a lot more information than we do as we only see the games. So it's a bit odd to turn around and say the coaches have to wait until they have conclusive evidence from games before trying to fix problems. And I'm saying that as one of the guilty parties myself (with key incriminating evidence linked above).

[jayasena]

Hasn't this coaching staff by now shown that they're willing to evolve? You can argue that it came too late, but I can see why Shaw was hesitant. The offense basically worked against U$€, we just had an extremely unfortunate series of essentially unrelated disasters. I think if we switch the Army and U$€ games we probably beat U$€ by 2 scores just from the extra time to get the kinks out. And the loss to ND was against a top-10 team, on the road, and we nearly won. After the WSU game where we moved the ball well enough, how clear was it that we had a problem with the base offense and not a simple execution issue?

I've had faith in Shaw's willingness to change, especially after the ASU disaster (as I posted in the immediate aftermath). And, as above, I attributed the lack of a change prior to the ASU game to Shaw being conservative and not willing to change until there was conclusive evidence of our offensive woes.

That said, one thing I've wondered is why the coaching staff needs to rely on game performance to come to this conclusion. I have a hard time believing our base offense works well against our defense, which is tougher than any of the opponents to date (unless there's some specific mismatch that I can't fathom). So, surely, the staff had to have seen this in practice. And hopefully the staff isn't so full of themselves to think there are no other defenses out there that can come close to our own (i.e., that struggling against our D is not indicative of a problem worth fixing). Or is it that our defense is so good that our offense looks bad in practice regardless of the scheme?

Anyway, when questions are raised about the coaching staff on these boards, a lot of folks offer the defense (and rightfully so) that the staff has a lot more information than we do as we only see the games. So it's a bit odd to turn around and say the coaches have to wait until they have conclusive evidence from games before trying to fix problems. And I'm saying that as one of the guilty parties myself (with key incriminating evidence linked above).