And to add to that, lsu took as much pressure as possible off of a young qb starting his first game ever, controlled the line of scrimmage while running the ball with one of the top RB'S in the country. A beautiful game plan.
Yeah I agree, I think we just saw a young guy who let nerves and inexperience get the best of him. He held on to the ball too long. It's that simple.
When you have an inexperienced QB who is extremely limited in the passing game... and he has good running ability... he becomes a "running" quarterback. You have designed runs and pass plays with three reads.. receiver 1, receiver 2, or run.
Question if you have been a traditional pro style pocket passing team and your freshman 1st time starter who not only is being groomed to be a pocket passer but has practiced that offense all year.....do you completely change your offense to win one relatively meaningless game? While we certainly had time to change it seems to me there are issues with changing styles if it is for one game only. 1) This game is an opportunity to gain experience for next year in our system. Obviously Jennings needed the experience and I expect the benefit he and the team gain outweighs the win. 2) You have to change the whole O from line blocking to pass route to QB/RB exchange. Why put the added complexity on the teams back? It would waste those 15 practices as a building block for the future. 3) What would it do for Jennings and the teams confidence to say in effect "you can't do what you have been taught for 1 year so we're going to panic and try something we haven't done before" 4) Iowa's strength on D was the LBs. We would have put them in better position to face an unsure running QB Seems the long and short term risk was not worth the small reward. In fact we won, the O line and Hill dominated and Jennings was able to gain valuable experience in the O we will run next year. It should help him shake off any future jitters. I expect over the next spring and fall Jennings will significantly improve with practice and Cam's tutoring.
He appears to run better than JJ, who ran all the time. I don't think we have to completely change the offense, just toss in some qb runs and options. It was clear he wasn't ready to run a pass heavy offense.
I think what he needs to work on is that internal clock that says, fuck it.. time to run. He just seemed to kind of camp out in the pocket and wait and wait and wait and wait.....
I think what it boils down to is Les 's philosphy of what a QB should be. In his presser ... he said, the running QB is what College Football was going to ... LSU is just getting in line. There you have Rivers, who supposedly is Mett II, Tall, powerful arm, don't know how mobile he is, but is a prostyle QB. Then you have Jennings ... who is a runner, but it's questionable as to how good of a passer he'll be ... he most certainly does not have the arm of Mett ... ODB and Landry have said so. If the past is an indicator .... CLM will go with the running QB. CLM doesn't know what a good pass game looks like. We had a nice pass game at the first of this season, but after the GA Game, it was never seen again ... just run and long passes down field ... no moderate over the middle passes at all. I can't judge it from my biased position .... I like a prostyle QB. The really successful duel threat QBs that I've seen, have all been phenomenal passers. Thus, if AJ is going to turn out to be a JJ, we can expect lots of frustration over the next few years. If AJ turns out to be a Winston, or Newton, or RGIII ..... we could be in for the most exciting offense we've seen ... provided that CLM will let him pass like Winston, RGIII etc.
