You are the scheme guru. I am admittedly not, so question for you.
It felt to me watching the game that the coaching staff believed that they were athletically superior offensively and could just line up opposite GT and tell GT exactly what they wanted to do and how they were going to do it, and that they would be able to do it anyways. Everything felt very vanilla. Are my feelings consistent with what you saw schematically?
Also, glad you mentioned the 2 TEs . . . on the pick that TVD threw that was almost returned, we were 4 wide which included both McCormick and Riley Williams and I remember thinking WTF.
Definitely not a guru, ha. Just some random amateur observer with too much time invested in football and this chaotic program.
I think your feelings are fair. I think we took a very straightforward approach to their defense and likely figured we could grind at them on the ground. After all, Bowling Green had just steamrolled them. Let's call that Plan A. I thought this approach was not particularly thoughtful or representative of what Dawson
can do. We were going to IZ them to death and take whatever short passing game they conceded, but we repeatedly stalled after initial progress on multiple drives.
My issue is that each game takes on a life of its own based on the flow. Once we found ourselves in a fist fight, we failed to adjust quickly or sufficiently enough. We tried to flood some of their zones outside the hashes, which is sensical, but TVD was off and I believe our personnel groupings were suboptimal based on the original plan (Plan A). I thought we failed to split those Safeties enough times or really put pressure on that Safety who repeatedly played run/pass.
So, while I don't mind the 2TE look or thought process as, for example, a way to go no huddle and remain flexible between Plan A and spreading the field a bit more, I think it's tough to accept we stayed in this "state" longer than necessary.
If we wanted to go 4 wide, then throw speed in the slot and run multiple vertical routes at their shell. Let's see how they'd handle it. That's exactly what we did - quite beautifully - on the long Colbie Young play. At some point(s), we had Cam as a split end to basically hold their outside corner in place. They do this in the NFL, but we seemed out of sync in what we tried to do.
On multiple route combinations, instead of having a guy like Smith or Ray Ray try to beat one of their DBs, we were reliant on a TE beating their DB. That's not the matchup football Dawson has preached and previously showed. It felt lazy or arrogant, and then mixed in with TVD not being at his best, which is naturally a huge factor.
There are brutal, end-of-game reasons we lost this game. And, there was this sorta disjointed (do you want to play smash ball or hedge), lackadaisical approach to how we attacked their defense. The non-kneel humiliates the program. The disjointed stuff is worrisome for how we might approach the remainder of the schedule.
Let's see. Like I said in the post you quoted, not a great way to predict what version we see next.
