Guy Chamberlin said:
You keep saying this over and over and over, but it makes no sense to anyone who actually watches the games.
Help me out: is Beck's tragic flaw that he runs a complicated offense and never sticks with what works, or that he sticks with a predictible run-first offense straight out of the 1950s?
You can't have it both ways.
Well I guess you can if you're really determined.
I think everyone will be surprised how good Tommy can be when we scrap A LOT of the Read Routes Beck seemed to be fond of. All of those "terribly inaccurate throws" everyone is talking about are mostly read routes and the WR and QB made different reads.
The thing about Beck is that he loves having a "variable" offense. Meaning, he doesn't "run plays" in the traditional sense. Those WR's on some plays aren't running routes. They are reading the D, and deciding what route to run off of what he reads. The most simple way to explain this on post routes, the WR can decide to go "over" the safety or "under" the safety, depending on how the safety moves. One instance of this happening is when it looked as though Tommy severely under-threw Westerkamp. That's what it looked like to your average Johnny Football Watcher. But to me, I saw that Westerkamp had a read route and decided, the deep route (over) was the best route. Tommy, being under pressure, made the "under" read, so it looked like a poorly thrown ball. From my perspective, Tommy may have made the correct read because the safety had his hips turned up field getting ready to play the deep route.
The reason we see Tommy looking down field sometimes appearing to "wait" and hold on to the ball forever too? Same thing, he's waiting for a WR to make a read.
For weeks I have been saying I cannot wait until we have an offense that is not dependent on QB and WR to both make the right reads. WR's need to be running routes on plays that have route concepts that will work. We do have those plays, which is why we see some plays work so well. Because the WR's actually run plays, they know when to look for the ball, and Tommy knows when they will be open.
Not saying Tommy doesn't need work though. He definitely does, but I think it's important to note that some of his down fall was due to the system too. Also, every QB in college needs work. You can point at Mariota all you want, but there's a reason guys like Mariota win Heismans. Kessler definitely made his mistakes Saturday too, and I was calling him the next best QB in college football. I still believe that, but he was outplayed by the QB that everyone here in Nebraska seems to hate.
