Hammerhead

You know, if Taylor is back next year, then I really couldn't care less whether or not what Bo told the media was 100% truthful.

The bowl situation really isn't a big deal to me. If we got snubbed out of a BCS bowl then bowl selection would definitely be a big deal, but Nebraska didn't earn a BCS bowl bid. To me, any non-BCS bowl game might as well just be called the "At Least We're Bowl Eligible Bowl".

As much as I'd like to see all our other QBs see playing time instead of stand there in full pads holding a clipboard, I can't see a QB rotation working. It allows for too much inconsistency.

Don't get your hopes up on that...

Very cool to read... T.O. is still a class act. Thank you for sharing, and thank you for serving as well.

"HI, I'M FROM CONNECTICUT! (Wait, which bowl game are we playing in?)"

Exactly. I don't want a team that's "pretty good". I want a team that's great. The only thing that makes this team less than great is the offense. We can't trade players with other schools or pick up players in free agency, so our only option is to look at the coaching staff and ask if they're getting the job done. I don't believe that Shawn is.

By "we", of course, you mean Watson. Any way you slice it, Watson designed the offense this year, one that worked very well up until the top 2 QBs got hurt. And yes, of course any offense that works well will rely on players that are good. We really maximized with this O out of Taylor and Roy and Rex this year, and it isn't putting them down to say the OC put them in a good position. Again - will not argue about the end of the OU game, and those plays. That's exactly my view, pretty much. Yes, but the zone read was a pretty easy choice for a team with a very elusive quarterback who is a freshman and doesn't have the playbook memorized from front to back and two halfbacks who aren't afraid of contact. It's simple, and it's effective... if the team you're playing against doesn't know how to stop it. Texas figured out how to bluff our QBs into making the wrong reads and completely nullified it. We thought it was Taylor's inexperience causing the wrong reads to be made, but it was simply Texas having a defensive scheme that proved better than our offensive scheme. Other than a few pass attempts (many of which resulted in drops, which I obviously can't blame on Watson) we didn't have a good contingency plan in case the zone read didn't work, which it didn't. I can't say for certain what would've been a good plan against Texas. I don't get paid to do so, and I haven't observed enough of Texas's defense to say what their biggest weakness was. Shawn does, and has. Again, I can't blame everything on Shawn. The lack of discipline is partially Bo's fault, and partially the players' too. Bo has our defense playing as well as they have in several years, though, so we can't afford to let him go. We have to address the problem somehow, and frankly, at this point Shawn is our only expendable commodity.

If I saw Dan in person, I'd at least give him enough of my time to punch him in the face.

It wasn't the scheme that destroyed Washington, KSU, OSU, and Missouri. It was Taylor Martinez (mostly with the zone read, although I'll give him credit for making some nice passes in the OSU and Missouri games) with some help in the Mizzou game from Roy Helu. We found something they couldn't stop, and we pounded it at them time and again, which is something anybody at all would know how to do. Those teams all have poor defenses though. Never mind that we scored so many points against them, as I said before if you can find something the other team can't stop and keep doing it, there's no reason why you shouldn't score that many points. What good is putting up 200 points on a crappy defense if you can't put up 20 on a decent defense? Sure, the dropped passes killed us in the Texas game, penalties killed us in the Texas A&M game, and turnovers killed us in the Big XII Championship, but they shouldn't have. A good offense can overcome those things. Let's take a closer look at the Oklahoma game. A turnover and a sack cost us a shot at two field goals. The first time, we could've given Henery a chipshot. The second, we were right on the edge of Henery's range and could've easily gotten him a shot right down the middle, and probably could've gotten him a few extra yards. All we had to do was run the ball in those situations. That would've taken a lot of pressure off a quarterback who was injured and was getting hurried/sacked all night. Also, why did we stop running the wildcat when it was actually working? Yes, the wildcat is a gimmick offensive scheme. Does it say something when a gimmick offense is more productive than your usual offense, though? Watson said he didn't want to make us one-dimensional. We were NO-dimensional with Martinez taking the snaps. All we could do was move backwards. At least with the wildcat we could get positive yardage. I'm not going to claim that I know the answer to fixing this anemic offense. What I do know is that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Expecting the same offensive unit that struggled against a team that won't even be playing in a bowl game to be productive against the best the Big Ten has to offer is insane. Something has to change.