The problem with the "give him time argument" is that Riley is losing games because of simple game-day mistakes that a rookie coach would be embarassed to make. Clock management is horrible, play calling in key situations is a joke, he doesn't make effective use of timeouts to get players on the same page before important plays, player personnel is a disaster (Newby over Ozigbo and Wilbon when everyone in the state can see that Newby is consistently the fourth best runner in the box score behind Armstrong, Jano, and Moore).
Our losses are not due as much to a transition from one system to another as much as fundamental coaching mistakes.
I keep seeing people talking about all these glaring coaching mistakes, but I'm not seeing them. What I see are people going back after the fact and picking apart things that didn't work out. That's not the same as a coach making a fundamentally wrong decision. I pretty much agree with Sam McKewon's comments below.
Husker Talk Live Replay w/Sam McKewon:
"I didn't like the 3rd and 7 call. Other than that - and I mean this sincerely - I've seen no glaring mistakes. Their decisions are within the range of reasonable decision-making and, to some degree, you're either going to have grace about that or you're not. Some people - that's just not the way they're wired. They have to pick it apart. And I appreciate that. But that's not me. To the extent that I'm alarmed about anything, it'd be the pass defense, which I have written about. I'm not particularly worried about the offense, but that's just me, others may disagree. I thought the offense would struggle this year. I think it will continue to struggle from hereon. Any games over 400 yards and 30 points, treat those like candy."
First, this is pretty short-sighted. If you're only going to focus on the last couple plays of a game, you're inherently conceding that everything else up to that point went basically as well as could reasonably be expected. I don' think that's the case.
Second, among other things that completely ignores the coaching decisions on how to defend BYU's last three plays. Not just the Hail Mary - it would have been nice to do some different things but it was pretty standard defense - but also the two plays before that that allowed BYU to get into the position to be able to even ATTEMPT the Hail Mary. Or the offensive play calls that led up to that. Perhaps people want to semantic those and not call them "mistakes" but there were plenty of things the coaches could have done differently that made a victory extremely likely.
The same goes for the Illinois game. Even after the third-and-seven play, we had to stop a team for 50 seconds that had, to that point, scored seven points on us. Yet we went with our base coverage that had a safety covering a WR deep. Not to mention continuing to throw - and often stopping the clock - quite a few times in the third and fourth quarters despite being ahead and not having success with the passing game. And for that matter, trying a field goal on fouth down - which is what TA was expecting - wouldn't have been any worse field position or time for Illinois than what they got and would have won the game if good. There is a risk of getting it blocked but it doesn't seem like that much more of a risk than expecting our pass defense to stop anyone. Then we repeated those mistakes again the next week, plus made no attempt to get a first down that would have clinched the game even though we'd just seen their offense go right down the field on us.
So, if you want to semantic it to a glaring "mistake", the one third and seven is definitely the most glaring. But there are PLENTY of other decisions that are very questionable if not outright wrong - some just might not be as recognizable as that one play.
