re: Jacob Hester "call a run"

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Matt Moscona also said LSU would run the ball ALL OVER Ole Miss......

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THIS is why I hate buying rat poison. I don't like all that preseason jawing how we gonna be world beaters. Just go play and how good you are will show up on the field without any mouth running stuff.

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Hester repeatedly said during fall camp how good the run game was going to be this year. He said the people watching practice who had concerns about it were wrong.

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He was wrong.

Flynn said last week that Ole Miss' QB wasn't good enough to beat us. He was wrong.

I do think it's worth making these guys answer the question about how they were so wrong.

Yea, I was just pointing out that the majority of his throws were inside the numbers and a lot were off of RPO. If you go back and watch the Clemson loss they just squatted in that window and Tua couldn’t beat them elsewhere.

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They have QB that is a run threat when they run the RPO or when the QB is not a run threat they run from power formations.

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This is the exact opposite of reality.

QB power and power read are very effective plays when you have a QB who can run. QB power especially is great because it gives you an extra lead blocker without having to bring another player into the box.

Meanwhile RPOs compliment a QB who isn’t a runner because it forces the defense to account for him in some way, even if he’s not a threat to run - and gives the QB an option to burn them if they don’t account for him. A running QB gets that from your zone reads, power reads, etc. while a pocket passer gets it from the RPO.

Hester’s point is not that we should abandon RPO, but that we are over-using it. If you tag every single run play with an RPO, you’re keeping your OL from being as aggressive on downfield blocks as they’d like. This in turn gives the LBs and safeties more time to react to the handoff, allowing them to respect the running threat even less.

On the other hand if you call a fair amount of straight run plays, ideally your OL can fire off the ball and punish those LBs for waiting. If you punish the defense enough for sitting on the pass, eventually they’ll have to commit sooner on runs. This will then open more opportunities to burn them on the actual RPOs.

That’s the ideal outcome, anyway. He has a good point. But it has nothing to do with a pocket passer being ineffective on RPOs.

The other implication from his and Flynn’s comments is that Sloan is too focused on trying to get the perfect call. I think there’s some validity to this. You can see it with the amount of time we spend checking out of plays at the LOS. The RPO tags on almost every run are an extension of the same thing - trying to make sure you always have an “out” if the numbers don’t work out perfectly. There are downsides to this approach.

/rant

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Hester repeatedly said during fall camp how good the run game was going to be this year. He said the people watching practice who had concerns about it were wrong.

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He was wrong.

Flynn said last week that Ole Miss' QB wasn't good enough to beat us. He was wrong.

I do think it's worth making these guys answer the question about how they were so wrong.

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That’s fair, but they also made some other interesting points, not sure if it’s in the clip OP posted, about the type of stuff we were running when they watched those practices. I believe he said that the power running game was a big focus at the time. I know they said that we were running a ton of wildcat packages with Ju’Juan Johnson in fall camp, something we haven’t seen at all in the games. (I think we might have run it once actually, maybe against Clemson?)

So part of their confusion seemed to be.. why aren’t we running any of this stuff we spent a bunch of time working on during camp?

I agree with this perspective. We haven’t been “running” the ball from a singular effort. It’s out of the pistol with the QB give or go. Agree that this puts the O-line in pass pro while running.

VOLS run almost nothing but RPOs and have had a top 5-10 rushing offense every year under Heupel. They’ve become very creative with how they use TE’s in the run game and have been able to establish themselves as a ground and pound ball club that can air it out at a moments notice.

LSU’s issues lie elsewhere imo, not sure if it’s an overall team culture deal or just horrific playcalling

Hallelujah.

You got the numbers. Run the fricking ball. He’ll Les ran it when we didn’t have numbers better than this powder puff group.

No need to run a RPO with a QB that is not a threat to run. It makes no sense. Nuss needs to be in a pro style offense. Get under center in downs where you want to confuse the defense on whether it’s a run or pass and on obvious passing downs, go shotgun.

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Safeties are creeping up because they are not afraid of getting beat deep. The OM defensive players were constantly cheating up and LSU never took advantage

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Because our QB clearly couldn't throw the ball more than thirty yards.

ETA: The passes into double and triple coverage last week were simply astonishing.