I wasn't there, but a couple of thoughts.JohnW wrote: ↑Sun Aug 19, 2018 12:05 pmAnd no write up on the Furman site either. Maybe less said the better about this particular scrimmage. It's been a day and I still can't figure out what they were trying to accomplish in the live scrimmage portion. I thought the main best thing Coach Hendricks did was to re-establish an identity. This is who we are as an offense. We're going to lineup and run right at you, stop that; were going outside, contain that; we're going to beat you down field; not a deep hand-off to a single back out of the frigging shotgun and hope he finds a hole, pass happy junk I saw yesterday.
1. Our likely starting QB didn't play.
2. Coach Hendrix said that they held some guys out. That is, don't subject some of your best players to game-like conditions when the only thing you may gain from that is an injury. I don't know who was held out, but he did something similar last season.
3. He noted that a lot of the offense was "situational." That is going to heavily change the playbook. In a two-minute offense, the team is trying to score, but maybe only runs a handful of base plays that don't require a lot of sophisticated formations, motions, and personnel groups. Most of the time, the team will be passing to increase the likelihood of stopping the clock.
In a four-minute offense (something Furman was extremely good at last year), the offense is by design trying to slow things down. They aren't going to be running a lot of risky plays or throwing the ball downfield. The runners will sacrifice yards for time. Running an option pitch play may reap bigger rewards, but with a lead late in the game you'll be happy with a simple fullback run and taking 40 seconds off the clock.
So, it's not surprising the offense looked basic or vanilla. Situational football by its nature demands a vastly scaled down playbook with a specific purpose in mind. Now, it doesn't sound like they were particularly good at running those plays, but I don't think we should read into the fact that we are going to a pre-Hendrix type of offense.
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