Arizona Football: The coaching staff needs to wake up and adjust

Arizona Football offensive coordinator Noel Mazzone needs to take a page out of NFL and other playbooks and build an offense around the strengths of his players.

It’s like the Arizona Football coaching staff doesn’t know what they have in their back pocket. Coming in after the firing of Rich Rodriguez, they did not capitalize on the prior year’s success.

Early on, I had suggested Arizona adopt and tweak the last regime’s playbook because it was successful with the talent they were adopting. But they made a decision to push their players into a scheme that may not fit the team. This year’s Wildcats lost a lot of Rodriguez’s recruits, and along with them, experience and that also I feel has hurt the team.

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That’s to be expected you would say, but it has proved to not be the best way to go to win games now, which Arizona was expected to do, and what head coach Kevin Sumlin has stated many times.

He hasn’t asked for patience, he fully expected to win games and the Wildcats were on a three-game winning streak. But then were out-coached by both Washington’s Chris Peterson and USC’s Clay Helton. Helton, who heavily recruited Tate, and Peterson has watched Tate since he started playing in the Pac-12.

Both Washington and then USC’s coaching staff realized that they could blitz Arizona’s QB and there was no answer for it.

Tate threw the ball away a lot in the first half against the Huskies and ran the ball out-of-bounds, but he wasn’t sacked as much as against USC. Sumlin said they talked to Tate about running forward in the pocket and that’s what he did in the Coliseum, but the pocket closed in around him, six times, and around Gunnell just once. There was a lot of criticism, heavy criticism solely thrown at the QB for the losses in both games, but you all know football is a team sport managed by coaches.

As J.J. Taylor mentioned post-game, the game plan needs improvement, “We got six defenders and they were bringing seven. We can only block six of them, so there is one man free every time. So we just you know we gotta just game plan for that next time.”

For a team to win games, their Offensive Coordinator has the ability to create offensive schemes that put his quarterback in a position to be successful. Either you build the scheme around a quarterback to be successful, or you push your quarterback into a scheme that you feel works and keep pushing it on the team even though it isn’t working.

Grant Gunnell is up next season and beyond, and just changing out the quarterback didn’t solve the pressure issues as he was intercepted on the first play and was sacked and rattled as well.

With the offensive line, we know they are playing as hard as they can trying to keep the quarterback in a comfortable pocket, but on Saturday they didn’t do a great job in providing enough time to pass the ball. To make matters worse, the wide receivers were unable to get open, and it’s showing something isn’t working with this offense and something needs to change quickly. That would be the game plan.

Sumlin put it this way:

"“We’ve gotta be better up front. We got to the perimeter a couple times early in the game. We weren’t consistent in the running game, which put more pressure on us to be able to throw the ball. They pressured us with edge blitzes, safety blitzes. A couple times it was just a flat bust in protection, where we just turned a guy loose off the edge.”"

If you run RPO, you must have protection for your quarterback and also have many options as a QB. Yes, Tate maybe should have stayed in the pocket longer or ran forward against Washington, but he did that against USC and the pocket collapsed around him over and over again.

The game plan cannot be too predictable in the Pac-12, and for Tate to take off, he needs a play that gives him ample time and space to make plays. For Grant to be successful, he too will need a stronger O-Line, a more imaginative playbook that is not predictable and receivers who can flat get open.

We’ll give credit for the attempted trick play where Tate passed to Jamarye Joiner for a long pass to the end zone. That threw the Trojans defense for a loop, but they were able to get to the ball as well and break up the play.

Also, why didn’t we see Cedric Pederson earlier? Nate Tilford? We didn’t see Tayvian Cunningham until late in the game, and Tay had made some great plays in Arizona’s wins. Multiple running backs in the same play? Being predictable with fake runs, and passes or lateral screen passes will not cut it and it is not going to win games for the Cats moving forward. Teams have figured out Tate and Arizona to a degree.

Former head coach Rich Rodriguez and his assistant Rod Smith knew why they recruited Tate at the quarterback position. He is dynamic and unpredictable, but effective and wants to win at any cost.

Jacob Alsadek, Michael Eletise, and crew were hell-bent on helping Tate do his thing in 2017. Alsadek took no prisoners on the O-Line, he took it personally when things didn’t go correctly. But he graduated and Eletise was hardly played last season and transferred to the University of Hawaii.

If you spoke to Coach Smith about Tate, he would have nothing but glowing reports on Tate and his abilities. And that’s what he and Rodriguez planed for once they realized what was possible in 2017. Rodriguez was against Tate running at first by his own admission, but then he geared his offense towards Tate’s abilities and it produced seven wins in a year no one thought that was possible.

Rodriquez called the plays for his offense. His feisty personality and all, he took all or most of the blame when the Wildcats lost games. Rich wasn’t chained to a few schemes, he would set up downfield plays which opened the field for Tate to run or lob a long pass with the confidence that his receivers would go grab the ball.

Wide receivers like Shawn Poindexter would shine, and defenses didn’t know what was coming a lot of the time. Even though Rodriguez also ran lateral screen plays, he shook up the offense to help Tate and his offense was more effective.

Greg Hansen of Tucson.com, agrees with me in a way. He feels that Rodriguez knew the recipe to give Tate the best chance to succeed and thus the Wildcats to succeed. In his article, Hansen mentions and lists Tate’s high school and college (2017) rushing yards by game, and this is what Rod Smith couldn’t wait for at Arizona. Here are a few excerpts:

"But something has gone terribly wrong.There has never been anything like this in Pac-12 football. Not in 40 years, not in 100 years. No offensive talent like Khalil Tate has been so fully blunted and ultimately, last week, benched.It’s like using Wilt Chamberlain as a point guard.I will never buy the theory that opposing defenses figured Tate out. Nuts.Someone has messed with the recipe. What once was sweet and irresistible has lost its flavor.Once Rich Rodriguez was shown the door, someone — either Tate or his advisers or Arizona coaches Kevin Sumlin and Noel Mazzone — decided that Tate would be a passer and stay out of harm’s way."

Totally aligned with Hansen here.

Mazzone’s RPO plan garners vulnerability if the opponent’s defense plans to pressure and blitz the entire game. This “players must bend to my scheme” is sheer nonsense. Isn’t the better approach looking at your ingredients and figuring out the best recipe to produce the best dish?

Now I have been a huge proponent of the short pass plays to tight ends, and lord it took years for Rodriguez to hear me out and agree with me, but it paid off in Bryce Wolma, Jamie Nunley and others had plays that worked when drawn up for them.

This season, we’ve rarely have seen tight end centered plays, or even have them as an option. Instead, Wolma is running blocks for his running backs more than anything else.

The bottom line is that Sumlin gives OC/QB Mazzone full control of the play calling. Mazzone seems to want Khalil to stay in the pocket and you saw what happened when he did. A player I won’t mention completely missed his assignment twice from the snap, turned around in a circle and Khalil got sacked. Those play calls are played out and it appeared that the defense could again read our plays just like they did last week.

I still feel we have the best QB in the PAC-12, and one of the most dynamic QBs in college football on the team, and if the coaches don’t have the ability to plan an effective game plan, then that’s on them and not either QB. Grant got the same results, with the same plays and got sacked and banged up when he got in the game.

It wasn’t until SC put in their 2nd/3rd string defense that receivers we’re able to get open quicker, putting Tilford in, using WR Brian Casteel, he was able to start moving downfield and ultimately score. USC watched Washington win with blitzes and it worked so they used the same game plan and Mazzone didn’t adjust.

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While Tate is running out of bounds, he is actually still looking for an open receiver and doesn’t find one. Same with Gunnell although he had Casteel close by as an outlet option which helped him and I hope was a lesson learned for next week.

Again, football teams that win are in sync and have coaches who make the proper adjustments. This is not a QB problem in as much as it is a game plan and protection problem. Let’s fix it, shall we?

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