Our short yardage issues have been a problem for years now, and frankly it’s a tired excuse from Clawson. Sure, it’s going to be more difficult to convert when we hand the ball off to a RB that is 3-5 yards behind the LOS while slow walking the mesh - it’s the dumbest shit ever. The off tackle rushing in short yardage is also ineffective and it needs to stop (it’s never worked that I can remember). The simple play will probably work, but we just don’t want to make it easy on ourselves and choose the more difficult and elaborate scheme for whatever reason. It’s the most frustrating thing we do, IMHO. Handing it to Mitch for a QB sneak in those situations is also mind boggling when we have the RBs that we do.
One big complaint I have with Coach R and Clawson is that we don’t seem to change or adapt our offensive methodology as we get farther down the field. I get the slow mesh RPO when you have a much longer field to work with, but those same plays simply do not work the same way when the defense has less field to cover. You’d think with Clawson being driven by data that he and Coach R would change this, seeing as though we have the worst red zone scoring offense in all of FBS this year. We don’t seem to play to our strengths and instead rely on the game plan without making the necessary adjustments when things aren’t working. Really disappointed in the job they’ve done this year. Good programs don’t fall back this far after 10 seasons, NIL or not (and they both obviously messed up bigly thinking Mitch was the answer at QB, despite him playing well enough for us to win last night). I’m confident we will turn it around as we have in the past under Clawson, but we have some obstacles now that we haven’t had before.
