They bought the DVD, but they didn’t buy the “System”.

Over at Smart Football, Chris Brown takes a look at the mess that is the Auburn offense.  His conclusion is that Tony Franklin hasn’t done a good job of selling his offensive strategies to his fellow coaches on the Auburn staff and that Tuberville was never buying the entire package of what Franklin was offering in the first place.

… Every coach I speak to says the same thing: I don’t know what they are doing at Auburn, but it ain’t the Airraid. So what’s going on? I’m not an insider, but my best sense is that the other coaches on the staff (including Tuberville) never bought into the system – maybe because Franklin did a poor job selling it internally, or maybe he thought he didn’t have to – and now their offense is simpl (sic) a muddle, a grab-bag of pseudo-spread garbage. This seems to be general sentiment among the smart money in football. For example, as one high school coach, who is also a client of the Tony Franklin system, said:

I live in Alabama and I attended the game between [Auburn] and Tennessee. I also am an offensive coordinator for a high school football team that runs the [Tony Franklin System]. From what I have seen this year from AU, this is not the system.

It seems to me that Franklin is getting told what to run on offense. Tubs wants to run the ball to set up the pass and Franklin likes to set up the run with the pass. I never saw any hurry up offense from AU at this weeks game . . . . Franklin has said that to be sucessful in this offense you must be good at the screens, and get a lot of snaps (maybe like 80) on offense. I dont think I have seen but maybe four screens all year and I don’t think they are close to getting 80 snaps.

I’m not ready to blame Tommy Tuberville; he’s an extremely smart guy and coach. But I do wonder: why in the world would you bring a guy in who knows one system extremely well but one system only, and then not run what he knows? And even if the pressure was on from the AD or the boosters to go spread, why not pick a twig off the Rich Rodriguez or “running-spread” tree? Instead, they picked a guy whose background was in a pass-first spread, and then they shelve the passing concepts. It really boggles my mind.

Last night sure didn’t help.

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UPDATE: This can’t be good.

… When Tuberville apologized to his players for not giving them a chance to win in the second half, that was almost certainly pointed at Franklin. Tuberville doesn’t call offensive plays.

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Perverse thought of the morning

I guess we’d best hope that the Dawgs don’t get caught in the Tennessee game looking ahead to playing Vanderbilt.

This just in: SEC offenses suck.

Watching game after game yesterday, it’s more and more apparent that many of the offenses in this conference are subpar.  Kentucky, Auburn, Vanderbilt and Tennessee all managed less than 300 yards of total offense and only Florida and South Carolina managed to score at least thirty points.

The tale for the season told by national stats is even more revealing.  There are only two SEC teams ranked in the top 40 nationally in total offense:  LSU at #28 and Georgia at #30.  As for scoring offense, it’s little better, with three in the top thirty.  All in all, it’s not a pretty picture.

Are SEC defenses that good?  Well, there are eight of the conference’s members showing up in the top 25 for total defense and six in the top 25 for scoring defense, so it’s hard to deny that’s a factor, but after watching Kentucky, Vanderbilt and Auburn display their wares yesterday, the visual evidence would indicate that many SEC offenses are simply inept.  There are a lot of bad SEC quarterbacks seeing the field.  And guess what?  Only two SEC quarterbacks (Tebow and Stafford) make the top thirty nationally in passing efficiency.