So many reps, so little time

One other thing I wanted to mention from that Ian Boyd post I linked to last week was something a reader noted in the comments.

Consequence 2: Flyover football is going to take hold even faster…

LSU ran a pass-first spread offense last year and wiped out the rest of the SEC and college football at large. That’s the future. Having a savvy QB playing behind a good line and distributing the ball to NFL WRs trumps pounding the ball to NFL RBs behind a good line with a less savvy or else underutilized QB that has a strong arm and tries to throw up some play-action now and again.

Running a pass-first system actually lends itself to the portal, because if your offense starts to come down to isolating a few WRs in space and protecting your QB to get them the ball then a single offseason is often enough to build the necessary chemistry between thrower and catcher if you have a savvy distributor as your trigger-man.

Teams that aren’t running these sorts of spread passing systems are going to be at a major disadvantage in the portal wars in trying to nab top pass-catchers or grad transfer OL/QBs.

Now, accuracy requires that I point out last season was Burrow’s second at LSU, but Orgeron didn’t commit to the kind of offensive scheme Boyd references there until last offseason.

The $64000 question is whether a single offseason will be enough time for Georgia’s offense (assuming for the sake of argument Newman wins the starting job, although it’s not as if there’s a quarterback on the roster who’s got a lot of on field experience with the receiving corps) to build the necessary chemistry.

There are only so many practices between now and September, and while, yes, there’s all summer to build rapport through voluntary workouts, that doesn’t change the underlying fact that there are only so many practices between now and September.  Which leads me to wonder how right Jake Rowe is about this:

What we’ll be saying after spring: We’re not saying this to be funny, but we won’t be at all surprised if Bulldog fans are complaining about nothing changing. A lot is going to change but will we get to see any of it? Probably not. G-Day has been a passing display each season under Smart, but it’s highly unlikely that he’s going to allow Monken to tip his hand and give other coaches any film to study. There might be more spread concepts and motions, but most of the truly new stuff will be worked on behind the scenes.

As I’ve mentioned previously, LSU wasn’t coy about the new offensive scheme last spring.  Orgeron told the media what they were doing before the spring game and showed some of the new concepts in the game.  It turned out that didn’t help opposing defensive coordinators much.

Do I think Monken is going to flash his entire playbook at G-Day?  Hardly.  Do I think he knows he’s only got a limited number of practices and scrimmages to install his version of the offense between now and Virginia?  That I do.