Obviously, if you have the ball at the one yard-line and four opportunities to stick it in and you can’t do it, you can’t feel too happy with how things turned out.
Moral victories are for fools. There’s no such thing as a moral victory - only wins and losses. That was my position immediately following the Penn State game and it’s my position today as well. Like today, in that game, the home team did not play very well and was definitely there to be beaten. Unfortunately, we were not good enough to pull it off in either instance.
That said, you have to be excited by what you saw from Kenny Pickett today. He looks like a legitimate quarterback and we haven’t had a guy look like a legitimately good quarterback all season long.
He obviously has a long way to go in his development, but he certainly has some tools – there is no doubt about that.
Honestly, I don’t blame the coaches for bringing him along as slowly as they possibly could. It is easy to say that we would be much further along if we had just played him earlier in the season, but I don’t know anyone could possibly say that with any degree of certainty?
I also don’t blame the coaches for keeping it pretty simple down by the goal line. I’ve been pretty hard on Watson, but in this instance he has a quarterback who probably knows what, maybe 60% of the plays?
There’s not a lot we could have done there.
Now, I do think they could have run a bootleg on first down. That gives the kid a run/pass option. I’m sure they feared that he would lose eight or 10 yards on the boot, but everyone knew Virginia Tech was going to be hyper aggressive there - shooting all gaps - and I think that would have given them a chance to score.
I especially object to taking a power back like Hall and running him parallel to the line of scrimmage. You have to play downhill there. With everyone shooting gaps, a power guy like Hall has no chance.
Still, for how limited they clearly were in that spot, those calls were not atrocious. It’s nowhere near as bad as what happened last week against North Carolina.
Moral victories are for fools. There’s no such thing as a moral victory - only wins and losses. That was my position immediately following the Penn State game and it’s my position today as well. Like today, in that game, the home team did not play very well and was definitely there to be beaten. Unfortunately, we were not good enough to pull it off in either instance.
That said, you have to be excited by what you saw from Kenny Pickett today. He looks like a legitimate quarterback and we haven’t had a guy look like a legitimately good quarterback all season long.
He obviously has a long way to go in his development, but he certainly has some tools – there is no doubt about that.
Honestly, I don’t blame the coaches for bringing him along as slowly as they possibly could. It is easy to say that we would be much further along if we had just played him earlier in the season, but I don’t know anyone could possibly say that with any degree of certainty?
I also don’t blame the coaches for keeping it pretty simple down by the goal line. I’ve been pretty hard on Watson, but in this instance he has a quarterback who probably knows what, maybe 60% of the plays?
There’s not a lot we could have done there.
Now, I do think they could have run a bootleg on first down. That gives the kid a run/pass option. I’m sure they feared that he would lose eight or 10 yards on the boot, but everyone knew Virginia Tech was going to be hyper aggressive there - shooting all gaps - and I think that would have given them a chance to score.
I especially object to taking a power back like Hall and running him parallel to the line of scrimmage. You have to play downhill there. With everyone shooting gaps, a power guy like Hall has no chance.
Still, for how limited they clearly were in that spot, those calls were not atrocious. It’s nowhere near as bad as what happened last week against North Carolina.
