Offence

Team still doesn't know how to win close games against good teams with any consistency.

Cobb is not feature back material. He won't take on physical contact to get the first down, he can't secure the football, and he's useless on short-yardage runs.

Yeah Cobb fumbled twice, so what! They were both deep in the other teams zone and did the defence do their job... a big resounding NO! I could not see the second fumble by Cobb but it must have been close. Get off this guys case! He got 166 yards, he tried to stretch into the end zone like countless other players and the ball was knocked loose...so they say. The first fumble he was swinging around on the tackle and someone got lucky and pulled the ball loose. Why not jump on the defense when Baggs went out for a burger and fries then caught the ball and walked into the endzone for the score. How about Dressler catching the ball on the 9 yard line then rolling towards the endzone waiting to be hit then realizes no one is near him and he gets back up and into the end zone. Come on that freekin bend but don't break is BS! I am really beginning to doubt Marshall's capabilities. Maybe that is why he could not land a head coaching position! He should be going to Obie and telling him that crap players produce crap football no matter which way you cook it! Maybe he has but I am totally fed up with this type of football!

Now for the most overrated and overpaid QB in the league. I do not care what any of you say but this guy has thrown an interception in the opposing teams endzone five of the last six games. He threw an incomplete to McDaniel when he was wide open. He continually throws into double coverage and gets picked off because he broadcasts his throws. He is not a money QB! I would hope he proves me wrong but even the people next to me were stunned when I called the intercept on the last play before it happened. This guy reads like a bad novel!

As for coaching I do not know, we have a lot of good talent on this club save for the defensive backfield and QB. We had four sacks so it can't be the line. The o line opened up so Cobb still got 166 yards. Who made the biggest goofs of the night, the defensive backfield and the QB! Cobb fumbled but deep in the opposing teams end surely the defense should have been able to hold them from their own 10 and 25 yard line. MARSHALL!

Blog:
Dressler points to exactly what our offence has been doing for weeks. Passing like crazy hoping something breaks. Dressler is saying you can get great results from short stuff which turns into long stuff.
My criticism of Mike Gibson is based on what has happened since he got here...not just yesterday's game where players have to take a huge part of the blame for the loss.
I happen to think Gibson is part of the reason our 6-6 record this year could very well end up 9-9 like it did last season. I remember some posters criticising Gibson's hiring two years ago for the very same reasons that we are criticising him for now. And that we also criticized him for last season.
To me he does not have a sense of game flow and a sense of opportunity at the appropriate time. Those talents go beyond picking out random plays from a list.
If you are happy with him....OK. Many of us are not.

Who says I’m happy with Gibson? I’m not a fan of his at all – a point I stated in my post before this one – but that doesn’t mean that last night’s loss was his fault. Taken as a whole, I agree with most of the comments about him, but this thread was started after last night’s loss, what exactly happened last night to ignite the OP to decide, “Hey, you know what? We lost, and I need to flame Mike Gibson for it.” What part of the play calling last night cost us the game?

I agree with this assessment. Gibson is still rather vanilla but Glenn hasn’t been consistent with strong passes down field. Cobb’s second fumble and going out of bounds before the first down marker were mental mistakes that are not acceptable. Still, had our Secondary not been so generous on second and long there would have been two and outs instead of big first downs.

I don't know why the Ticats used so many vertical passes at crunch time.

We started the game using short wide passes to march us to 2 TDs
and a third series of passes like that got us into field goal position.

[ and the receivers can go out of bounds to stop the clock. ]

Essentially, Gibson deviates from what is working far too often during games.

The play-action game off rolls that attacked short and intermediate zones was very successful. This play-action-into-deep-armpunt nonsense DOES NOT WORK because the plays involved are too predictable. We do not have enough rubs and crossing routes featured in the attack because it’s either balls-to-the-wall deep passes or flat dumping.

The hitch screen routine does have some merit, but when Gibson overdoes it (as he did against the Als), it becomes predictable and easy to attack.

The running game worked well last night when we saw cutbacks by Cobb off-tackle. The third-down stuff we saw was a poorly designed and executed play involved Cobb running up the buttcrack of a guard.

We do not have much success zone blocking as we do when it’s big-on-big. Cobb’s tentativeness really comes into play when the line isn’t knocking people back. Simply put, there is too much interior penetration during zone blocks. The line spacing when a zone block is called tips the d-line too much and there are simply not enough seams created when the defense stuffs the line.

When drives work, you continue to run iterations of successful plays, changing them slightly re option routes, pre-snap motion, and personnel groupings to disguise them. You DON’T abandon what works unless the offense is failing to execute. Trestman/Milanovich, Dickenson, and Berry are the elite offensive playcallers in the league because they find weaknesses to attack, they change tack in-game when personnel shifts on defence open new aspects to attack, and they are ruthless.

Gibson? He’s a ditherer. Against equal or inferior opposition, unless the offense executes out of its head, we have minimal margin for error. We are not ingenious enough because the guy running the offense gets too clever for himself running a sandwich-spread offense.

In terms of the politics of the coaching staff, it must be fixed in the off-season. We are second-tier in approach and when we see turnovers and breakdowns, it is clear to all that we aren’t close to being November-ready against the elite of the league!

Oski Wee Wee,

Russ

You forgot something …BLOCKING.

But I agree concerning offensive creativity. Football is a game of planning and execution. Look at Montreal. Their offense is quite basic IMO but they execute extremely well. Why do they execute so well? Excellent coaching, excellent payers, studying their opponents and experience.

Fantastic post, Russ. Great observation and analysis.

I would add in response to seymour that elite CFL offenses only look basic because the execution is high level and the deviations from previous plays are more subtle and not so grossly apparent as the intermediate out / vertical chuck feast-or-famine Gibson approach. In actuality, they are very complex with respect to formation shifts, options / extensions, pre-snap motion, and picks / rubs, attention to which should be the no. 1 priority of the offensive coordinator. An effective offense gains its complexity not by college-level attempts to deceive the opposition through simple opposition (one play, then another different play, then a third different play), but by subtly modifying successful plays to create uncertainty in a defense via the discrepancy between pre-snap look and post-snap play: what you see before the ball is snapped may lead to a number of incrementally different plays / routes / options after the ball is snapped. That is where good football is, folks: in the details, the nuances, the minute adjustments that allow your players to go out and attack the play to the best of their ability instead of having to be superhuman just to get open or secure a catch.

Good offensive teams’ offenses look basic because they make everything look easy. Mediocre offenses put a tremendous amount of pressure on individual players to be superlative snap to snap instead of devising ways to create space, separation, and opportunity for their players through shrewd scheming, ruthless playcalling, and in-play subtlety.

If I may add one point to this well thought out post, Glenn doesn’t have the arm for ‘deep armpunt’ plays anyway.

blog: just for the record:

I did not write this…it’s someone else’s post

mr62cats wrote:Having said all that, how can anyone blame last night’s loss – as the OP seems to be doing – on Mike Gibson’s play calling? We can talk about creativity all we want, but the team may have scored close to 40 points without Cobb’s fumbles. The loss last night, if it’s on anyone’s head, is on Cobb’s, not Gibson’s. I’m not a fan of Mike Gibson either, but he was not to blame for the loss yesterday. If the Cats had won yesterday, would people be criticizing the OC? If Cobb doesn’t fumble, and the Cats score 39 points, are we talking about how predictable the offense is?"

Russ: You took the words right out of my mouth!!! :lol: :lol: :lol: :wink: :wink: :wink:

Excellent analysis.

I’m just guessing here - I’d need to watch the game again to be sure - but maybe the 'Riders were covering the sidelines to prevent us from stopping the clock, leaving the middle more open? Isn’t that pretty much SOP at the end of the half and game?