I always liked A-Rod, but our offense never flourished under him. Grimes is now the OC at Baylor. Interesting what one can pick up on Facebook. How long was Grimes the OC at BYU? Was he successful?
I think A-Rod will do well at BYU. I wish Travis Wilson would have learned to throw the ball better under A-Rod, but I guess throwing motion is kinda built in before college.
We will not lose to BYU while A-Rod is OC. Scalley vs A-Rod is a huge mismatch in my opinion.
I guess I wouldn’t think to look for info about BYU in the general college football thread, when we have a thread devoted to BYU, our historical but fading rivalry.
I think he means we have a whole BYU/TDS category. Since that’s football dominated, the idea is that it should belong there, not just a general football non-Utah thread that someone has to find and is mixed with all the Alabama and other school talk that don’t have categories.
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Yes.
I never liked A-Rod (for his pathetic offense). I truly thought he was a huge part of our problem on offense. His play-calling sucked and he didn’t seem to be able to mold the offense around our QB’s strengths and weaknesses. I was SO happy to see him go to the Why.
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to be fair wasn’t this during our transition from the MWC to the PAC12? I think AROD was handicapped to some degree because of lack of talent. But when you compare this to Norm Chows productivity with one armed tied behind his back, AROD fell on his face.
Utah’s QBs largely seemed to regress under his coaching. Travis Wilson, Terence Cain, Troy Wiliams come to mind.
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Liking A-Rod doesn’t mean I think he’s an effective OC.
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I thought it was funny how A-Rod kept accepting positions on opponents’ coaching staffs and then turn around and come back to Whittingham a couple weeks afterward.
I’d like to think it was a clever way to get opponents’ playbooks but I don’t think it was.
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if the rumors were true AROD was going through some tough personal issues at the time. I cant blame him for being indecisive.
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I have tried to explain to people how Kyle impacts the offense with his philosophy for winning. I rarely agree with Gordon Monsen, but despite the hyperbole, he pretty much nails what I saw in this article about ARod.
“Whittingham, a great head coach who has always favored defense over offense, was afraid to allow his offensive assistants to hit the throttle hard, considering the worst thing that could happen to any team — namely, the defensive side — was for a quarterback to throw a pick. That was death. And the dark overlord — we use that term at least partially endearingly — stressed to players and coaches alike to avoid putting reward ahead of risk when it came to advancing the ball.
Taking those kinds of chances, putting Utah’s defense in disadvantageous positions, wouldn’t just stir a scolding from the lead guy, it would conjure deep in the bowels of the football offices a reaction from him that included steam off the brow, the spinning around of his head, round and round and round, along with projectile vomiting, and other unspeakable things.”
you’ll always hear Whitt say that other than the final score the greatest predictor of an outcome of a game is the turnover margin. that philosophy while not always sexy has paid great dividends for Utah
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I think an offensive coordinator will mostly look as good as the talent he has and the opposing defense faced. Sometimes play calling is a factor, but mostly it’s execution… which requires talent.
When you get to the P5 level, it’s more like the G-league in the NBA. D-coordinators know what they’re doing, they know how to take away 1st, 2nd & 3rd options.
So, A-Rod will probably look awesome against some teams, and mediocre against others.
That’s the predicament they’re in. 2020 was a dream season for them - easy competition, only one stubbed toe. When they mix in the P5s again, it will get tougher, especially with Wilson & others gone.
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Kyle’s dad once said the ideal offense to compliment Utah’s defense would be the Air Force wishbone / flexbone. Keep it on the ground, grind up clock, etc.
The problem is at the P5 level - like Utah was, at least on defense in the last years of our MWC era - those offenses are easy to negate, with the right prep.
Kyle got a taste of an aerial attack he’d be fine with when Alex Smith was here under Urban. And then we went through the turnstile of OCs in search of replicating that, but an Alex Smith doesn’t come around that often, and the defenses he’d face in the PAC are much more adept than what we faced in '03 & '04.
Ludwig 2.0 is more than capable of having a good-enough offense for us to try to get to the next rung in the ladder, especially now that we’re getting upgraded talent (in the form of four 4 star QBs, even if they’re transfers) and we’re seriously in the hunt for good RBs and (hopefully) will get in the hunt for more TEs (thank you Brandt Kuithe!) and WR talent at Bryon Thompson’s level & above.
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