Assessing 2011's field generals, in no particular order. Today: West Virginia junior Geno Smith.
? Typecasting. Smith started every game last year, even attempted almost every significant pass, and struck more than one observer as the best quarterback in the Big East. Still, from here, his third season in Morgantown looks like a blank slate.
In the first place, he spent all of 2010 hobbled by effects of surgery on a stress fracture in his left foot that he suffered as a freshman, forcing a second surgery earlier this year. In the second, the balanced, mix-n-match scheme Smith operated last year under offensive coordinator Jeff Mullen is giving way to the up-tempo, wide open, bar-the-door passing scheme newly minted head coach Dana Holgorsen has piloted into the stratosphere at his previous stops.
Even before he was promoted to the top job of the most bizarre soap opera of the offseason, the move to make Holgorsen offensive coordinator/coach-in-waiting was driven by an offense that staggered in ranked 67th nationally in total offense and 78th in scoring opposite one of the best statistical defenses in the country, failing to top 14 points in any of the Mountaineers' four losses. In Smith, Holgorsen has a tall, efficient and fully healthy slinger who's no stranger to putting the ball in the air from the shotgun. If one of the chief complaints under the old regime was that it was too boring, that problem has certainly been solved, in more ways than one.
? At his best? By West Virginia standards, the previous philosophy was fairly pass-happy in its own right: Smith's first year as a starter was the second-best in school history for completions (241) and touchdown passes (24) in a single season, and left him No. 4 on the single-season list for total offense (2,980 yards passing and rushing). The story was the same relative to the rest of the Big East, where Smith finished No. 1 in completion percentage, touchdown:interception ratio and pass efficiency and second in yards and touchdowns.
As those numbers suggest, Smith can gun it a little when inclined, as he was when he put the ball in the air 45 times for 316 yards in the process of rallying the Mountaineers out of a 21-6 fourth quarter hole and on to an overtime win at Marshall in September. The ideal vision in Mullen's scheme, though, was of a steady hand on the throttle, with the running game doing the work of the engine. The run:pass ration skewed heavily toward the run during the Mountaineers' four-game winning streak to close the regular season, a stretch also produced three of Smith's most efficient afternoons as a passer ? including his 9-of-12, 212-yard, three-touchdown effort at Pittsburgh the day after Thanksgiving, officially the single most efficient passing performance by any quarterback all season.
Not that Holgorsen has anything against "efficiency," strictly speaking, but in his mind, 9-of-12 for 212 yards sounds more like a nice first quarter box score than an ideal game. Including his "Air Raid" days on Mike Leach's staff at Texas Tech and a two-year stint overseeing Case Keenum's record-breaking pace at Houston, Holgorsen has been a key element in the brain trust of offenses that finished among the top three nationally in both passing and total offense each of the last four years, with three different quarterbacks at three different schools. One similarity between Holgorsen's scheme and Mullen's: Both include a lot of bubble screens and other constraint plays to get the ball in the hands of small, quick receivers. The difference is that Holgorsen might call it 50 times.
? At his worst... Even the scouts who labeled Smith as a "dual-threat" out of high school never confused him for the second coming of Pat White, and his rushing numbers for the season ?�106 carries for 249 yards (including sacks) with zero touchdowns ? almost disqualify him from those ranks altogether. Under the circumstances, though, he's more than an adequate athlete. The lingering questions are all about his adjustment to the new system, his downfield arm strength and especially his consistency.
As brilliant as he looked when things were going right, Smith could be absolutely brutal when they weren't: The Mountaineers' losses at the hands of LSU, Syracuse, UConn and N.C. State in the bowl game were four of Smith's five lowest-rated performances of the season. Accordingly, they were also the Mountaineers' four lowest-scoring performances of the season, despite consistently solid outings from the defense. Only once, with a three-INT flop in a 19-14 loss to Syracuse, did it resemble a total meltdown. But with the exception of the Backyard Brawl win over Pitt, the tendency to stall out for entire quarters at a time against competent defenses persisted through the bowl game.
? Fun Fact. Frankly, a lot of guys can inspire pundits to float them as "dark horse" Heisman candidates, especially the locals. But I dare you to me find another quarterback who's inspired a full-length homage from a local beat writer set to the tune of "The Ballad of John and Yoko":
Decided to hand it to Noel
But that big toe of his is on the fritz
His digit got dinged down on the Bayou
Man, could we please pick up a blitz?Mr. Furfari, you know it ain't easy
You know how hard it is to QB
If I don't get this offense together
They're gonna keep blamin' meMade a lighting trip against Marshall
Actually made two so we could survive
But this is a different offense without RichRod
Every night we ain't gonna score 35
John Lennon, Colin Dunlap is not. But as it turns out, he does know a little something about crucifying.
? What to expect in the fall. With Holgorsen pulling the strings, even a mediocre passer would be in line for PlayStation-esque numbers on the strength of his coach's reputation and sheer quantity alone. If Holgo could have handpicked any quarterback in the Big East for his system, though, Smith's success as a first-year starter in a far less stat-friendly system still would have made him the obvious choice. With Tavon Austin's emergence as a legitimate big-play threat last November and the lo-fi nature of Big East offenses, in general, it's almost impossible to imagine Smith not delivering the most prolific numbers in the league as long as he's healthy.
If the yards and touchdowns are a given, though, it's not as certain that Smith can deliver them with the same efficiency on display through most of last season, without a corresponding rise in the number of turnovers and other mistakes that threaten to undermine a rebuilding defense. Outside of the Syracuse game, aversion to disaster was one of Smith's best traits; as an upperclassmen, those instincts should only be more sharpened. He may not be Pat White, but if Smith rides the learning curve into a comfort zone in the "Air Raid," the final product on the scoreboard may begin to look a lot like the "Spread 'n Shred" of a few years back, anyway.
- - -
Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
Sarah Michelle Gellar Olivia Munn Melissa Sagemiller Roselyn Sanchez Soft Cell
No comments:
Post a Comment