It could be that we put that motion in for the same reason that more balanced spread attacks sometimes do, just to help the QB read the defense. The half dozen or so times we ran that motion in the first half, it resulted in a ton of big plays. The FSU defense didn't really react to it at all, pre-snap, except once a corner cheated up, then got burned by Dwyer even though he was in the right place. There was once the motion resulted in the FSU defense just being hilariously misaligned, and Ant took that one up the sideline 60 yards. On the Dwyer play with the same motion that caused the corner to come up, Ant didn't actually complete the motion, he cut it off at the snap and reversed direction, which I found interesting. Also interestingly, IIRC, we completed all of our successful passes in the 2nd half after FSU made adjustments. How much of that was enabled by the motion, I don't know, but it makes me think it was related.
If it is the case that we haven't seen that motion since then (and I have no clue whether that's the case) my guess would be that it's because it makes the snap that much easier to time, which is something we have struggled with, and the sideline momentum and the cut the A-back executes may make it more difficult to get the pitch relationship right. Where recent CPJ teams seem to lateral and sometimes even basically forward-pitch the ball, Nesbitt is throwing it backwards quite a bit in this game. Sometimes it almost looks like he's pitching it right behind him. Could be that in year 2 of the system that the familiarity with that relationship wasn't tight enough or the personnel weren't the right fit yet to risk pressing it close to the line like we do today. Could be that it was necessary because the A-back just couldn't get forward fast enough and the QB's hand was forced by a defender. Could also be because CPJ thinks the 4th down time out play is a more effective way to combat people timing the snap. Not sure how much of it was by design and in which way, because I ain't CPJ or Nesbitt (I'm Nicolas Cage).
So that's a layman's guess, anyways. I'd be interested to hear from some of our option gurus and former players on what the real cause was, if they are still hangin' around in the offseason. Doesn't
@Longestdays do a bunch of TO analysis?