Athlon Preview

As much as it would suck we are probably a program that is best positioned for a redshirted football season.
 
Jerry the Jacket said:
Probably won't play any games this year but if we do, look for another year like last year. We just don't have the horses to be really good. I'm hoping we can show some improvement, if not, then you got to start questioning the Collins hire. I hope I am wrong about all of this, but that is just where my head is right now.

Go Jackets!
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I rewatched the NC State game last night. There is a lot of reason for optimism about the future. Line play was significantly improved over the start of the year despite all the losses due to injury. Graham showed flashes of brilliance - he has all the tools, but played like, well, a freshman. Mason is a beast, and we were down arguably our top 2 receivers (Camp and Ezzard). And let’s not forget that we have Gibbs coming to the flats. On D we’re stacked in the secondary and get a big boost up front with Clayton this year. LB play still concerns me, but we have some talented freshmen coming in. I’d be surprised if we weren’t noticeably better this year, even if our record may not show it (strength of schedule).
 
originalwombat said:
Decent article, except they did not mention Gleason and said Yates would get a look. I have to think Gleason gets a closer look than Yates. In fact, I would assume it's a three-way race with JG, TG, and JS.
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I think people are way overlooking Yates. Hope he gets a fair shake. I didn't love his HS film but he was a 4* QB for a reason.
 
ramblin_wreck08 said:
I rewatched the NC State game last night. There is a lot of reason for optimism about the future. Line play was significantly improved over the start of the year despite all the losses due to injury. Graham showed flashes of brilliance - he has all the tools, but played like, well, a freshman. Mason is a beast, and we were down arguably our top 2 receivers (Camp and Ezzard). And let’s not forget that we have Gibbs coming to the flats. On D we’re stacked in the secondary and get a big boost up front with Clayton this year. LB play still concerns me, but we have some talented freshmen coming in. I’d be surprised if we weren’t noticeably better this year, even if our record may not show it (strength of schedule).
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Agree with your general premise, but would love to hear the argument for Camp and Ezzard being our top 2 receivers. I’d probably have them as 3 and 5 respectively. Ezzard tough to put anywhere yet really.
 
gtrower said:
Agree with your general premise, but would love to hear the argument for Camp and Ezzard being our top 2 receivers. I’d probably have them as 3 and 5 respectively. Ezzard tough to put anywhere yet really.
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We won't really know til field work, but ya gotta think Brown sees some playing time.
 
gtrower said:
Agree with your general premise, but would love to hear the argument for Camp and Ezzard being our top 2 receivers. I’d probably have them as 3 and 5 respectively. Ezzard tough to put anywhere yet really.
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I should have specified my “top 2” statement excludes slot receivers (Brown). Camp was our leading receiver last year before an injury sidelined him. I expect a strong Sr season from him. Out of HS, Ezzard was the highest rated WR on the team, and looked the part in person at fan day last year. It’s tough to tell with him, of course, because we haven’t seen him in game. Just a gut feeling we got a good one in Ezzard.

Out of curiosity, who are you thinking for 1-3?
 
Brown
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Carter
Camp
Sanders
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Ezzard
 
originalwombat said:
Decent article, except they did not mention Gleason and said Yates would get a look. I have to think Gleason gets a closer look than Yates. In fact, I would assume it's a three-way race with JG, TG, and JS.
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It’s a four way race with Graham having the easiest path to take the job. IMO there’s no telling who will win and I believe they will give everyone a fair shake.

We have young OL and young QB. We will have to run the ball to have the best chance for winning. Success in this realm for a QB means being able to take care of the football and identify defenses. This means knowing the game-plan and playbook. Ideally, if your QB can understand the run fits, they can check out of bad plays.

More than likely we will institute these types of things where we can get the best play. The QB who can best handle this will have the best shot at winning the job.

UNLESS, one of them shows they can absolutely sling it consistently to give us a truly balanced look.

Most important:

-Take care of the football!
-Identify defenses
 
Jerry the Jacket said:
Probably won't play any games this year but if we do, look for another year like last year. We just don't have the horses to be really good. I'm hoping we can show some improvement, if not, then you got to start questioning the Collins hire. I hope I am wrong about all of this, but that is just where my head is right now.

Go Jackets!
Click to expand...
You are basing this off of one year results where he inherited triple option athletes to run his offensive and defensive schemes? Specifically, this meant he had undersized OL and DL (this is bad for all systems other than the TO), WRs who never ran a standard route tree nor caught the ball in any volume, one decent RB and a bunch of wing backs, not a single TE on the roster and no depth on top of these limitations. He did inherit a decent stable of DBs to work with so PJ didnt leave him nothing, at least.

Based upon all of these severe talent limitations, Nick Saban would come in here and win three games. How can you possibly pass any judgement off of one year given we are basically starting from the ground up? Coach pretty much gets a free pass this year too. This was a multi-year project and we all knew that. In fact, you cant judge any coach truly for five years because he will have players he recruited for his system by then but I know that's not how it really works in the instant gratification world of CFB.

If you are a PJ fan then all I can say is the TO ran its course here and the experiment was wildly successful with three victories over UGA and a couple of 10 win seasons but it was also a complete program failure as we could no longer recruit P5 athletes. The roster was arguably worse than middling GoF teams by the end of PJs tenure.
 
How do you even project us?

Every single thing was bad in 2019 (promise was shown, but overall bad in every phase).

Every single indicator points positive in 2020.

The schedule is brutal and on whole the competition also points positive in their indicators.

We'll be a much better football team in 2020. We might be good. We might be ok. Our record will probably be far worse than the team.
 
I don't remember if I saw it linked on here or twitter, but I really enjoyed the season preview on Roddy Jones's podcast ACCAF. He had Sean Bedford on and it was just nice listening to a couple of knowledgeable GT alum discuss the team. Nothing earth-shattering, but good content for any football starved individuals.

Not really sure the best way to link a podcast since I think everyone gets them through their own various apps, but just for reference:

Edit: oh snap, look at that fancy auto-formatting.
 
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