This is not a vent board or any other kind of therapy. Before you hit the POST button, ask yourself if your contribution will add to the level of discussion going on.

Important notes on articles:

• Please do not copy entire articles into your post; rather, provide links to them.. We are now links-only for ALL Internet publications. If only a small portion of the article pertains to your post, Fair Use allows you to copy those one or two paragraphs, provided you cite the author's name and the publication for which he writes. Otherwise, put a link in the HTTP Link box.
• Even if you're copying a reference to an article, provide a link to the page from which the article came. We're trying to cut down on duplicate topics, and the posting process will check the link to your article to see if it's already being discussed on this board. At the very least, you'll save yourself some grief on the boards.
• If your first reaction after reading the article you're going to share is the author is uninformed / stupid / a jerk / all of the above, it's not worth sharing with anyone. Not every article needs to be discussed. The more the hair-pulling articles are discussed (e.g. ESPN Page 2), the more the authors will write hair-pulling articles.

Post being replied to

This is why I would like us to change the offense by pmcdnd96

I don't think Vince Young would help us that much because we wouldn't use him right.

I don't think Mac Jones is significantly more physically talented than Ian Book. In fact, I think Ian Book is probably a better athlete.

But what I saw in the last two games is that Mac Jones is very decisive and knows where the ball needs to go. Yes, it helps to have a fleet of receivers like Alabama has. But his short dump off passes to running backs were decisive and on the money. His passes to gaps in the zone defense or to mismatches in man-to-man were quick and decisive. And although he's not a running QB per se, when he took off, he decided to go quickly and took off upfield to gain some yards.

Contrast that with Book, who scanned and scanned and scanned the field. Despite having one of the best offensive lines in the country, he generally waited long enough for the pressure to force him to move more quickly than he wanted to. To his credit, he often used his athletic ability to escape the pocket, almost always to his right. Some of these plays turned into big gains.

That is all about scheme and coaching. To use just one example, there were a number of times in our final two games where Book had an easy ten yards in front of him if he had been decisive and taken off. With his speed, he should have been coached to run on every first or second down when there was a significantly open field in front of him - in first or second and ten, a 5 yard gain is good. Why don't we coach that? I'm not certain, but I believe it's because our coach thinks offense is about getting chunk plays and every time we decide to take an easy 5 yards, we are sacrificing an opportunity to get 25. So we drill it into the QB's head that he has to stare at the field, see where the defenders are going, see if the receivers make the right decisions based on their route trees, and then throw the ball. I believe this leads to the QB holding the ball and looking indecisive, then making a last second decision before he gets tackled for a loss.

We have some designed QB runs, but you can usually sense those from a mile away. We occasionally have the QB keep the ball on a zone read play, but I believe that far more often, we are just running the zone running play version of those plays without the read, so the defender doesn't really have to commit to stopping the QB. This means defenses can gear their defenses toward stopping our running backs in the run game and our QB and receivers in the passing game, without having to worry too much about the play design misleading them. (And if you think this isn't a huge deal, check out how our defense did against Clemson in the second game when their QB was taking off and running the ball versus how we did when in the first game when their QB was either handing off or passing.)

I think we like to think the difference between ND and Alabama/OSU/Clemson is talent, and there is a talent gap, but I think that even if we swapped out Ian Book - a solidly middle-of-the-road college starter - with Vince Young - one of the best college QBs of the last 30 years - it wouldn't make a difference because our scheme wouldn't allow him to make the plays he did at Texas.