Good stuff, a couple of riffs

by Mike (bart), Wednesday, July 29, 2026, 01:55 (1 day, 6 hours, 2 min. ago) @ Larz
edited by Mike (bart), Wednesday, July 29, 2026, 02:02

First off, generally agree that the picture on offense actually feels quite murky.

The bulk of that feeling is driven by the unknowns at WR along with what you point out as a new paradigm for Carr. The rightful terror defenses had of the RBs along with athletic excellence of Fields (and to a lesser extent Rairdon) helped create some very straightforward reads for Carr. He would be choosing between either single coverage on quite athletic receivers (or a really fair technical guy like Pauling) or, reading a three-deep scheme (which, to be fair, he did a great job of with regularity), or being able to hand the ball off to a 1st Round RB against a two high shell

USC had a terrible game plan against us, but they did stymie Carr by constantly making him navigate 6 and 7 man coverages (in fairness it was raining). Those 6/7 man back ends are going to be the norm, now, and certainly with a less reliable/predictable defense against Faison in particular -- way fewer of those 10-12 yard free access pitches and catches to be had when the defense can actually put a safety on each hash. It's going to be a lot tougher on CJ this year

Further, given the backup QB situation, Carr is going to have to be very judicious about when he runs the ball. There just aren't going to be very many layups.

One area where I'd say I'm way more optimistic than you are, though, would be TE. I felt like Cooper Flanagan showed out really well as a blocker in 2024, especially against some good teams like Texas A&M, UGA, Louisville, etc. I'd have to go back but I think he may have been our best blocking TE in 2023 as well. Much, much better and more versatile blocker than Rairdon. To me, he's maybe the X factor of the entire offense aside from "#2 Receiver X." If you can't regularly even up numbers on the ground by running your QB (especially in critical situations), you need to be have a TE who really wins as a blocker, otherwise defenses can live in 2-high on every down and your life offensively is going to be very frustrating. Price and Love negated a lot of this problem via their explosiveness (and the threats thereof) but the irrational pit I would get in my stomach when we got to 2nd and 2? That was driven in no small part by the mismatch between Rairdon's skill set and our ability to run Carr.

Additionally, for as explosive as we were, there was a lot of less than ideal stuff going on last year when it came to our run blocking options. I remember us running counter or split zone with, like, Will Pauling coming across the formation. Flanagan's ability to both target as well as move people will create a lot of options for better play setups. Additionally, I think with Knapp moving inside you get opportunities for stuff like Power or Down G concepts that can create easier blocks for everyone else while taking advantage of Knapp's athleticism and power in the run game. We didn't really have a go to guy in the run game like that last year, and I think it showed at times

We just desperately need WR to not be a mess for the 6th year out of the last 7 or whatever. If we can find a really good #2 and #3, we have the pieces to be a complete offense by the time the playoffs roll around. In some ways an even more complete (if not as explosive) as what we had last year