Practice was sort of weird today. On one half of the field, the offense was moving a mile a minute. On the other half of the field, the defense looked like they were in preschool learning their ABCs. They sort of were, learning the terminology and all the different calls. It's a different vibe.
Coach Jasper clearly had no intention of spilling any beans when I talked to him. At the luncheon, Niumat didn't get into details about the offense either, but he did say a couple of things that I thought were noteworthy. I asked him about the kinds of mistakes that he saw last year, and he talked a lot about the kinds of things we've talked about here... Guys missing blocks and assignments and whatnot. My follow-up to that was to ask if the solution to all that is really to tailor the offense to Malcolm's strengths. His answer was interesting... He said that Keenan was the only quarterback that they've had who ran the *entire* offense. With everyone else, they've run the particular elements of the offense that suited those players the best. He doesn't want to morph the offense into something new, he just wants to pick out those 2 or 3 existing parts that are best suited to Malcolm's strengths. Essentially, he doesn't want Malcolm to be running Will Worth's offense. It's part reduction of scope, part change in focus. I'm not going to expose any state secrets about what they worked on in practice but I will say that I didn't see anything that contradicted that.
One thing to note, don't expect a depth chart until the end of the spring. Niumat said that there are too many coaches getting their first chance with their players that he wants to give them a chance to make a better evaluation before posting anything.
Coach Jasper clearly had no intention of spilling any beans when I talked to him. At the luncheon, Niumat didn't get into details about the offense either, but he did say a couple of things that I thought were noteworthy. I asked him about the kinds of mistakes that he saw last year, and he talked a lot about the kinds of things we've talked about here... Guys missing blocks and assignments and whatnot. My follow-up to that was to ask if the solution to all that is really to tailor the offense to Malcolm's strengths. His answer was interesting... He said that Keenan was the only quarterback that they've had who ran the *entire* offense. With everyone else, they've run the particular elements of the offense that suited those players the best. He doesn't want to morph the offense into something new, he just wants to pick out those 2 or 3 existing parts that are best suited to Malcolm's strengths. Essentially, he doesn't want Malcolm to be running Will Worth's offense. It's part reduction of scope, part change in focus. I'm not going to expose any state secrets about what they worked on in practice but I will say that I didn't see anything that contradicted that.
One thing to note, don't expect a depth chart until the end of the spring. Niumat said that there are too many coaches getting their first chance with their players that he wants to give them a chance to make a better evaluation before posting anything.
