Texas A&M Football: Will Jimbo Fisher give up playcalling?

Is the criticism a fair one?

Before I give my answer, I want to discuss something more fundamental here: is the assumption regarding Jimbo’s offense even fair? Is his offense antiquated? Media coverage and your average fan would certainly say so. Josh Pate, a guy whose commentary I really enjoy, had this to say in a widely-shared clip regarding the A&M offense:

If you can’t listen, this quote pretty much sums up the video: “Jimbo Fisher has been pulling out an offense that expired in 2014 for years… [emphasis added]”. Pate would go on to further address the offensive issues in a longer clip. But he says something later on that caught my attention. He references this stat from Bud Elliott’s tweet:

The reason my interest was piqued here was the underlying assumption of a lot of what Pate was saying, and I’ll try to state it as fairly as I can here: changing of the offense (i.e. modernization of the offense) results in more explosive offense, particularly in the passing game.

A corollary to this is that Jimbo’s current system will not achieve those results.  And the thing that sparked this whole discussion: This lack of modernization is to blame for the poor offensive output against App State because Jimbo’s offense has not changed. But is that true?

The explosiveness numbers can’t be argued with. Those are what the offense has produced. But the entire thought process is predicated on the idea that Jimbo’s offense has yet to change. My contention here is that, at the very least, it is too soon to tell whether that is true. Personally, I feel like we have enough evidence that it has changed. Further, I don’t believe that scheme is the primary culprit of what we saw last Saturday.

I don’t write this to just defend Jimbo out of some sense of loyalty or to avoid the discomfort of shifting the status quo. I write this because I believe the issue is being misidentified, and if you misidentify the issue, then you come up with solutions that address the wrong thing. So, that said, let me defend my opinion here.