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

How much blame does the scheme bear?

We’ve seen the offense in two games so far. In the first, though many felt there was dysfunction, it was not due to a lack of explosiveness. King closed the SHSU game with 11.74 YPA, 2 completions of 60+ yards, and 3 plays of 40+: all untold heights in the Jimbo era as far as explosiveness. It was the intermediate passing game, decision making, and the run game/OL in general that were in question after that game.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: it was just Sam Houston State; but the Ags have played several FCS/generally lesser-quality opponents in Jimbo’s time, and still didn’t show near the explosiveness as they did against Sam Houston. This signaled, to me, a shift in offensive philosophy: a decided emphasis on throwing the ball down the field.

So what about App? There, obviously, was a lack of both explosiveness and efficiency that ended up dooming the Aggies. But was this because of scheme? Playcalling? Execution?

To my eyes, the latter is the biggest culprit. There were receivers open and lanes to run through, but leaky line play, missed assignments, and bad throws down the stretch made it such that the Aggies could not extend drives and stay on the field.

Is it possible, though, that the scheme is just too complicated for some of the players, which leads to missed assignments and mental mistakes? I’ve seen some people assert as much. That conclusion also seems less likely to me given how efficiently the offense ended up operating in 2018 and 2020 and at times in 2019 and 2021.

I referenced earlier the article by Patrick Mayhorn written about the offense after the 2020 Vanderbilt game. The article itself is titled “Jimbo Fisher Is Still Making It Too Complicated”.  He therein attempted to attribute the inefficacy of the offense to unnecessary complexity in the scheme.  Here are some more quotes from that article:

"“[The offense] works about five times a game and looks completely incompetent on the other 55 plays.” “This isn’t a team that can just bully its way into wins against good opponents, because this offensive line isn’t good enough to manage that kind of gameplan.” “It’s pretty obvious that [Kellen Mond]’s never going to fully grasp this offense and continuing to just hope that he eventually will is lazy from Fisher.” “It certainly doesn’t help that this line is consistently losing ground in the running game as well.”"

Does any of that sound to you like it’s describing the 2020 offense? Because, to me, pretty much all of that ended up being dead wrong. The “too complicated” gripe is just one of several criticisms that it’s popular to levy at Jimbo’s offense when it doesn’t look like it’s clicking.

Mond’s command of the offense and ability to make checks at the line were a huge story in the 2020 season. Did he act like he was allergic to throwing the deep ball outside of the Florida game? Sure. But time and time again he made the right read and call, and, in concert with every other offensive player, he was part of one of the most efficient offenses in the nation that year.

So no, I don’t believe that Jimbo’s offense is too complex. I believe that there were other reasons the offense looked the way it did on Saturday. But here’s the thing: I’m not taking the blame away from the coaches. It’s still on them that this team wasn’t ready to play. There are still things they have to fix.

But at the end of the day, it was just far too small a sample size to judge from. It’s a stat that has been run into the ground, but it bears repeating: the Aggies only ran 38 plays against App State.  Those kind of results are not repeatable and we can’t really draw from that dataset that what happened is predictive for the rest of the season.

Let me restate my conclusion in simple terms: it’s too soon to tell if the offense has shifted philosophy, but the evidence, to me, would suggest that it has. It’s not a lack of change in philosophy that’s to blame for the way things looked in the loss.

Because of this, I feel like the criticisms of Jimbo as unwilling to change his philosophy are misplaced, or, at the very least, too hasty. We were given reason to think he had changed in game 1, but game 2 was such a debacle that everyone has reverted to the old complaints.