Some good points on here..even from some of you bammers. This is probably going to get long, but maybe some of you guys will see it as a fair and accurate assessment. Been wanting to post about this for awhile, but school's kept me busy and today is my first day off--here goes:

There are a few things that has crippled the offense this year and the first glaring reason is the offense having to support the defense. This offense is successful when it paces the defense at key points in the game and can spread the ball around. They want to hit you from every angle and constantly keep the defense guessing what's next. When things get predictable then they speed up the pace. It's all geared toward keeping the other team on their heels.

So why has this season been different? If you speed up the game when the offense isn't clicking, you are just sticking your defense back on the field. At times this year we've seen the offense try to speed things up, you've also saw lopsided time of possession and huge numbers against our defense.

At this point, many people will say "well if the offense was successful they could pace the other team and stay on the field". That's a great point and there are some glaring deficiencies within the offense aside from not being able to pick up the speed. The Oline play has been horrible. Call it youth, call it inexperience, call it lack of strength/talent. Doesn't matter-it's been bad. My take? I think it's all of the above, but I also think it's the personnel and their toughness/grit. Listen to these guys in interviews. I don't hear guys that want to beat their opponnent into the field. I think in addition to all the obvious reasons for the lack of success, they just don't have that drive/toughness/grit--wanna kick your face in factor *yet*.

WRs may have been the only unit more disapointing then the Oline, but it's close. The offense has to have blocking on the edges to be successful and the WRs are responsible for a lot of seal blocks. Injuries have certainly hindered us. Two best WRs have been hurt a decent portion of the year and our best freshman receiver got redshirted due to an injury. Blocking has been bad-there's a reason a white dude that walked on for this season is getting 80% of the snaps-he's the only one that trys to block and he misses half of his tries. The QBs haven't done a great job of getting the football in the right spot and some of that gets put back on the Oline play, but the receivers don't catch half the balls they should (except Blake, Lutzy, Omac). I watch other teams and those receivers are hungry-they attack the ball if it's not thrown perfect where our guys just aren't on that level I guess. This area will have to improve dramatically as well. I'm not great at analyzing route running so I'll leave that out of this post.

RB has been a bright spot for otherwise disappointing offense. Dyer with a good Oline this year would be in Heisman talk. We are short at the RB position as far as depth goes, but that will be fixed come next year so I can't complain. I would like to see Mason get some of OMacs running plays. I think he is as fast and runs tougher, but this is just a personal opinion

I think Moseley, Frazier, or Trotter could be successful. I'm not convinced by Trotter's arm strength, Moseley's ability to run (at all), or Frazier's accuracy but I think they could all be successful with the other deficiencies fixed.

Coaching. I think Malzahn is the best there is. I have concerns about his offense, but they don't begin with his abilities, play calling, or if it will work in the SEC. My concerns begin with it's inability to be effective if the defense isn't functional, if the QB play is subpar, if the WRs and Oline block like a bunch of 90 year old grandmas. My other concern, which is a double edged sword, the ability to get great athletes in the system but the inability to draw the top talent that may be looking for a prostyle offense that may get them to the NFL. I'm not sure how much weight this holds but it probably evens out in the wash as they say.

Bottomline: It's not Malzahn. It's the defense not allowing the offense to do their thing. It's a weak Oline and poor WR play. Its playing a schedule that ranks in the top 5 in the NCAA with a team that's in the bottom 5 as far as experience. It's losing 3 juniors and 23 seniors off a championship team and 5 more guys due to stupidity. It's being 13 scholly's short of the 85 limit. It's playing Arky, USC, LSU, Clemson, Georgia all on the road and all ranked. Even with Cam, we would have lost 3 of those games, if not 4 (would have still beat USC and probably added a win at Clemson).