lol I don't know what got into me. I think when my hackles get raised I start speaking like a fanatic.
My main point is, it's hard to evaluate where TG is at the moment, because EVERY team is now playing us in a 6-1 defense, even the Buckaroos. They are stacking the line against our run game, specifically to stop TG's outside zone runs. Straight out of the horse's mouth, even Arians explicitly said as much. So, to counter this, everyone says, "why aren't we running Gurley up the middle???" So, I posted one of his "up the middle" TD runs; the other one I would've posted but the NFL.com link function isn't functional. In the one I posted, it was about a 13-14 yd TD run... trucking defenders at the goal line...
looks pretty good to me. With all of 5 touches in this game, how is he supposed to look good? the one run he tried to bounce outside was a TFL. Against a 6-1 defense, anything run outside is going to have predictably bad results.
TG is understandably frustrated with facing 6-1 stacked defenses all day long. (So was SJax.) I think it's actually recognition by the teams we play that TG is our BEST WEAPON when they specifically game plan their D to stop him. Once this happens, "you take what the D is giving you", so you start passing more, and since we haven't had Higbee on the field, we can't really go over the middle, so we rely on what we have -- undersized WR's who go on intermediate sideline routes, leading to Goff holding the ball too long, leading to strip sacks. Pretty good game plan -- I'd run it if I were playing the Rams, wouldn't you?
I also think that, in order to counter this, McVay & Peete & Kromer are changing the run scheme, and usually this comes with a learning curve. On top of this, we have relative newbie Noteboom, rookie Allen, and Demby/Blythe as our interior OL. If we are indeed changing our run scheme, Snead may not have drafted / acquired the appropriate talent for what we are having to change into. On top of this, refs are now flagging the type of legal holding we were doing last season, Hav being one of the worst -- I saw him doing it on almost every play, & I even saw Whit doing it too. I don't know much about OL schemes, or football in general, but I'm starting to see a "perfect storm" of conditions that are affecting TG's play & attitude.
Regardless, the runs I saw up the middle were SUCCESSFUL, so I posted the evidence to support my mostly-objective opinion that there's nothing wrong with GURLEY -- there's a bunch of things wrong around him, but there's nothing that tells me that we need to CUT him... that's just an insane idea. I suspect that McVay will make the changes needed to counter what we're seeing other teams do to stop our BEST WEAPON (I have more faith that this will happen than when we had SJax), but until then we can probably expect more pain & frustration.
