Saturday, January 05, 2008
Once again, Beamer fails to adjust to game matchups
Aaron McFarling
Recent columns
MIAMI -- The great debate begins with one quote. Virginia Tech coach Frank Beamer uttered it early Friday morning, when he was asked about his team's offensive performance after a 24-21 loss in the Orange Bowl.
"I think we'd like to have run the ball a little bit more in the second half," he said.
Yes. That would have been nice. Particularly when tailback Branden Ore was having his best game of the season, and Kansas seemed ill-equipped to stop him.
On Tech's final drive of the first half, Ore ran the ball 11 times for 49 yards, including a 1-yard touchdown plunge. He ran with power, speed and shiftiness. In short, he was brilliant, the kind of back we'd expected him to be all season.
He gained 63 more yards in the second half, an admirable total. But here's the thing: That came on just 11 carries. Beamer would have liked to have given him the ball more often.
So why didn't he do it? After all, that Beamer quote is like a chef saying he would have liked to have added more salt, or a baseball pitcher saying he would have liked to have thrown a fastball instead of a curve. These are conscious decisions, completely under one's own control.
There are several theories floating around on this. One, expressed in many early morning e-mails I've received and comments posted on the blog at roanoke.com, is that it's all Bryan Stinespring's fault.
This is a fairly popular opinion. And certainly, given the fact that he's in control of the play-calling, it has some merit. Stinespring has some culpability here.
But there's more to it than that. How hard would it have been for Beamer to pull rank on Stinespring, his longtime friend?
"Pound it," he could have said. "Forget the pass. They can't stop us on the ground."
Here's why I think that didn't happen: For all of his wonderful attributes, Beamer struggles with in-game adjustments, and that weakness filters downward. And once Tech was forced to form a new offensive identity this season -- a highly successful one that led to an ACC championship, by the way -- he stuck with it to a fault.
We'll address in-game adjustments first. Do you know what Tech's biggest comeback is in the Beamer era? Fifteen points, against Virginia in 1995. That's a surprisingly low margin for a man who just completed his 21st season. After all, Georgia pulled off a bigger comeback than that against Tech just last year.
What that says is there are too many games in which the Hokies either have it or they don't. In the Orange Bowl, they didn't have it early, and they lost to an underdog.
This is part of the reason Beamer struggles in bowl games. When it comes to game preparation -- be it early in the season, late in the season or in the postseason -- he is decidedly old-school in his approach. We do what we do, he figures. If we do it well, we'll have a good chance. If not, we'll struggle. We just have to focus on ourselves.
Seems reasonable. But sports today are all about matchups, and Beamer needs to do a better job exploiting them. Given several weeks to prepare, opposing coaches are consistently outfoxing him, and it happened again Thursday night.
Example: All December, Kansas coach Mark Mangino told his team about Tech's special teams. They love to block punts, he warned them. But instead of fearing that fact, he found a way to abuse it.
"We watched on tape for about a month of them leaving the gunners exposed," Mangino said, referring to the players who line up outside of the formation. "Walking off the gunners and trying to just outnumber you to block punts. We said that we're not going to let them do that. If they did it more than once, we were going to throw the ball out there."
Tech did it more than once. And late in the third quarter, facing a fourth-and-10 near midfield, Kansas threw the ball out there -- and hit a wide open gunner for a first down.
The irony here is that if the Hokies had developed a consistent running game early in the season, they might not have won the ACC championship, but they almost certainly would have won in a matchup with Kansas. That might sound crazy, but think about it for a second. If Ore had shredded Ohio, William and Mary and Clemson like he did Kansas on Thursday, perhaps the Hokies never go to a dual-quarterback system. Perhaps their offense looks more like it has in the past decade -- run first, then run again. Pound. Pound. Pound.
But they probably don't beat Boston College in the ACC title game with that offense. Ore averaged just 2.9 yards a carry in that one, and the Hokies had to rely on Sean Glennon's arm to lead them to victory.
So given the circumstances, the move to two quarterbacks was no doubt the right one. But once Beamer fell in love with passing, he could not abandon it, even with a month to look at tape and determine that a run-heavy attack against Kansas would be the better way to go. If the tape didn't reveal it, the eye test Thursday night should have. The Jayhawks wanted no part of Branden Ore.
Alas, we've heard a lot of it before from Beamer. Things "just got out of whack." Things "started snowballing." And a new one after Thursday's game: "The game just didn't fit right."
Sometimes you've just got to make it fit. Or else you'll spend another offseason like the Hokies will spend this one, proud of their season but disappointed in the ending.
