Battle Red Blog
Obviously, there is a theme over the last week and throughout the whole season. The theme is that the offense sucks and many people still think Nick Caley needs to be shown the door. I came out a little over a week ago and argued that Caley should stay even though I had been banging the drum the loudest to get him out of town earlier in the season. I’m certainly not going to throw any pity parties if he does get canned because he does more than enough to be relieved of his duties. However, I think it is important to make the case for him staying because that is the most likely result.
Simply put, Caley is running the offense that DeMeco Ryans wants him to run. Ryans wants to run a smash mouth offense and that is what Caley is doing. What we see is an offense that doesn’t match what the team is built to do. Some of that is by design and some of that is because of unforeseen events. Either way, at a certain point you need to either lean into what you are trying to do or you need to look at what you actually have and run the offense in a way that maximizes your talent.
The funny thing is that we were sold on Caley because we were told he would do that when he was hired. We were told that Bobby Slowik had not done that and that the biggest difference was that Caley would ask players to do what they were capable of doing. The only difference is that Caley is more conservative than Slowik was, so they get sacked less often, turn the ball over less, and are slightly more efficient passing the ball. Those are good things. The offense just looks clunky at times and it is always good to look at why.
It starts up front. Nick Caserio drafted only one lineman even though they jettisoned three starters from the 2024 offensive line. Granted, two of them were terrible. So, one could predict you would be better there by sheer accident and I suppose that has partially been true. Ed Ingram has been much better than Shaq Mason. Unfortunately, they probably whiffed at center and whiffed at left guard. It should be noted that they have been whiffing at left guard and center for several seasons now.
It continues with what I sometimes lovingly call the one footed Joe Mixon. No one knows what happened to him and it somehow took the entire organization by surprise. I find that very hard to believe. At any rate, they had designed an offense where Mixon would take a bulk of the carries, Nick Chubb would spell him and gain more tough yards, and then Woody Marks would develop into a change of pace back that could help out in the passing game.
Two of those three actually developed into what they were supposed to. Chubb was never going...
