Two Noteworthy Disclosures from Ja. Beck

Last week I attended the Cougar Club luncheon at LES where Jason Beck, BYU's quarterback coach, addressed the crowd and took questions. I felt like two things were noteworthy disclosures:



1) To compensate for the loss of Taysom Hill, the plan initially was to use both Christian Stewart and Kai Nacua at quarterback. Stewart was to take a few series, and then Nacua would come in and run a wildcat package for a series or two. This was the plan and this was what they ran in practice leading up to UCF. However, when both Bills and Leavitt went down with injuries early in the UCF game, Nacua was suddenly needed at safety again, so the wildcat package never saw the field and hasn't been practiced since, at least as of Thursday, that is.



2) BYU does not plan to recruit a certain style of quarterback. The plan is to recruit "the best available" quarterback regardless of skill-set (dual-threat, shotgun, drop back, etc.) each and every year so that each year there is one quarterback signed. The hope is to develop a progression where a guy will start his Junior and Senior years, and then there will be a bevy of talented quarterbacks set to compete in Spring and Fall to the "the guy" going forward. Once the starting QB is determined, the playbook will be revised to match that skill set.



These points bring up two questions--Will 2QB never fully die? and How does BYU plan to recruit all the other offensive positions when they don't know what type of offense they will be running year-to-year?

I think having a dual threat QB doesn't change recruiting in the other offensive positions. BYU's offense will always thrive with a QB that can hit his receivers, when you have a guy who can also pick up yards with his legs when the play breaks down just makes the offense even harder to stop.

I'm a bit bothered by this.



So basically, every two years, assuming QBs stay healthy which they haven't been as of late, we could see a new offense scheme. I'm with Sno. How do you effectively recruit when you don't know what your identity is.



This appears to be attacking the problem backwards. Why not come up with a successful scheme/framework and then recruit the players to fit the framework. Instead, the house is going to be partially torn down and rebuilt every other year.



If you are a WRs, you want to play in a system where you're going to get catches. If BYU happens to have a running QB that year and not know what they are going to have the next year, you'll likely look elsewhere. Same with a TE. BYU hardly used the TE with Hill. Now we're using them all the time. How's a guy that wants to play TE to decide?



What's going to happen is BYU is going to miss out on top players at skilled positions and we're going to see a lot of athletes transferring. Imagine being a TE in an offense like Anae ran with Max Hall and suddenly mid season you're irrelevant because the QB got injured and BYU has switched to a Hill-like offense.



Seems the offense has commitment issues.



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I agree. Commit to something.

My biggest criticism (okay, one of my many biggest criticisms) of Brandon Doman was that he developed a playbook where he asked entirely too much of his offensive line. He wanted them to be hog-mollies in the run, stout in creating a pocket for the five-step drop, and quick in getting out and downfield for the zone-read and spread-option plays. Add to that he wanted them to be fit enough to run the "Nitro" when Doman felt like it, and he essentially created expectations for the offensive line that only Brian Bosworth at his peak could acheive. Generally linemen can do one, maybe two of those things well, but their build that allows them to do those things means they will suck at the third. We ended up with such a potpurri of blocking schemes that no one could do it well.



Now we seem to be headed in the same direction, but with the improvement that the changes will only happen season-to-season (or injury to injury, as we've seen this year) as opposed to play-to-play. That still sucks for OL recruiting--are we going to create trench-warriors, or Rich-Rod quick-and-nimble Olinemen?



I don't see how you can effectively recruit until you have an identity to tell you and the recruit what you want. BYU seems to be trending to a "Jesus Take the Wheel" philosophy in recruiting--we take the best available kid who wants to come to BYU because, hey, BYU, and then trust all the pieces will come together into something we can work with three years later.

I don't think you read too much into that comment. It would seem natural that from QB to QB you vary things a bit to play to strengths--as you might to take advantage of strengths of other positions around the field.

If you say our QB is a pocket passer and that is all we do, what if you can't recruit a quality pocket passer? Would you tell Taysom I know you can run and throw better on the move but by golly you are going to stand in the pocket and throw downfield or you don't play?

It would be interesting to hear some follow up discussion with Beck to find out what he meant rather than jumping to conclusions and expounding without his input.

I thought the biggest takeaway from the luncheon was Taysom is coming back and they are trying to get another medical year for him (though not likely).

stuckinbig10country wrote:
I thought the biggest takeaway from the luncheon was Taysom is coming back and they are trying to get another medical year for him (though not likely).

Nice, thanks for the update.

frdbtr wrote:
I think having a dual threat QB doesn't change recruiting in the other offensive positions. BYU's offense will always thrive with a QB that can hit his receivers, when you have a guy who can also pick up yards with his legs when the play breaks down just makes the offense even harder to stop.

It most definitely does. Starting with the Oline, even. Pass blocking and run blocking are two completely different skillsets, with completely different traits. Ideally, you want your Oline to be able to doing everything pretty well, but when you are bombing seasons left and right all the "does everything pretty well" lineman are choosing other schools, so you are left with more one dimensional players. You want to be able to look at your recruit and say "You pass block really well... Guess what? We pass ALL THE FREAKING TIME! You'll work your way into the two deep in no time, and we'll work on your running discipline when you get here..."

This is one of the reasons why I say that Anae is gimmicky, and you all have heard it often from me. He doesn't have any base to his offense. It's a Gary Crowton offense, without the offensive brilliance and daring of Gary Crowton. There is no offensive identity. For some reason after Hall graduated Anae went off the reservation and wanted to implement a qb2 system (when Anae 1.0 wasn't perfected, as he had been repeatedly dominated by anyone in the top 40). It wasn't like he had Tebow or Hill in there, either. He wanted to add all of these bells and whistles to the offense for Riley Nelson, of all people?



Instead of stripping things down to the engine to try and build something better than what he had, Anae put on some stickers, fins, and a racing muffler. It led to his losing his job here at BYU, and he shouldn't have been invited back, because you have the same Anae throwing decals and flashing lights on the BYU car, instead of getting into the hood and finding out what really works.



(I have said in the past that BYU should run plays out of 1 or 2 formations until the offensive line can identify blitzing patterns and pick them up regularly - that is what I mean by stripping things down and then building up).

I think you guys are making a mountain out of a mole hill.

BlueIsBetter wrote:
(I have said in the past that BYU should run plays out of 1 or 2 formations until the offensive line can identify blitzing patterns and pick them up regularly - that is what I mean by stripping things down and then building up).

Or perhaps run the same five passing plays out of a million different formations, like Jimmy Mac said they used to do.



We should have an identity, I agree. One of the reasons Crowton did so well his first season, though, was because he tweaked his offense to match the talents of Luke Staley and Brandon Doman. So it isn't an either or situation. You need to have an identity,and your identity needs to be flexible enough to match the talent you have, not the talent you wish you had. What scheme gives BYU the biggest competitive advantage that will meet the talent level of the recruits we typically get? That is the scheme we should run. Whether or not we are doing that currently, I have no idea. I'll have to trust the coaches on that, because so far they have done pretty well with this new offense. Absent an injury to Hill, and severaL KEY defensive players, we would be having a pretty special season right now. Depth has always been a problem for us. A special season will require a special talent and no injuries, or an unusually deep roster for BYU. So, I will keep watching, cheering, and hoping for the next special season, realizing they occur only once every decade or two for BYU.