calumnus said:
mvargus said:
CALiforniALUM said:
Wilcox just announced that Baldwin is coming back.
Fingers crossed.
The Pac-12 network had an interesting point. In games where Chase Garbers started and played the whole game Cal was 4-0 (now 5-0) When he was injured at some point Cal was just 1-5.
It's easy to blame Baldwin, but the injury bug did have a huge impact. Cal also had 3 different QBs start a game this season. USC is the same, but they had the all around talent to avoid complete catastrophy due to that and have an 8-4 record. Stanford can't do better than 4-6 with their 3 different starters. It does make a huge difference.
So while I do think Baldwin makes some bad play calls, I also think we never saw him at his best this season due to the OL and QB injuries that really did have a huge impact.
Funny how before Garbers' injury people blamed Garbers for why the offense sucked and then afterwards they blamed the lack of Garbers for why the offense sucked.
Garbers is a good QB (so is Modster) but the QB position was never the problem. BEFORE Garbers' injury we were the #115 offense in the nation, last in the PAC-12, but yes 4-0. UCLA, Stanford and USC are collectively the worst they have been since Holmoe (or this century). The fact that we won those games does not make it a good offense. With an actual good offense we would be exploiting this opportunity to win the PAC-12 and finally get to the Rose Bowl.
Our losses to USC and Utah had little to nothing to do with our offense. Or at least it wasn't just our offense. We had a huge problem on defense that both of those teams exploited ruthlessly.
And I never said that the offense was worldbusting. What is has been was erratic and frustrating. We'd see flashes of brilliance like the winning drive against Washington, the early play against Ole Miss, Modster taking over the game against WSU, etc. But then we'd get play like against ASU after Garber's injury and everyone screams that we have the worst offense in the nation.
At the start of the season I thought that Garbers was struggling mentally just a bit. He was too slow to make decisions and that was causing him to miss reads and make drive killing mistakes. However, at the UW game it was as if it clicked for a short time. He had the same swagger against Ole Miss early before the play calls killed the offense, and he was looking strong against ASU. He's had 2 games back and the first was against USC, which is a difficult assignment for any QB as they have more team speed than your average Pac-12 team. But you could see that he was getting the swagger back against Furd. It took time, but the 2 TD drives were solid. I expect him to be playing better next week.
I've said from the start of the season that the OL was having issues. You could see it from the start, but it became very obvious after Saffell went down with an injury during the 4 game slide. Cindric and Meattaur are going to be very good in a season or two, but without Saffell playing center between them, they had a ton of trouble with some of the little things they needed to do. But the only "starter" we don't get back is Bazakas, and we should see Gentle Williams and Will Craig return as well. If we can get a good spring practice session the OL should finally be able to open the holes for the RBs that will allow the offense to function much better.
But that is all conjecture. We need to wait for 2020 to see if I'm right and the early injury bug, as well as the near decimation of the OL to injury was as big an issue as I think it was.
