The more I think about it, the more I can’t get away from the conclusion that expecting a sudden offensive turnaround was simply not realistic. The WCO system is hard, but a non-NFL level WCO is workable at the college level with some patience. When Clawson was hired, we should have anticipated at least 1 full year of offensive rebuilding before thinking his system would actually be in place.

After all, he’s made the system work everywhere he’s been, and that’s with schools with less talent and fewer resources. There’s no reason a college-edition WCO couldn’t work at UT, but it’s not really feasible to expect it to fire immediately.

It just continues to lead me to believe that we never did see the Clawfense.

While the new scheme may have created some problems for the offensive line, I do not believe it was the main problem. When I did the play-by-play for the running game vs. Georgia I did not see examples of lineman of missing blocks because of confusion (that I could tell). Instead I saw players get pushed into the backfield and players that were too slow to be effective pulling on sweeps. From what I could tell from the limited running plays that were called in that game, the blocking scheme and type of plays were very similar to the zone running scheme under Cutcliffe.

I agree with you, we never really saw the clawfense. We will never really know, now. It was an experiment that we had no patience for. Someone should have seen something at some point and said, “hey, this isn’t working, we need something else. The fans aren’t going to accept this.”

Tuberville fired Franklin when they were struggling. Why no last ditch effort by Fulmer to take over the play calling? I guess they didn’t want to give up on the offense, and thought it was about to turn the corner.

Clawson didn’t produce enough for us to give him another year to make it successful. We didn’t see enough to give him the benefit of the doubt on trying it another year to make it work.

There is no way we ever saw Coach Clawson’s offense. We were too busy getting our tails whipped. I don’t thing there is any way that we can really evaluate Coach Clawson at this point. I understand that the offense struggled, but I don’t think that had much to do with Clawson. Nothing really seemed that revolutionary to me. I never saw any formations or plays that really stood out as something new or improved. I believe Coach Fulmer had a lot to do with the play calling and actual schemes for game day.

I didn’t. How did the offense do against the defense in that game? If there were going to be growing pains, it wouldn’t have hurt for CPF to say, “Be patient with us as we get this thang cranked up.”

Why does Joel eat lunch in his car?

Generally, I’ve grown weary of the term “west coast offense”. I think it’s become diluted to the point where it doesn’t really mean anything anymore. Seems like half the teams out there run a version of it.