I agree when you have to dial back the playbook it makes it easier to defend. also the bad snaps were killer. But to say Rees tried to run plays oto Milroe strengths I will agree to disagree. To me he was bound and determined to hit the bigger plays especially in the first half. When you are having sack after sack you have to get the ball out of his hands or at least move the pocket to change the target point for the blitzers. IMO I would have run the play action through the zone read even on throwing plays and my reason for that is the eyes of the qb are up looking at the defense during the play action. This would help him see potential blitz’s coming. He could make quick read throws and if not there you have a rb in flat or he can pull it and run. This would have slowed down the amount of time Michigan could blitz because if he caught you out of position then that could be a house call run by Milroe. Rees improved throughout the year but his last three games were not his best play calling IMO. Not blaming him for the loss just would have liked to see more in game adjustments from him.
No one said we ran 4 vertices every play. I said that he tried to call longer developing plays down the field. I agree he should have been benched for those 2 bad interceptions.
As to the down pour, I agree it effects the passing game, but do you think they should have pulled the other qbs and let Milroe come in? They were given the entire game.
The zone read is not only for what you run for people who have trouble reading defenses, qbs who are great athletes, qbs who have passing flaws, as well as lines who have trouble blocking, Tua ran it to perfection. If they didn’t have faith in Milroe to run a zone read he would have never stepped foot on the field at Alabama. The concepts are basic and he has to read 1 player if you run the read option and 1 player if you do a RPO the qb has to read the Mike.
You new here??? You keep mentioning how JM should have been used in the RPO more but he couldn't make the reads.
This was discussed ad nauseam early in the year. Before the reads were taken away from him, he made some of the worst reads I've ever seen a QB in an RPO offense. There were many times he'd hand the ball off when if he would have kept he had a whole the size of a 18-wheeler to run thru.
It was horrendous to the point they finally just started telling him what to do give OR keep.
IMO, this is probably the part of his game that is the most serious. He struggles with field vision. It shows in the RPO exchanges, seeing wide open receivers in the flats (easy dump off passes that were there all year long!) and when in the pocket there were gaps he could have escaped and made good yardage. In those times it was unclear if he didn't see the running lane OR he was just stubbornly trying to pass instead of run.
This was was CTR changed the offense to cater to him starting with the bye week and LSU game. That's when plays started dictating QB runs. So the offense was changed for him. It caught a lot of teams off guard but by the end of the season, good defenses started figuring it out. That came on full display against UM.
BTW, to be fair, every QB misses reads/receivers, but it just seems JM struggled with this more than any QB Bama has had that I can remember.