Just look at how Stidham was used. Stidham has a good arm, he can throw the ball downfield, but he was doing screens and underneath the coverage passes and it was working! That's the part that irritates me. I know Hurts needs to improve in some areas, but I have no idea why they handcuff him by taking away things he actually did well last year.
Anyway, I think we'll have a QB competition in the spring. But first, I think they need to sit down and stop trying to run an NFL offense, and come up with something that works in college with the guys they have on the field.
Thing is, Jalen threw the screens well last year, and we kept those in the playbook. In fact, we threw several WR screens against AU and they still work reasonably well, but the big reason those were so great in 2016 was A Stewart and the toughness he played with at WR. He destroyed DBs both as a blocker and when he had the ball.
The only thing we really took out from a passing standpoint was the jet sweep since those got marked as passing yards even though it's really a run. We replaced those with a lot more passing to the RBs though. in 2016 the RBs had less than 200 yards receiving on the season and in 2017 so far they're at 350 official receiving yards, and there have been a ton of plays where the pass was backward that then go down as a run even though it's really not.
in 2016 Jalen didn't throw underneath (seams, short slants, crosses, etc) at all, to the point that Clemson didn't even defend against it. From what we have seen in 2017 he's only done it a few times, mostly when games are basically already won. AU gambled we would play the same way and defended us almost exactly like Clemson did in 16 with a few exceptions based on down/distance and formation. As someone else said, they planned to stop #2 and #3. Their gamble worked.
That leads me to this theory: Jalen doesn't/can't consistently execute that part (underneath) of the passing game.
Here's why: that's THREE offensive coordinators who aren't calling the plays that we fans think should work (seams, slants, crosses) with Jalen at the helm. I know they are better at Xs and Os than we are, AND that they know those plays would help us tremendously if we execute them. Forcing a defense to have to defend those routes and in the short and intermediate middle opens up the running game, slows down the pass rush and all sorts of good stuff. I have to guess then that they've tried to execute those plays in practice (backed up by the fact that we did see it a couple of times this year) but that they don't consistently like what they see when we run those in practice. Otherwise, why would three different play callers not call those plays?
I understand your point though - could Jalen be a better version of Blake Sims if we ran the right offense? That's possible, but as someone else (maybe you) said, Sims had a much better deep ball than Jalen has shown so far. Jalen probably has him on pure arm strength so can get the ball there, but Sims has him on accuracy and touch. IMO, Sims also had a much quicker release than Jalen which really helped on the WR screens because the defense didn't have quite as much time to react. All that said, Jalen came to Bama because we told him we'd develop him as a pro-style QB, not because he wanted to continue down the path as a dual-threat QB. 2016 was an unplanned deviation in our scheme because none of the other guys could win the job, and Jalen wasn't going to be able to be effective at being a pro-style QB as a true freshman after being a DT QB his entire career. Also, most of the rest of the team was recruited with the goal of being more pro-style. That is what we are built for - except potentially Jalen. With that in mind, it seems we have to commit to being pro-style multiple instead of zone-read and RPO. Then we give both Jalen and Tua a shot to see who wins. Honestly not sure who'd win. Tua has certainly shown flashes of ability but we don't really know how he'd perform under pressure. Jalen has grown a lot, but still seems to have a couple big areas that would need to improve.
