Im kind of middle of the road on the Jimbo thing. While he hasnt impressed me every year, he has impressed me occasionaly. I tend to think, though, that he has been pretty good at developing QBs. The only QB that we have had, since having Jimbo as our OC, that hasnt developed, has been Marcus Randall. Think about it, in 2000, our offense started out pretty bad. After the first couple of games, Josh Booty took the reigns and finished the season making All-SEC. Then in the Peach Bowl, Davey came in to lead a pretty impressive comeback against Georgia Tech. Davey and Booty both looked terrible the year before, before Fishers tenure. Then in 2001, we had the most prolific pass-catch duo in LSU history with Davey and Reed. Not to mention that Toefield tied Shawn Alexanders SEC record of rushing TDs in a season. In 2002, Mauck came out blasting, having his best game as a tiger against Florida. The offense looked to be back on track to be pretty explosive. Then Mauck got hurt, and in comes Randall to throw 4 INTs against Auburn. He had a couple of good games, but was marred by inconsistency. In 2003, Mauck finished the season as the highest rated QB in the SEC, ahead of one Eli Manning. He also had a 2:1 TD:INT ratio to go along with a 64% completion percentage. Now 2004 rolls around, and we have the same inconsistency, though perhaps less wreckless, from Randall. The same downward pointed spiral, the same "deer in headlights" look. IMO, Randall is the only QB that never really came around. The reason? I have no idea, but I dont think it was Jimbo. Now, play calling is another, independent issue entirely. Some of our playcalling the last couple of years has been a little suspect, but, with exception of Randall, it has always worked. By worked, I mean, we won games, we won championships, and we were damn close to playing for another this year. I also think that Russell showed more improvement throughout the year than Randall did, which I suppose could be expected from a freshmen, even though it was his second year in the system. I am convinced, though, that if Flynn and Russell both would have had the experience under Jimbo that Randall did, they would have been head and shoulders above him in performance. This is really starting to sound like a Randall bashing post, which wasnt my intent at all, but I cant help but feel like Jimbo did everything he could with Randall. It just never clicked.
Does anyone honestly think Jimbo had free reign of the offense under Saban? I can think of only one game during the Saban/Fisher days where Jimbo was allowed to be creative and have a wide open offence. That was the Alabama game where Josh Reid set all sorts of records. With games such as that excluded, I don't think Jimbo ever truly had the ability to do as he pleased on offense. Saban micromanaged every part of the team in my opinion...
I can only hope that is exactly the case, that good ole St Nick had the choke hold on everything. I hope Jimbo will open it up if he does in fact get to stay.
I haven't looked around to find this information elsewhere as I'm at work, but according to dandydon, Miles announced last night that Jimbo has decided to stay at LSU, turning down offers from Saban w/ Miami, and North Carolina. I know the play calling was a little suspect at times this year, but I think this is good news.
I don't think anyone would argue that the offense didn't look terrible at times throughout the course of the season. No doubt, but I also believe that every team in the country's offense struggled at times, even USC's. Especially in the first half of games. Our offense was very inconsistent and I think I can point ot the QB's for alot of it. Randall has been inconsistent his entire career. Russell had the dubious task of comin gin and out of games. I happen to think that had Randall not been on the roster that we would have seen Russell play a heck of a lot more and progress very nicely during the season and we would have seen the offense become much more consistent and explosive. But we probably would have loss another early game, like to UF and Saban just didn't want that to happen. And all teams have defensive scores figured into their average. And as bad as our D was at forcing turnovers this year it actually had to kind of hurt the offenses stats.
