Smothers should have a great year for our coach in 2023. As opposed to Scotty Lame Duck
Not sure… but he goes in for the shake and all appears normal, he holds on for a second or two longer and KF looks kinda puzzled and the view shifts over and his hand is oddly in his pocket… maybe it’s nothing but it grabbed my attention
It was an option route where the WR has the option to stop in a hole in the zone or go deeper. Our receiver took the open stop option. Smothers made the wrong read according to Frost in the post game.
Smothers missed the read and threw it to the wrong spot. Frost also said that Smothers made the wrong read on the option that ended in a fumble. Belt had a huge hole and Smothers pulled the ball.
kkkirk may coach at alabama in 3 years when saban is done....he's that good
That's the way I heard it too. I get it but it sets you up to be 50/50 if both options available
I don't know if Smothers couldn't see the WR stop because of how huge our line is or what. It's one of those unfortunate deals where the WR breaks off his route and the ball is already in the process to be thrown where the WR would have ended up. It happens. Really bad timing for us. Damn. Now we have to listen to these damned Iowa trolls for another year.
The adjustments they made
Frost said Iowa pulled up their safeties to stop our option game that was working in the first half. Apparently we didn’t think of a counter to them stopping us.
That is ideally what you want when you are an option team.
Even if the WR had continued on his route I'm not sure the read / decision was a good one.
Don't forget the Iowa O-Line was pushing the Knebbers D line about 5 ft back on every run play in the 2nd half.
The counter is a play action option pass which we used quite a bit. They also moved their linebackers to just outside the box to counter the options. They were daring us to beat them with the passing game. Hell we still had things going before that fumble and that play was open for a big gain to Belt IF we had given the ball there instead of pulling it.
IF Falck continued on his route I think we had a better than 50% chance of completing it. That DB would have been falling down trying to get to the ball as it reached the WR. Bad read maybe but it was at least a 50/50 ball IMO. Manning caught one of those earlier for a gain to the one. Might have been the same route on that play. Frost said that they've practiced and run that play thousands of times this year.
