Going for it was the right call. Herman has plenty of problems right now but his understanding of 4th down math is not one of them. Most of the cliches and tenets about "take the sure points" are decades old and came from a time where defense predominated and players played both ways. Blindly choosing sure points over what is on average more points doesn't make much sense, especially early in the game (the "it's early so you must always kick" is backwards. Early on you want the greatest number of points possible, only late do you worry about matching particular numbers based on the leading/trailing margin).
The particular plays chosen on 4th down haven't always been the best - although that's hard to judge since most people retroactively decide the call was good or bad based on if it worked or not. But it's been obvious for a while that the "QB sweep to the right side from the shotgun" isn't working this year, despite being almost a sure thing last year. Whether defenses adjusted, our OL regressed, or we really miss having Watson and Beck be the lead blockers in the backfield, or some combination of the above, I'm not sure.
In general this staff seems slow to adjust to stuff that clearly isn't working, even way beyond just a "it happened to not work a couple of times" fluke. It took them until late in the 3rd in the KSU game to make the defensive changes most of us were calling for by the end of the 1st quarter. It took them until late in the 3rd in the ISU game to make the offensive changes most of us were calling for at halftime if not sooner.
It's like, ok I get they know way more about football than us, but then how come they keep doing the same thing we advocate for, only with a big delay, and then immediately stuff starts working like we all said it would much earlier. That's a problem.
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Last edited: Nov 19, 2019