Film Review: South Carolina

The LSU passing game is pretty good……in spite of itself

The LSU pass game is putting up numbers. Despite facing 2 defenses with a pulse among the first 3 opponents (unlike most other teams), the Tigers rank 11th in the nation in EPA/Dropback at 0.122, meaning they add the value-contribution of just over 1/10th of a point on the scoreboard every time they throw the ball. More traditionally, LSU is completing 70% of attempts with 907 yards and 11 touchdowns through 3 weeks. Despite all of this, the group has been pretty bad. As you see, the floor is pretty high, but they’re still at it. As I discussed last week, Nussmeier looks uncomfortable and sped-up. Both pre and post-snap, he’s making mistakes, guessing, and leaving meat on the bone. The root of this may lie in the other unit, the pass-protection (which he is a part of), that is struggling. It’s possible he feels sped up by a lack of trust that rushers will get accounted for. If you have a fear of free runners and busts, it speeds up your internal clock to the point that it is hard to operate before you feel like you have to panic. With one exception, the LSU OL wins their matchups consistently when they get people blocked. The problem, which includes them, the RBs, and the QB, is getting into the right looks to do so.

Against both USC (the first one) and Nicholls, LSU was exposed against the blitz. Some poor design and a lack of assignment clarity are preventing LSU from picking things up and the QB is not at the level right now where he can clean it up with quick decisions and playmaking. This was definitively not the case a year ago, when LSU’s invulnerability to the blitz up front, at QB, and out wide was its greatest trump card. As I wrote a year ago when LSU played Blake Baker’s Missouri

This year LSU has the same ability to win its one on ones, but teams have been able to get after the QB when involving extra rushers.

South Carolina was aware and threw the kitchen sink at Nussmeier with success. Here the assignment is totally jumbled. With the C opening to the field, the extra rusher there is accounted for by the tackle. Despite this, the RB steps to take him and leaves the backside threat unaccounted for, as the LT and LT have to take the 2 DL aligned over them. It’s unclear who was supposed to do what and which of the C or RB is wrong. Campbell even tries to point this guy out to get him accounted for but nobody does it. Additionally, the C’s anchor is bad and he gets walked back into the QB. He is the exception to the earlier stated rule.

It’s not always his fault, as he’s been put in tough situations by some busts he’s not responsible for, but Nussmeier has been his own worst enemy against the blitz. With the two rushers aligned outside the tackle and nobody in the A gap for the LG to deal with, LSU will get into a “fan” call to the boundary, which means the LG and LT widen together to take these wide rushers man to man. Instead, Nussmeier directs the back to take that DE which is both a bad matchup and a player already accounted for by the left side of the line. The MIKE, however, is the only threat unaccounted for and should be the back’s assignment. To compound his mistake, Nussmeier peels back into the pressure instead of taking the escape lane to his frontside. The QB is given autonomy to change protections, but it should probably be clawed back for a while.

LSU gets the protection right on this one, picking this up and giving Nussmeier time to punish the blitz by hanging in an extra beat and hitting the deep corner. His internal clock, however, is so sped up right now that he panics, drifts away from nobody, and dumps it underneath.

As a reference point, you can see Daniels trust that the protection he set is going to wad up the pressure just enough to give him time to hang in for that beat and take the shot. He misses the throw itself but the process is what we’re looking for.

Even if the protection doesn’t stop everyone completely, it just has to give him enough time to take the shot, especially against the 7-man all-out blitz that SC is sending. Nussmeier has a big answer here but is too overwhelmed mentally to have the presence to hit it.

Here he does everything right but second-guesses his eyes and ends up losing his chance at a play. The protection is good enough and he does well to buy himself a bit of time and space, but he needs to see and trust this.

You never want to be a Quarterback that DCs can toy with. Despite the good result, the first play is a misread and an obvious guess. The Corner is outside leverage on an out-breaking route, and if he doesn’t misplay it, it’s probably a pick. Nothing he sees after the snap should tell him to throw this. He should have seen the corner zone this off immediately and by the time he hit the top of his dropback, been ready to dump-off to Taylor to replace the blitzer. He got away with it, but SC’s DC noticed. Knowing he won’t confirm anything post-snap, they later present pressure to bait him into panicking the same way. This time they drop out of it and WLB buzzes underneath to make a takeaway that should have ended the game had LSU not been bailed out by an undisciplined (and controversial) blindside block call. If the LSU offense is going to hit its ceiling they need to be dangerous to blitz, and if Garrett Nussmeier is going to earn the respect of NFL scouts, he’s going to have to start doing the hard stuff.