An explosive-by-design offense coupled with our suffocating defense could get a lot of opportunities and score a lot of points.
But if we don’t have the weapons (and, in 2020 at least, we don’t appear to at RB and probably not WR), that could be a square peg, round hole situation.
How married to “Moorhead’s offense” is Moorhead? Did he do the same things at Mississippi State that he did at Penn State?
Very. It's how he made the huge up-jump from Fordham, because his offense was very innovative.
It's not too dissimilar on some levels from what ND runs right now, either. It's RPO heavy, its calling card was the QB reading the safety and if the safety came down to play the run then you chuck it over his head. You hit the post 1 out of 3 times that's fine because thy're all big gains or TDs.
Bottom line though is that the main reason why it takes awhile to get "rolling" is that it asks the QB to read the defense, and for a lot of QBs that's not an easy ask ESPECIALLY when it's reliant on making correct (and quick!) post-snap reads as much as it does pre-snap reads. I'm hopeful that because ND already does a lot of RPO that it won't be a big learning curve.
The other complication is that you need specific skill sets. Tommy Rees physically could not run a Joe Moorhead offense. I'm unsure whether Ian Book can, but Book was pretty darn good going down the field this year. Wimbush? Jurkoved? Absolutely. You don't need "elite" players or it wouldn't have worked at Fordham (and it has its roots at Eastern Michigan)... but you have to have a QB that can push the ball down the field. You have to have a WR that can make them pay for putting their safeties in the box. You have to have a RB that will actually capitalize on the creases when they're there. And right now, we've been operating under an offense that doesn't rely on that, and it's worked reasonably well. So I don't know if it makes sense to change up that paradigm....
....on the flip side, Tyler Buchner would destroy in a Moorhead offense.
