Whitt, Scalley and my random thoughts.

I think something lost in this terrible season is the defense. Now, the defense isn’t bad, but it different. And it isn’t creating turnovers.

I mentioned this in another post, but Whitt hates offense, this much is clear. He wants the offense to run the ball, bleed the clock, have big plays off PA and score off turnovers. He doesn’t want the offense to be able to thrive on it’s own.

We can’t run the ball this year. If you can’t run the ball, PA doesn’t work. If PA doesn’t work, Ludwig/Whitt’s offense doesn’t work. And we’ve seen that this year.

Also, we are terrible at TO’s this year. Bottom half of the country. If we don’t get TO’s and give our offense short fields…well we can’t run the ball and PA doesn’t work so our offense can’t do anything.

That leads us to the defense. It is vastly different this year. This isn’t Whitt’s defense. We are playing so much zone, we can’t get to the QB when we blitz, and so on.

I think we have too many cooks in the kitchen. I think this is why you don’t name a head coach in waiting. This is why you let Scalley leave if he wants a title and control but Whitt isn’t willing to give it up. Scalley can always come back.

But we have two HC’s on this team – Whitt and Scalley – and we know offensively they have different philosophies.

And defensively…this defense ain’t Whitt’s.

So what happens when an offensive player doesn’t like the scheme Whitt runs and hears that Scalley wants to change it up? Does that player maybe slack off, knowing that a change is coming and he will try then?

And same defensively. What defense are we running? What’s it’s goal? Is it Whitt’s attack, attack, attack? Or a bend don’t break?

Utah is a great school and what Whitt, Urban, and McBride have built is awesome. We don’t need to worry about keeping Scalley. If Whitt left, we’d have a line out the door of coaches wanting to take over. I really think a lot of what is wrong with this year is that we have two HC’s with two different styles of what they want to accomplish.

p.s. and this is what terrifies me about Scalley. His whole career has been here under Whitt. But what he wants to do is not what Whitt does. Whitt is a 4-3 blitz heavy, man outside guy. Scalley really seems to love the Vic Fangio style of defense. And we know offensively they are different. My problem with Scalley is that what he wants to do…hasn’t been done here offensively since Urban and defensively…ever. We have no idea how good/bad he will be because we have never seen his style anywhere.