Advantage or disadvantage?

[Sweetness]

From the interviews after practice it sounds like the offense got their ass kicked pretty hard today. I hear a lot about the “advantage” our offense has of being able to get to go up against a great defense in practice everyday, but personally I believe this could actually be a pretty big detriment.
I don’t think it does the offense any good to go out in scrimmages and drills just to have their timing and rhythm constantly be thrown off, and never be able to go through sustained periods of success. In my opinion they would be much better served to go up against the 2s/3s, build up their confidence, feel how the offense should work, and then go through reps with the ones more sparingly as kind of a progress check. The 1s could help them identify their weaknesses, and they could go back and work on those in an environment where they actually have a chance to improve, rather than just getting destroyed rep after rep.
Especially in a year where you are implementing a new offense.
I honestly have no idea how much the 1s go against each other, so maybe they already do this, but like in any training it’s good to progress through different levels of difficulty rather than just constantly going up against an imposing force. I struggle to see how just getting beat day in and day out is a very effective way to learn an offense.
I hear this every year, and every year I have the same thought, that it is actually hurting our progress. If it was actually helping, don’t you think we’d at least start to see some above average offensive performance? it’s one of my theories for why our offense has lagged so much under Whitt.
I’m curious to know if I’m alone in this thinking?

[Utah]

The coaches do this. They set the offense up to succeed. In the next few days the offense will “win” which means the defensive calls will be vanilla, instead of Bernard and Lloyd, Carlson, Lund and Mata’afa will get reps, etc. 

I bet the offense was feeling a little too good, a little too proud of themselves and Whitt let Scalley let the defense loose to humble the offense. 

Fall camp sucks. By having these battles won and lost you can help motivate people to come back stronger tomorrow. 

[EagleMountainUte]

No sheltering any human from something is always the wrong way to do things. It is always better to face adversity/fears/weaknesses/ whatever head on so you can build from mistakes.

The man in the arena from Teddy Roosevelt: 

who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Some artificial victory now is false confidence. 

[UteThunder]

The offense doesn’t only go up against the starting defense. They run plays against ‘air’ and they run plays against the scout team defense. They get plenty of opportunity to establish rhythm and progress through what Ludwig is trying to install. 

[PlainsUte]

What you described is TDS practice.  So the fans and all can get so excited about their Heisman quarterback, running backs, receievers, and maybe sell a few season tickets in the process. 

QBs throwing to backs and receivers without defense should be done in June and July during offseason workouts.

That said there was a quote from Neil Armstrong during practice in a simulator for the lunar landing, paraphrasing “We’ve crashed the lunar lander umpteen times due to umpteen simulated problems, just for once can you let us land it without something failing?”

[Author]

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