Hue Jackson 4th Best OC in NFL

[*SHRacerX*]

(06-24-2015, 07:44 PM)jj22 Wrote: Not sold on the praise just yet. We'll see for sure after this year. As for last year, you can't credit him for developing Dalton any. Certainly wasn't better than Gruden. Who I had a hand in prematurely celebrating his departure. Until he can have our offense blowing teams out like it did in 13, I remain skeptical. This is a big year for the offense. I think they'll produce. They are going to have to let Dalton throw. A dominant run game is fine, but we have too many receiving options. Look at the first quarter of the season last season. Dalton came out throwing. To the point I was wondering if I was watching Gruden.

We're going to have to find a way to run the ball and dominate teams on the ground. And we will. We could have last season while throwing the ball around if we would have started Hill (but there's truth to him taking himself off the field some early, so he may not have been ready, remember the last preseason game against the Colts they seemed to run him to the ground for no apparent reason).

Hue's got to find a way to get the passing game relevant again, this year is big for Dalton too so they might as well take the handcuffs off of him.

I think this one sums it up best.  I love Hue's toughness and mentality.  He has been very successful in every job he has had to the point where he sometimes took very limited talent and made it pretty damn good.  However, it dawned on me that maybe he was just better at eliminating the mistakes on those poor offenses and his offense isn't as threatening as I thought.

I couldn't wait for last season and then I came away, like many others here, very disappointed.  A part of me understood the loss of his weapons on offense, and I look forward to this year with optimism, but then the skeptic in me looks at their performance last year and thinks: "You can't be better by being more conservative".  The common thread in the clunker games (Cleveland and Indy 1.0) was that they did not spread the field or have much of a downfield threat.  I remember hearing Hue say once before that opposing teams are going to have to defend every inch of the field (not a direct quote, but something to that effect).  I loved how they chipped away at Baltimore in week 1 and made their big guys chase laterally which was clearly not their strength.  It did struggle in the red zone, where the field became shorter, but I felt I understood what he was doing.  Also, with Hue, I always felt that they would design a game plan for the team they were facing.  It wasn't the same ol' "this is what we do", rather they would attack a team's specific weakness. 

I guess that in all I feel pretty optimistic based on the history that shows that when Hue has a good TE that is a receiving threat, and a vertical threat to stretch the field, his offenses have been pretty solid.  With the return of Eifert and MLJ, the arrival of Kroft/Uzomah/Alford, the emergence of Hill, the potential of Burkhead, and (to me almost the most important facet) the depth of talent on the offensive line, I think Hue will have one of the best offenses in team history. 

Although I don't like opening up on the road (and even less on the West Coast), I am very excited to see what he has in store for his old team.