It’s been a while since I did a Q&A. With no game to preview this weekend, now seems like a good time to open up the ol’ mailbag. Let’s see what you got.
The new look offense we were expecting didn't pan out as well as the fan base had hoped. Is this a recruiting issue, a coaching issue, or is it fundamentally an issue with the philosophy? What changes can we expect after another offseason?
— @jordanpbradford
What does the offense need. I mean Navy’s survived QB injuries before. It's not coaching. I don’t buy the rule change thing because AF leads the nation in rushing every year. Can’t be recruiting; again because of AF. With all the film study; you’re far more knowledgeable than us.
— @IllegitimateJMC
You have consistently said that Navy's offensive struggles are deeper than the QB, curious what you think the issue(s) are; also, are you surprised Chestnut has gotten a free pass this season despite such poor results? I just watched his presser for this week and it was one softball after another.
— James M.
In your studied opinion are Navy's offensive woes primarily on the OC or the ‘scheme'?
— @USNA_73
I'm shocked that most of the questions I received were about the offense. Shocked, I tell you! I guess this shows the difference between my Twitter audience and the website's readers, since we've covered this before in the game debriefs. That's okay, though. It's worth discussing again.
The biggest problem with the offense is that it is unable to block on the perimeter. It sounds simple, but it's not.
Because of the cut blocking rule change, option teams had to find new ways of blocking on the perimeter. Navy's solution has been to use new formations along with increased motion and shifting. From the Temple debrief:
The new formations are designed to give the defense unbalanced looks in the hope that they will be similarly unbalanced. With the motion, the idea is to create a numbers advantage by changing the alignment of the formation before the defense can adjust. Sometimes, the offense motions away from the play, hoping defenders will follow and take themselves out of position. Instead of cut blocking, the slotbacks try to get leverage. On most plays, it's the slotback and a wide receiver tasked with perimeter blocking. One tries to get inside leverage, one tries to get outside leverage, and the ball carrier tries to run between them.
It isn't working, at least not consistently. Instead, we've seen bad angles, missed assignments, and unblocked defenders. And it's affecting everything that Navy tries to do.
Indeed, ineffective perimeter blocking has had far-reaching consequences. Because defenses don't fear Navy's perimeter game, they've just stacked the box to stop the fullback. Early in the season, when the offensive line was healthy, the Mids were still able to manage. As the offensive line has been more and more banged up, powering through those stacked defenses has become more difficult, which is why the offense has gotten worse as the season has progressed.
Navy tried to loosen up defenses by giving them more shotgun looks, and against UAB, it worked. But the two defenses since that game knew what was coming, so the counter trey option out of the shotgun didn't catch ECU or SMU off guard. Those two teams were probably the least stacked-in-the-box that Navy has faced this year, but it didn't make running against them any easier.
The inability to block on the perimeter has also made playcalling difficult. Again, from the Temple debrief:
The more the season has progressed, the more confused I've been trying to figure out what kind of playcalling series there are in the new offense. Generally, in an option offense, you start with the triple option. When the defense adjusts to stop the triple, the offense has a few plays to counter that adjustment. The defense adjusts again, and the cycle continues. For example, maybe the defense adjusts to the triple by squatting the defensive end. The offense adjusts by running the fullback trap. The defense adjusts by bringing a safety into the box, and the offense adjusts by throwing play action over the top. That's series football.
But what if the triple doesn't work in the first place? More often than not, Navy isn't just adjusting to what the defense is doing. They're adjusting to what they can't do themselves. As a result, there sometimes doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to the playcalling. The solution, it seems to my untrained eye, has been to throw as many different looks at the defense as they can, presumably hoping to catch the defense out of position. And to be fair, they have at times, which is why we've seen more big plays this year. But those big plays have been oases in a desert of three and outs, and they haven't made up for the inconsistency.
This is why changing quarterbacks hasn't really made a difference for the offense. No quarterback makes up for bad blocking even if he does everything right.
The question, then, is why the perimeter blocking is so bad, and I don't have any good answers there. The slotbacks are the youngest position group on the team, and it's their jobs that have been affected the most by both the rule change and the changes in the offense to counteract it. Maybe things will improve with more reps and more experience.
But there also seem to be problems with the scheme as well. In almost every game this season, I've noticed several plays where the playside safety goes unblocked. It happens often enough that I'm sure it's intentional and not a missed assignment. That safety almost always makes the tackle on those plays. I don't understand the reasoning there. Is it that the coaches figure that a safety lined up deep enough isn't worth blocking? Are they just more concerned with scraping linebackers, so they're picking their poison and blocking those players instead? Do they think the new motions and formations will confuse the safety and run him out of the play? Whatever it is, it isn't working.
The whole point of an option offense is to make it an 11 vs. 9 game. Leaving two defenders unblocked as option keys allows you to block more defenders downfield. Leaving that safety unblocked changes the option math, and not in favor of the offense.
But like I said, I don't have a good answer. I do know that the solution won't be a matter of just putting in a new quarterback or calling better plays, though.
1. Do you believe DC’s have adjusted to our new formations and pre-snap motion, to the point it is no longer effective?
2. Has all the pre-snap motion made it more difficult for the O-Line to hold still? I can’t even hold still on my couch for the time it takes us to switch formations and run motion.
3. Do you believe blocking on the perimeter can improve to provide big-play potential? Or do you see the staff adjusting to more RPO, etc?
— Mark H.
1. Yes and no. Earlier in the season, opposing defensive coordinators could only study Grant Chesnut’s old offense to prepare for Navy, so the new offense probably caught them off guard. Defensive coordinators since then have had a better idea of what’s coming, so they could prepare for the new looks they saw from Navy. So yes, DCs have adjusted, but not to the point that all the new looks can’t be effective if they’re just blocked right. That’s what’s holding Navy back.
2. I assume you’re asking about false start penalties. The reason we’re seeing so many from Navy this year is because of the injuries on the offensive line.
Everyone knows the old saying, “Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.” That’s also the reason why the service academies usually are among the best in the nation when it comes to penalties. Their offensive lines are the products of four years of doing the same thing repeatedly, which is why they don’t make mistakes. When they get hurt, they’re replaced by guys who’ve spent three years doing the same thing repeatedly, so they’re still ok.
This year, Navy is getting back to more of an old-school approach when it comes to how the line practices. The problem is that they haven’t built that same kind of three- and four-year depth yet. With all the injuries, you have more guys playing out of position and more guys playing before they’re ready. That means players are less sure of themselves, which leads to more penalties.
Remember, the penalties weren’t a problem at the beginning of the year. It only started with the USF game, when the injuries began to mount.
3. I think more RPO plays were part of the long-term picture for the offense, no matter what. But an offense cannot live on RPOs alone. The perimeter blocking still needs to be fixed. I’m sure there’s a way.
New head football coaches at a division 1 school typically get a couple of years to recruit student-athletes into their system before being judged too harshly. Navy, of course, is not a typical division 1 university. How much time should Coach Newberry get?
— @LesNixon13
Is the current coaching staff going to get the benefit of a four year recruiting cycle to get results, or will there be a new staff if the wins don’t start coming in?
— @JedediahTate
I don’t see why Coach Newberry wouldn’t get the same opportunity as any other coach. That’s especially true at a place like Navy, where developing young players into senior contributors over four years is the program’s formula for success. The only potential wild card is if Chet Gladchuk retires and a new AD wants to put his or her stamp on the program. Football success is usually tops on an AD’s to-do list and new ones don’t want to be judged by their predecessors’ decisions.
Why wasn’t Arline the starting quarterback at the beginning of the season? Do the coaches play favorites? I can’t think of another reason. We’d be better off if X started the whole way.
— Marcus P.
Are you sure about that? He’s a great runner and he’s thrown some good passes, but has the offense looked any better? They did against UAB, but the quarterback wasn’t the only change in that game. The plays were different, and the two games since then might have been the two worst games the offense has played other than Air Force. And we all know what happened against Temple. I’m not saying this to put down Arline one bit; I agree that he could have been given greater consideration for the starting job from the beginning. But again, the quarterback hasn’t really been the problem with the offense this year, so I don’t think a different one would have changed the team’s fortunes much, if at all.
I don’t have any inside information on this, but I suspect Arline was the odd man out at quarterback simply because the coaches wanted to get the best 11 players on the field. Think back to the beginning of the season. Both the top slotbacks from last year had left the team, leaving the Mids awfully thin at that position. Chatman, Heidenreich, and France are all sophomores. It’s why Anton Hall was moved, and Arline would have given them another proven player there. He was really the only choice of the quarterbacks. You wouldn’t put Lavatai at slotback, and none of the others would have added any veteran experience in that position room.
To be blunt, I think this season has justified the coaches’ concern about the slotbacks. It is probably the weakest position on the team. They all are fine with the ball in their hands, but they rarely get the opportunity to do anything because their blocking is poor. I don’t know if Arline would have been any better, but the coaches’ initial desire to move him shows that they recognized early on that there would be problems.
Arline has been the victim of bad timing and bad luck. I think the coaches wanted Horvath to be the starter when fall camp opened, but his progress didn’t happen as quickly as they’d hoped. That forced them to keep Arline in the QB room longer than they wanted. Remember, when Lavatai was hurt against Notre Dame, it was Arline who replaced him. Eventually, Horvath improved enough to be put into the mix, allowing Arline to start practicing at slot. But as soon as he was ready to get real playing time, both Horvath and Lavatai were lost to injury, necessitating a switch back to quarterback. It took another couple of weeks for him to get back up to speed, and he’s started ever since.
Makes more sense than a conspiracy, anyway.
What are the biggest items the Navy football staff needs to focus on, in the off season, to get us back to being a consistent winning program?
— @star53ship
For the football staff, fixing the problems with the offense is job one. But there’s a difference between a winning team and a winning program. Regarding the latter, the most important work isn’t the football staff’s. It’s for Congress. The biggest thing that Navy could do for the program is work on moving NAPS to Annapolis.
We all know how much college football is changing with NIL and the transfer portal. Navy can’t take advantage of either one. As crazy as NIL has become, I’m not overly concerned about it as far as Navy goes. It certainly doesn’t help, but the kind of kid who’s interested in the short term was never coming to the Naval Academy anyway. Navy gets players who understand that USNA is an investment that pays off in the long term. That hasn’t changed.
The transfer portal is a different story. Teams can revitalize their rosters yearly using the portal, and the American is a popular landing spot for high-caliber players. Teams can’t be talent hoarders anymore. Now, more talent is seeing the field, making the average college football team better than it was 20 years ago. That makes Navy’s job that much harder.
To top it all off, Navy’s service academy rivals are using more and more five-year players. Air Force had 11 fifth-year seniors, including star players Zac Larrier and Emmanuel Michel. Army has 15 fifth-year seniors and five fourth-year juniors, including Jakobi Buchanan, Isaiah Alston, and most of their secondary. Sure, people from both schools will swear that everything is above board and not the new way they do business. We’ll see. If not, that’s just one more way the playing field isn’t the same for Navy.
Both of those things make retention a top priority for Navy. They can’t afford to lose talent while the schools they play are all stockpiling it. Retention took a massive hit due to COVID, but that should work itself out after next year. However, retention at the prep school was an issue long before COVID hit. The school is almost 400 miles from Annapolis, so it can be hard for NAPSters to feel like they are part of the Naval Academy program. Then they go home for Christmas after a Newport December and start questioning what they’re doing there. To top it all off, the athletic facilities aren’t exactly Division-I-caliber.
Moving NAPS across the Severn to the Naval Station would work wonders. While the coaches would still be bound by NCAA recruiting rules, it would be a lot easier to make regular visits during contact periods. NAPSters could go to home games. They could visit practices as long as they did it on their own. They can be part of the Naval Academy community through things like attending services at the Chapel. Most importantly, they could see what they’re working toward whenever they look out the window. USNA becomes more tangible to them.
Obviously, this isn’t a move that could (or should) happen solely for football. Army’s new prep school cost over $100 million to build, and that was back in 2011. That’s a lot of money, and it’d be even more now. However, there are legitimate non-football reasons to move NAPS as well. It also isn’t unprecedented; until 1974, NAPS was located at NTC Bainbridge in Maryland.
If one thing could be done to help the program over the long term, moving the prep school is it.
I came across a youtube channel managed by a flexbone coaching clinic guy named Dr. Lou Cella who claims to know and have worked with many on the Navy staff whom people in the industry respect as option gurus such as Ivin Jasper, Ashley Ingram, etc. Though he seems to be very opinionated and borderline alarmist, a common thread in most of his videos and shorts is that the ONLY way to run an effective offense at a service academy given the talent and size disparity is to pretty much never be in shotgun and base the core of your offensive philosophy around zone dive, mid triple, and toss sweep and to use that to set everything up.
Though obviously it's not that simple, it does appear that over the last decade or so, Air Force has become less and less multiple and we have become more and more, and the rushing numbers have seemed to reflect what Dr. Cella is talking about. Over the last five years or so they've been averaging ludicrous rushing numbers per game and had multiple 10+ win seasons, while we have remained middling at best minus a few breakout games.
How much of this do you agree with? Have we had a misplaced sense of having to become a jack-of-all trades while ending up becoming mediocre-bad at all of those trades?
— Ryan F.
I’ve seen people reference Lou Cella before and know of his existence, but I’ve never actually watched his stuff. I trust that this is an accurate description of his thoughts, although it’s an interesting question either way. There are really two different arguments here. There’s the question of what can win at a service academy and what’s best for offenses based on an inside veer triple option.
As to the former, I don’t think there’s anything special about shotgun formations at the service academies. However, there is merit to the idea that you don’t want to add too much to the offense. I wrote as much back in 2018 when Navy looked terrible against Air Force. In my answer to another question above, I mentioned the importance of four years’ worth of repetition when it comes to proper execution of the offense. There’s a tipping point when it comes to how much practice time you can spend on other things, where once you go past it, you start to damage your ability to run the core of your offense.
There is a difference, though, between “adding too much” and simply “lining up in the shotgun.” One of the first things I asked Grant Chesnut after he was hired was how he could keep from degrading the core offense with everything he wanted to do. He said the important thing was not to change what the offensive line was doing. As long as the line is still doing the same things they do when you’re under center, you’ll be ok. The line is still practicing the same stuff.
Look at what Navy is doing in the shotgun. They’re running outside zone. Well, they run outside zone under center too. They run the counter trey. They also do that under center, usually with the quarterback. They run the inverted veer, which uses similar blocking to the counter option and fullback trap. As far as the line goes, everything is pretty much the same.
Now, that doesn’t mean everything is hunky-dory. There are tradeoffs when you line up in the shotgun. Plays develop more slowly. The reads are different for the quarterback, and Arline has struggled with shotgun reads more than he has under center. It’s not something you do just to do it. Ideally, you use it to adjust to something the defense is doing. Right now, Navy is just trying to find anything that will work for them.
Air Force has simplified their offense for the better, but I think boiling it down to just not lining up in the shotgun anymore is oversimplifying what happened. Trying to be a jack-of-all-trades is indeed a bad idea, but I don’t think that’s what Navy is doing.
What do you think of Army joining the AAC? Is it bad for Navy?
— Jon A.
I don't love it. People tend to lump Army and Navy together when it comes to sports, so I value the things that set Navy apart. Membership in the American was one of those things. I think it would've been a strategic advantage for Navy over the long term, both financially and in overall perception. People might mock the conference's "P6" campaign, but you know what? It worked. It absolutely helped to build their brand, and Navy has benefitted from it. Now Army will, too.
But the reality is that Army joining the league will be a net positive for Navy. Like it or not, Navy has tied their future to the conference, so what is good for the conference is good for the Mids. Army joining is good for the conference.
After losing four schools, the league's biggest priority is maintaining the value of its media rights deal with ESPN. With the departure of SMU, the AAC had to find a replacement that ESPN would be willing to pay for. I saw people hoping for schools like Appalachian State or JMU, but ESPN already owns the rights to their games through their contract with the Sun Belt. They won't pay more for schools already in their inventory. The American had to find a school that ESPN didn't already own the rights to. That is basically Conference-USA and Army, and Army is far and away the biggest brand name of that bunch. More importantly, it is one that ESPN is happy to acquire.
While the American's media deal is orders of magnitude smaller than the big-money conferences, it's still more money than most of its members have ever seen, including Navy. They're counting on using that money to grow and stay as competitive as possible. Army joining the league keeps those plans intact.
One silver lining in this is that, at least for now, Army has changed their offense. One of the reasons why Navy didn't want Army to join in the past is that they didn't want another option offense in the league. That would mean more preparation for the option from league defenses every year, making them better at stopping it. At least for now, that is no longer a concern.
