Cignetti’s play calling and/or offensive schemes are not the issue. Not is it an issue that he could not coach up a low Patriot League talent QB to be able to play merely adequate ACC football. If you want to hold him responsible for something, it would be a failure to simplify the playbook or create a very small playbook for his freshman QB—plays the kid could execute with some modicum of success as opposed to the utter failure yesterday. It would not have made much of a difference yesterday or against Louisville, because a semi-competent DC would figure out the abbreviated scheme fairly quickly, but it would have worked against Clemson, where all we needed from our QB was that he have better physical tools than the starting QB at Bucknell. So hold that against him, it’s still not a firing offense.
The bigger indictment of Cignetti was his failure to make sure they had a semi-competent back up. And not because Jurkovec is “fragile” or whatever nonsense agenda is making the rounds. Jurkovec got pounded last year behind a shitastic offensive line because he had to play exposed to give us a chance to win in most of the games we played last year. There are almost no QBs you could name who would have ended last season upright playing the way Phil had to play and with the Oline we had. None. As for this year, smack your hand into a helmet and bad things are going to happen. A bad break, nothing more, nothing less. But even if the myth of Jurkovec’s fragility is the typical agenda bullshit that makes up 99% of the posts on this board, football is still a violent game that requires depth—especially at the QB position. And sure, you weren’t going to keep AB and you weren’t going to poach someone off the two deep at any P5 schools, but you didn’t need that much of an upgrade. You just needed someone better than a Bucknell-level athlete. There are a lot of kids like that buried on baby rapist rosters so far down that they aren’t even seeing the field when it’s Sunbelt, MAC or C-USA weekends for the SEC, Big 10 or Big 12. Watching Arizona last night against USC—Arizona, which has sadly devolved into a team so hopelessly terrible that even BC can smirk at their current condition—is now playing the RS Freshman who started the season 3rd on the depth chart. He is better in every way than any of our QB options. A far superior arm and far more mobile than Moorehead or Grosel. So if what is literally the worst P5 program in the country, one that was demolished and had salt dumped on top of it by Kevin Summlin and has been left to the tender mercies of Judd Fisch, if such a clowntastic program can muster a far superior QB from the bowels of its scout team than what we have, we’ll, that’s a Yuuuuuuge miss by Cignetti and Hafley. And that is what you kill them for—the complete failure to manage the roster.