Great points on McVay and needing to adapt.
I have quite literally NEVER posted anything critical of Mr. Boy Wonder Franchise Savior Photographic Memory Supermodel Shagger McVay.
However...
Even I gotta admit I’ve been disappointed with his play calling recently. OK, so our OL sucks now. Where is the game plan that uses (as you said) rollouts, quick passes, misdirection screens, and emphasis on the run? What happened to McVay’s ability to adapt???
I read an article once, and o believe it was here, that another coach said McVay is not a great play designer but he is a great play optimizer. He takes other people's plays and makes them better. If that's true, then now that people know those plays he needs new material but he can't generate it alone. If that was true he'd be stuck, which is what we do see now.
Furthermore, I think McVay had a lot of success based on patterns and predictability. We saw this with the jet sweep. He introduced jet sweep to his offense, it was new (for us) so it caught teams of guard and had great success. But he only did that long enough to make it a key for the defense: see jet motion, be prepared to follow it. That's when he hit them with the real move, fake jet sweep. Now we run fake jet sweep at least 2:1 compared to an actual jet sweep. And it worked great. But teams caught onto that now too. And McVay doesn't have another move in that chain. So he keeps running a ton of fake jet sweep, it doesn't work like it did before and the offense is less effective.
Another less specific example is the first quarter or two of play the last couple of years. He had some new stuff and we had a high powered offense that scored all game, but the first 2 years 3rd quarter was where the bulk of our points came from. In quarters 1 and 2 we'd see weird plays or weird strings of plays and after a while even we knew what was up. He was testing to see how the team reacted to formations or strings of plays/formations. Then he'd adjust over half time and kill them in the third and close it down in the fourth. But I believe he had patterns based on a "normal" teams tendencies. Most teams go a, b, c, d. So McVay developed a pattern of a, b, ç, $ and wrecked everyone. But now he goes a, b, ç, $ a few times a game and the defenses know it.
Now that people have caught onto the new patterns and limited their own predictability, McVay has to run a normal offense. Normal offense isn't his strong suit and it's less effective than what he did the last two seasons.
I don't think anyone can argue that his play calling had become predictable. At this point we've established that an incomplete pass on first down inevitably lead to a run up the gut on second (big thanks to my father for pointing that out to me). Somebody else mentioned a this down pass short to the sticks to follow that but I haven't watched a game since reading it. Did sound right though. He had patterns that weren't normal for the NFL and that have him some success early. But now that every team is preparing for is like we're somebody, it's not enough.
IMO, he needs to bring in a high quality play designer to help him out. Either from another NFL staff or college. But he needs somebody generating new material for him to improve on.
