Something different than LaVar (Are we using Portis Correctly)

Are we using Portis to the best of his ability. Where are the screens, draws, stretch plays. Could we open up the offense anymore. I think so. We have alot of weapons if you think about it. Portis, Moss, Patten, Cooley, Jacobs(if healthy).

I think they will work also, with the way that brunnel is playing right now

I don't think we are using him to the best of his abilities right now, we've got to create more opportunities for him to make plays in space.

space is the key for portis. He can make people miss, use his speed to get outside. I just dont see us using the sweeps either. I just think we have so much more potential to score points and move the ball than what we are showing. I realize we are putting YARDS on the board, but as we saw last week, its who outscores who, not who outgains who.

Something different needs to be done because while this O is gaining yards it has only scored 1 more point this season than at the same time last season.

I think the use of Portis so far hss been mediocre at best. Portis is best in space, on the edges or outside. Seems we ram him up the middle a little more than I'd like to see. I think the ratio of gut runs to streches and zones needs to come down a bit. As far as screens they ran a bunch of these in pre-season but we have yet to see them. I am guesing these are being saved for later in the year. Seems Gibbs and co. like to hold back things so teams can't prepare for them. You can contrast this style of scheming to the Colts who simply throw everything at you every time and force you to choose what to take time preparing for versus what not to. Not sure which method is better but the success of the Colts is hard to argue with.

I think to a large extent our offense has been turned around by a couple things this year. First of course is the continued improvment in play at the QB position. Brunell seems increasingly able to avoid some pressure and make good decisions while throwing the ball adequately. He is no Johnny U but he is getting the job done pretty well.

I think our play calling has become a much more inspired but our overall offensive direction is what is holding us back from scoring points. Our offense is largely to max protect and let our fast receivers get open while Brunell takes his time finding them. This works great in space but when you get to the redzone it is much harder for those WRs to get open with less space. Consequentially we either don't get anything done since no one can get open or we have to shift gears and move into a less comfortable set which we don't seem to execute as well. We need to work our way out of max protect as the season progresses because it is really limiting our scoirng ops.

Portis looked very good this week. Remember he aslo had a 30? yard run negated and he was very close to breaking away for two TDs. Once Portis lost his balance and fell down and once he had a player just get a part of his foot to trip him up. On another play if he would of ran to the left of his block and not his right he would have scored. I'm not making excuses I'm just stating how close he was to a 200 yard game against a tough run D. I thought our entire O played great and was happy to see how well we moved the ball. The Skins are missing two things 1 we needed to score more points in the red zone 2 we need a turnover or two to come our way. Every week we are increasing O production while facing tougher teams and this is what I'm hyped about.We can look at all the negatives but if you look at all the positives we have alot to be happy about. We are seeing Gibbs and this team coming out of their shell and if any team tries to look past us they are going down. Two weeks from now we will be 5-1 and everyone will be jumping on the Skins bandwagon.

portis does seem to stumble a lot, especially on 15+ yard runs... anyone know what his problem is?

portis does seem to stumble a lot, especially on 15+ yard runs... anyone know what his problem is?

Man, Stephen Davis did NOTHING BUT stumble. And stumble he did for a LOT of yards. I used to refer to his runs as "Stumbling for yardage".

I think we are just taking it one step at a time. When was the last time we had 400+ yards of total offense? I think we're just taking it step by step. Next week, I see the big points and the big yards coming and as we coninue to mesh and gel, we're going to become even more dangerous.
Portis is going to get his yards, don' worry bout that, we're just clearing all the men out the box first by passing it. I think by week ten Portis will have 2 200+ yard games.