Anyone even close to Jacksonville can see the mob with flames and pitchforks forming around Everbank Field just waiting for one sighting of Blaine Gabbert to send them into a frenzy.  After another game with under 50% completion percentage it's understandable for the fan base to be frustrated, but at the same time I think that we are missing something.  This was just Jedd Fisch's fifth regular season game calling plays at the NFL level...  AND IT SHOWS!

 

The Offensive line has taken a lot of heat for not generating enough push in the run game.  Loosing one on one battles up front is unacceptable and it gets you beat in this league.  At the same time, through the first four weeks of the season every time that we tried to get MJD involved it was with a fullback and two TE's.  Geeee...  I wonder what we were going to do.  With this many new players in the lineup (Harbour, burton, ebert, forsett didn't play in the preseason, Toddman emerged meaning that plans for Robinson had to be pushed back and or shelved) Fisch hasn't found a basic rhythm for his personnel packages and as such has made us all too predictable on offense.  Last week we were in base personnel for most of the game with the injuries to the wideouts today its 75% shotgun.  When we find a balance things will look a lot better. 

 

More importantly, I think that he misses the forest for the trees.  After the blocked punt we ran five consecutive passes inside the ten yardline, all out of shotgun, all straight drop back passes with no play action and the only one that wasn't from a tight bunch formation had our street Free Agent TE split out wide instead of our bellcow top 5 draft pick.  Later on with henne in the game with blackmon split out wide there was some sort of miscommunication about the route that he is supposed to run.  The first play that should have been installed in Red Zone packages back in OTA's was lining blackmon out wide in any formation and throwing the fade or fade stop.  If we can't get our best player the ball in the easiest way with 5 shots from the goal line then that's a problem.  You can worry about deuce right zigg twenty two x option or whatever convoluted terminology we have later, but football boils down to getting the ball in the air to your best player one on one and we didn't have the plays called in the red zone to do that.

 

Bash Gabbert all you want.  You can call him scared all you want.  You can call him weak.  You can talk about his pocket presence (which is a valid criticism).  But We have seen both henne and Gabbert struggle with against predictable personell packages, route combinations that don't take the lid off defenses, and no play action passing to suck up the coverages. 

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