Kent State Game Week 2023

In the last couple
Years there was a couple good High School QB’s that liked Miami but with the time Brett had left wouldn’t come here. Kids won’t transfer to a program with an established QB, hopefully they can get a good HS kid or transfer in the next year.

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If you have a decent program and have an obvious starting QB spot open, I really think what is going to be happening across college football is that you are going to take a P5 guy who enters the portal. BG QB we face Saturday would be an example. He has a couple of years of starting experience at P5 conference schools and if our job was open he probably would have come here. I guess it depends on how much Chuck believes in Aveon as to whether the QB spot will be open or not when Brett leaves ( which will be either this year or next).

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If Gabbert doesn’t come back we roll with Aveon, I can’t see us winning more than 3-4 games. Kid just cannot pass

He won 5 games last year with no experience. You are thinking he will get worse?

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It is so difficult to tell how good we will be next year. If everyone who has eligibility returns we could be incredibly deep and good.

Of course in a few of the young men’s cases they will have doctorates and be just shy of receiving social security but I can hope!

Would love to see AS in a game where he’s throwin against minimum 2nd teamers and throwing to crosses and timing up hooks and not just bombing it down the sidelines on fly patterns. Then we’ll know if his passing has improved.

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Let’s be real, one of those wins was against a winless FCS team while the other four were against teams with a combined 14-34 record by an average of 3.25 points. We barely reached five wins with Aveon and it was on the back of great defense and special teams, the UB/BG/WMU losses were almost completely due to ineffective passing game that allowed the opposition to key on the running game. Smith was in a tough spot last year and I’m sure he’s improved, but he is not an FBS-quality QB with our system. That’s not taking anything away from his work ethic or talent, but I will be very concerned if he’s our starter next year.

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Perhaps my calls to bring on O’Henry will come to fruition. I will ship the candy bars to Oxford in bulk pre game.

“Lets be real!” I think this is a really cheap shot. So by your “standards”, let’s judge Brett this year. He is 4-1, However, those 4 wins are over teams with a combined record of 5-16, and 3 of those 5 wins were against FCS or lower teams, so those 4 teams are actually 2-16 vs FBS. “Lets be real”. As I said, I think it was a cheap shot and I think your stats prove nothing. Coach Martin has said that he is more confident, more experienced, and better this year. The only playing time he has had this year has led to a TD on every single possession he has played, one vs UC, and several vs Delaware State.

Based on his inability to pass the ball, hes certainly not going to get better. it’s not like we run a read option that maximizes his running ability.

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To be fair to AS, we really haven’t seen much of his throwing ability this year. What we have seen is a few passes, and they didn’t look great. But hard to judge if he has improved over that small sample size. I think both sides of this discussion have made some valid points.

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Those Brett FBS wins were against some bad teams, but by an average of nearly 2 TDs instead of just over a FG.

I don’t doubt that Smith has improved, but how much weight can we put to Chuck’s comments? Is he the type that would say “eh he’s stagnated / regressed” to the public? To bluesman’s point we haven’t really seen much passing from him in 2023, all I can use is last season along with a reasonable expectation on how much he could have improved over the offseason.

This all is more an indictment of Martin/Koehler than Aveon. Notice I said “in our system”, which throughout his coaching tenure has mostly been a balanced attack with a slight lean to pass. Now if say Martin were hired away this offseason and his replacement geared us towards a run-focused spread with a lot of RPOs, read options, and short passes, Aveon might be a really good starter for us. But not as-is unless Chuck runs the actual offense for him during garbage time to show off his improvement.

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I think we all agree that discussing Aveon’s abilities is nothing more than time filling fodder unless another QB is required. That said, I will join in by saying that there were two apparent areas of improvement from last year. Mechanically, he had an open handed delivery that is a barrier to consistent accuracy. Though not a thing of beauty, I have seen an improvement in that mechanic. Kudos to Gus for forcing that adjustment. The other was his ability to read the defense. That has yet to be seen.

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Agree. It does look like Gus has stopped Aveon’s tendency of pushing the football out.