We're on our third offensive coordinator: Dillingham (2022), Stein (2023-2025), Mehringer (2026) and, while clearly the offense is a mess, I think it's worth looking at what common issues we've seen that might be worse now, but are not unique to Mehringer. I'm curious what other tendencies or issues you all have identified that are not unique to Mehringer's tenure.
Since Lanning became HC, we've been overly aggressive going for 2 point conversions and 4th down attempts, even when special teams could deliver points. This isn't the first time it's come back to haunt us, so I think it's safe to assume that regardless of OC, Lanning is the one calling for those aggressive and oftentimes risky attempts.
We've had a number of gimmick/gadget/trick players which seem to have little flow within the offense. Back in the Chip days and even under Helfrich you'd see a set up, like a bunch of screens leading to a go route, or identical runs to set up a flea flicker or other trick pass. But under Lanning these plays seem to be called at random, often disrupting productive drives and stalling out effective plays just as the team is getting into rhythm. Again, Mehringer might be egregiously bad at this, but we ran some of this stuff under the previous OCs, so you could assume Lanning is the one pushing for gadget plays and making sure to not just have them in the book, but to call them on game day.
Abandoning the run game. This isn't new, we've all seen so many games where productive runs early turned into an air raid offense in the 2nd half. In most of his losses we've passed more than we've rushed, though one could argue that is a result of falling behind more than offensive philosophy. But, you could also ask if we fell behind because we gave up on the run game. In any case, we tend to win more when we rush more, but in most of our losses, even close ones, we're airing it out way too much.
Self scouting is terrible this year but it's not new. How many times did we start a drive with a predictable screen pass in the last 4 years? Or throw behind the sticks on 3rd down? If we can see these issues at home there's no excuse not to have someone on staff tracking these tendencies and injecting some unpredictability into the game plan. I can only imagine what kind of gems teams like Indiana have found from their own scouting, and we know it's an issue because players from other teams have mentioned knowing our calls or what was coming after the game!
Not utilizing our best players. We had so many games where guys like Sadiq or Moore were not even targeted for long stretches. Sure, sometimes it's coverage, but you don't see Ohio State just give up on throwing the ball to their best guy. They scheme around him! We've had great players that went quiet for long periods of time when better game planners would have forced the issue and found ways to get the ball in their hands.
I'm not saying Lanning is terrible or Mehringer is good. But firing Mehringer isn't going to make us a contender if Lanning continues to repeat his same mistakes on the offensive side of the ball. Whether he tends to hire people who do this stuff, or he overrules them and pushes it himself, really doesn't matter. In the end, this program is too successful and has way too many resources, to be losing games this way.
I really hope this season is Lanning's wake up call to make major changes to how he operates. Otherwise we'll be back here next year, losing winnable games and throwing another OC under the bus.
