Should Les Miles Shuffle WR’s To Spark LSU Passing Game?

In his press conference this week LSU Head Coach Les Miles had some pretty harsh words for his wide receivers.

”We’re looking at shuffling the lineup. We’re looking at all those things. I like the effort of my wide receivers. It’s not as productive as it needs to be. It needs to be more in line with the coaching. … We have to execute better. Period.”

Les Miles has said some pretty off the wall stuff in his tenure as the head coach at LSU, but usually after you translate his words back into some semblance of English his basic message makes sense. I am struggling to make sense of this particular declaration.

Now, in Les Miles defense dropped passes have been part of the problem for the Tigers. If every well thrown ball Brandon Harris has thrown was caught his completion percentage would be above 75%. In some games he would more than double his yardage total on top of that.

The problem I have here is the expectation that receivers will get into a rhythm and catch passes when the team just isn’t throwing the ball.

Sep 20, 2014; Baton Rouge, LA, USA; LSU Tigers wide receiver Malachi Dupre (15) runs after a catch against the Mississippi State Bulldogs during the first half of a game at Tiger Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports

Malachi Dupre raised that point pretty effectively.

“If they were recruiting me and they told me they were going to give the ball to Leonard, or the running backs 75 percent of the time, it might be hard to get a recruit at the receiver position or quarterback position. But at the end of the day, we’re here … we’ve got to live with it.”

Now, for the sake of accuracy I have to point out that the Tigers aren’t handing the ball to Fournete 75% of the time. They are running it 75% of the time though, and passing only 25% of the time.

With 61 pass attempts through 4 games the Tigers rank 125th of 128 FBS teams for total attempts. Many teams ahead of them have played 5 games. If you take LSU’s 15 attempts per game average and figure they would be at 76 attempts through 5 they would move all the way up to 124th place.

Only two college football teams are passing the ball less than LSU right now.

Sep 26, 2015; Syracuse, NY, USA; LSU Tigers running back Leonard Fournette (7) is tackled by Syracuse Orange cornerback Wayne Morgan (2) and safety Antwan Cordy (8) during the first quarter in a game at the Carrier Dome. Mandatory Credit: Mark Konezny-USA TODAY Sports

Malachi Dupre feels this hurts recruiting. I’m not so sure about that. Les Miles has a great track record of bringing in future NFL receivers. He also has a great track record of throwing the ball when he has the right QB to WR combination.

We can’t forget that we are just two years removed from a team that featured a 3,000 yard QB in Zach Mettenberger and two 1,000 yard receivers in Jarvis Landry and Odell Beckham Jr.

Les Miles can manage a team that passes the ball. And he can recruit big time wideouts in spite of his well known bias towards a run and play defense style of coaching. That isn’t the problem here.

The following stat Ross Dellenger of The Advocate tweeted does show you that there is cause for concern here.

The two most unbalanced offenses Les Miles has had since he took the LSU job were last year’s and the 2011 team that played for a national championship.

Last year’s team is an anomaly. The team was coming off a season where they put 13 players on NFL rosters and was basically starting off fresh with all new players everywhere.

2011 is the one that worries me. That team was incredibly talented, one of the most talented college football teams of all time. They looked a lot like this years LSU team on offense, running most of the time and passing very little.

When the running game was on they were dominant, and the running game was on for most of the season. When the running game bogged down in two games against Alabama, the offense completely shut it in.

The first time the playmakers on defense saved them, and LSU went into the national championship game undefeated.

In that game the offense shut down and the defense wasn’t able to generate the turnovers it had feasted on all season. The game was a nightmare, a long frustrating nightmare where the LSU offense couldn’t even advance the ball past midfield much less score points.

The lesson from the 2012 national championship games was simple. No matter how well the team can run the ball they have to have a plan B. They have to be able to manufacture yards and first downs in the passing game to open things up when teams put 8 and 9 players in the box to stop Fournette.

Just chucking it deep 15 times a game isn’t enough. There are two issues there.

One, deep passes aren’t efficient enough. They are a sunny day solution, not a rainy day solution. That’s the harsh lesson the talented 2011 team faced in the end.

The other issue is without throwing the ball enough to get your receivers into a rhythm they look out of sorts and miss otherwise easy plays.

None of this implies the Tigers are in trouble right now.

Oct 3, 2015; Baton Rouge, LA, USA; LSU Tigers head coach Les Miles runs onto the field with his team prior to kickoff of a a game against the Eastern Michigan Eagles at Tiger Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports

If you are a stat junkie, you are probably very familiar with the Football Outsiders website. According to their NCAA S&P+ Ratings LSU currently has the #8 ranked offense in the country. This isn’t too surprising, since LSU is scoring 36 points per game . Leonard Fournette cures a lot of ills.

The scary thing for Tigers fans moving forward is the lack of diversity in the teams offense. In spite of Les Miles claims otherwise both in his Monday press conference and in his weekly radio shows the offense is one of the most one sided in the country right now.

Running the ball 75% of the time is incredibly imbalanced. Looking deeper into the passing side the almost complete lack of pass attempts that travel less than 10 yards beyond the line of scrimmage in the air is also incredibly unbalanced.

A diverse offense will pass the ball at least 40% of the time (and a 60/40 run pass ratio is still very run heavy) and at least half the passing attempts will be short efficient passes.

For LSU to hit those very low marks they need to throw the ball 25 times a game instead of 15, with enough short yardage attempts to develop more ways for the offense to move the chains in close games.

Failing to develop a fallback to run Leonard run mixed with an occasional deep pass puts the Tigers at risk of another 2011 type letdown.

Sep 19, 2015; Baton Rouge, LA, USA; LSU Tigers helmets on the sideline during the second quarter of a game against Auburn at Tiger Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports

No Tigers fan will ever forget the forlorn faces on the LSU sideline during the second half of that game. The team looked despondent, and worse than that they looked lost.

Running the ball and playing defense was the bread and butter of that 2011 team. When the running game wasn’t there for them they simply did not have anything else to fall back on. The offense was shut down completely.

With teams like Bama, Florida and Ole Miss still on the schedule LSU will see defenses far superior to anything they have faced yet. The same is true of the College Football Playoff should they make it that far.

The team is running out of chances to build something more into the offense than Leonard Fournette. Les Miles is sending his receivers a wake up call this week. He might want to send a wake up call to his offensive coaches as well, before it gets too late to make a change.

Next: Ways That LSU Must Improve Against South Carolina