You have to remember that a significant difference in the two offensive systems is that with Love, they were trying to go downfield a lot more rather than the quick, on rhythm, one-read and if it's not open, cut and run type of stuff they were doing with Willis. So what you have to figure out is, why weren't they able to be successful with the Love offense (vs. the Willis offense)? And we've talked about the reasons for that a lot - poor OL play (against the better defenses anyway) leading to relentless pressure on the QB, WRs who after Watson simply don't have the raw speed to take the top off a defense (and also who dropped the ball at an alarming rate), Love himself not playing up to the standard he set in the second half of 2023 (whether due to injury or just simply regression) and so forth.

The things they were doing with Willis weren't only covering up for him, but they were also covering up for a lot of the overall shortcomings of the offense last year. Frankly, I had to wonder why they didn't keep doing those types of things when Love came back, to cover up for the deficiencies of the offense as a whole. As long as it kept working, they should have kept doing it. Whoever they had at QB.

Problem is, that scaled back, pared-down offense was 100% NOT complex enough to be successful over a whole season. Once teams really got onto it, and it wouldn't have taken long, they'd have struggled to score any points at all. You just couldn't do it.

But what they COULD (should in my view) have done was to stay with it the scaled back offense for Love's first couple weeks back, but gradually add back in some of the other concepts as Love came back, got healthy, and got back in rhythm. But instead, Love came back vs. MN and was immediately thrown to the wolves... and we saw the result. Never able to really get into any type of consistent rhythm on offense, and so forth.