also haven't rewatched the game, but i felt like he was waiting way too long to find an open receiver. he would drop back and nothing would be there. could be due to receivers not getting open, but at the time it felt like to me we were relying too much on scrambling/check downs. i could be wrong. it feels weird being concerned about it because he completed his first what, six or seven passes?
I don't necessarily think that is a bad thing.
My impression was that the new staff at SFA learned from last year and they were absolutely not going to give up big plays against us, so they played deep zones which took away our vertical and even intermediate passing a game. IMO, this was a big reason we didn't have a lot of huge plays, in either the passing game or the running game, but we had plenty of effective plays. As a result we ended up having open guys underneath and Waters ended up hitting his backs out of the backfield often because a) they were able to release because SFA didn't blitz much and b) Waters did a good job going through his progression and not forcing balls down the field. Also, we were able to get bodies on the defenders in the box, leading to a number of 4-8 yard runs, but because those safeties were deep they could come up and make tackles, but after we had effective runs. So within a simplified offensive package, Waters was able to avoid mistakes and the offense was mostly effective.
The first 4 drives resulted in TDs. Even the final drive of the 1st half the offense moved 38 yards in 50 seconds with only 1 TO, Cantele just missed the FG.
The 2nd half was less effective with a 3 an out, an INT, and a FG along with 2 more TD drives. Still, on 10 drives with Waters in the game the offense scored 45 points. 7 of the first 8 were effective drives (counting the missed FG before half) resulting in 6 TDs for the offense. I'm not disappointed at all in that effort.
