Rod Boone of Newsday discusses all of the weapons Brian Schottenheimer has at his disposal.
Brian Schottenheimer's toy chest has been loaded with a bevy of goodies this offseason, almost as if he's been given a humongous box of giant Legos to play with. The Jets' offensive coordinator can take those shiny new pieces and arrange them in a variety of ways, essentially creating his own potential masterpieces that look nothing like the original pictured on the Lego box.
"You think about, 'Boy, if I move this guy here, I can do that. Look at this personnel package,' " Schottenheimer told Newsday. "I think that's one of the things that's fun this time of year as a creative coach. You kind of catch yourself daydreaming about if, 'Wow, I do this, I do that. Oh, that'd be a cool concept to put in for this guy.'
"Obviously, our philosophy and our scheme is pretty well laid out, but we feel like it's gotten a ton of flexibility with some of the new additions that we have. And we feel that we can tag certain things to our runs and passes to make it a little bit more difficult to defend."
Oh boy. This makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. It's great to have a ton of weapons. Every team wants it. I just worry because Brian gets too cute. He incorporates a lot of gimmicky stuff into his schemes that work better on the chalk board than on the field. The Jets are going to have a lot more talent on offense than most defenses they will face. I'm hoping the focus will be more on execution than deception, but that's not really Schotty's thing.
While I have full faith in the defensive staff, the offensive leadership is a definite question mark entering the season. Schottenheimer has been erratic in four years at the helm. It's easy to commit exclusively to the run with a mistake prone rookie quarterback (and even that took too many painful games where he asked Sanchez to do too much, and Rex had to intervene). We'll see how Brian does this year. It could determine whether he gets a head gig in 2011.