FSU football film review: Offense vs. Virginia Tech

Film Review is back! Each week we take a play-by-play look at how the offense and defense played vs. their previous opponent.

Florida State fans had high expectations for the new, fast-paced, smash-mouth spread offense under Willie Taggart, but it fell flat on its face Monday night to open the season vs. Virginia Tech. After going back and watching the film, we have some takeaways on what exactly went wrong, along with a detailed review from each play.

Here are some takeaways, followed by all of the plays broken down.

The QB must start making the right read on zone reads and RPOs.

Virginia Tech loaded the box to stop the run. There were 8 or 9 defenders near the line of scrimmage very often, but FSU didn’t effectively counter this. The coaching staff tried to call various RPO and Zone Read plays, but Deondre Francois clearly had a hard time making the correct reads. On zone reads he didn’t show the ability and/or the desire to pull the ball when the defensive end crashed to take the running back. However, he had no problem sacrificing his body as a blocker, so this may be a comfort thing, as opposed to a willingness to do so.

FSU also has RPOs within the offense requiring Francois to throw the ball to the perimeter if numbers dictate. He didn’t do this enough when FSU had clear numbers on the outside. This really hurt the offense and often times made it seem FSU had a bad play called. As crazy as it sounds, FSU needed more bubble screens, not fewer.

As we know, VT has an excellent defensive coordinator in Bud Foster, and the Hokies presented many different looks in the box. There’s no doubt this contributed to Francois’ confusion with some of his decision-making. It’s not surprising either due to Francois’ limited reps in this new offense, as some of these elements were completely foreign in the prior offense, and he missed spring ball.

Francois should be expected to improve his decision-making in this area each week. If he’s unable to, the offense won’t get substantially better.

FSU needs to take more matchups against 1v1 coverage.

With so many VT defenders in the box, this left numerous 1-on-1 matchups to the outside and often times vs. soft coverage. FSU didn’t make the opposing defense pay for this, either. It’s unclear why they didn’t feel comfortable getting the ball to their bigger wide receivers in these matchups. With Francois’ ineffectiveness in the read and RPO plays, this’ll be something FSU needs to look for as the season progresses.

This is an area where the coaching emphasis can be greater. If the staff knows the QB is struggling in making the right choices, it needs to have him make some of the choices pre-snap and just take some 1-on-1 matchups.

Francois can’t force the ball to Noonie Murray and must handle adversity better.

As a passer, Francois started the game off fine, other than the early miss to D.J. Matthews over the middle. As the game went on, particularly after the Keith Gavin drop in the end zone, the FSU signal-caller played worse. He began to press and look for big plays rather than take what was there and seemed to force the ball to his favorite target, Noonie Murray. You’ll find several examples of this in the play breakdown below.

The offensive line clearly did not play well.

There might be a silver lining we can find.

First, here are some of the issues:

• We saw plays where lineman stepped the wrong direction, or turned a guy loose from a missed assignment in the run-game.
• A few times they were unsure of their assignment due to movement and stems from the VT front.
• They blew a few pass protections, but much of that was excellent disguise by VT and came at a time when FSU was playing from behind, or Francois simply held the ball too long.
• The penalties were untimely and hurt the offense.

Most of these are mistakes you’d expect with a team installing a new scheme against a very good defensive coordinator. And Virginia Tech’s defensive line is by far the Hokies’ best unit. FSU’s offensive line is somewhat limited physically, but most of the errors we saw are fixable for a group that we didn’t have high expectations for to begin the season. It’ll need to coach better to fix some of the mental errors because the group won’t get physically better during the season.

If Landon Dickerson remains sidelined with his ankle injury when it comes time to play better defenses again, this group could be overwhelmed physically.

Tight end was a bright spot for the offense.

Tre McKitty caught the ball well and did a nice job blocking, as well. This is encouraging.

Cam Akers didn’t have his best game.

Cam Akers seemed to press some and was trying a bit too hard to make a play on his own, rather than trusting the play and allowing his blocks to set up. This can happen with the amount of penetration VT was getting, but he’ll need to learn to stay patient. Jacques Patrick did a better job of this and continues to show improvement using his size to run with power. Both were set up at times to run into a doomed situation by incorrect decisions by Francois.

It was obviously a disappointing night for the wide receivers, as well.

The most disappointing aspect of the wide receivers’ poor performance was their blocking on the perimeter. They missed assignments at times and didn’t show the necessary effort to consistently win their matchups in order to create lanes for screens. Effort should never be a problem, regardless of scheme. FSU also didn’t do a great job personnel-wise in helping them with this. Some players within this position group are better suited to catch the bubble than block and vice-versa.