ASU Football: Mike Norvell’s Challenge

As the ASU football preseason approaches, offensive coordinator Mike Norvell has a couple of things gnawing at his coaching spirit.

First is the natural excitement of an upcoming season, especially considering the weapons returning on offense for the 2014 campaign.  Secondly is the pressure to perform.  This pressure applies to all coaches everywhere.  Coaching is their livelihood and the last thing they want is to have a bad year and lose their job.  Learning how to handle that pressure combined with the excitement of excellent players returning can actually lead to silliness.

This is Mike Norvell’s Challenge:  Stay with what works.

It may sound ridiculous, but sometimes, coaches, especially bright young coaches, can almost get too creative.  They can get bored.  They can get paranoid and feel that they have to stay one step ahead of their adversaries.  It’s not uncommon to see coaches take a simple concept and turn it into a complicated scheme that confuses their own players.  It’s not unusual for a coordinator to get so caught up in the weeds that they ignore or don’t see the obvious.

The simplest example would be an offensive coordinator drawing up elaborate passing routes with lots of shifts and motions, etc only to realize that they could win the game by just running the ball.  Another example is one heard from fans all the time.  The offense will throw a slant route for a 15 yard gain in the first quarter and then never run it again.  Last season many ASU fans complained that coach Norvell would call for the back shoulder fade with Jaelon Strong only 2-3 times and then abandon that play in the critical fourth quarter.

This is probably an amateur look at the game and is definitely a case of “armchair quarterbacking”.  There are many factors that go into calling a play.  But the overall sentiment is legitimate.  Do what works.

The challenge for offensive coordinator Mike Norvell is real.  He’s got to resist the temptation to draw up the perfect play.  He’s got to avoid getting too tricky and too fancy.  He’s got to elude the trap of getting too “schematic” and just move the chains.  If something is working, keep using it until the defense finally adjusts, rather than trying to dazzle everybody with something new.

This is not an indictment of Mike Norvell at all.  In two seasons, he has shown that he is quite capable.  Devils in Detail just believes that he will be facing a bit of a challenge this season.  Quite frankly, Norvell might be a victim of his own success and feel the pressure to “outdo” the previous two years.  He would be wise to keep his perspective simple and let his players make plays.

ASU fans will be hoping that coach Norvell, with the tutelage of head coach Todd Graham, will accept this challenge and let this ASU offense be the potent offense that it is.