UConn Offensive Coordinator George DeLeone Talks Run Game And…Wildcat Offense

OK, well let’s get right into this one.

Lyle McCombs (23 carries, 82 yards 1 TD) didn’t break a buck against the Minutemen. What gives?

“We were not pleased with how we ran the ball,” DeLeone said. “We have to run the ball better. We’re  a team that believes that we can run the ball. We’re a team that is going to pride ourselves on our run game and we spend a lot of time on it. We didn’t get the results against UMass that we wanted. It was a combination of issues: No.1, I thought, fundamentally, we gotta coordinate some things better between the running backs and offensive line. No.2, I didn’t think the offensive line, at times, played as well as they can play: No.3, UMass’ middle linebacker, No.44 (Perry McIntyre who had a game-high 12 tackles), had a phenomenal game; phenomenal game. Now, we’re going to see good linebackers as we go down the road here but he was exceptional. I mean he was extremely well-coached on our offense. I thought he diagnosed plays exceptionally well. I thought he had a very good game. So, I thought it was a combination of the three. No excuses. We have to do better.”

You know, some will look at the game and say – and they have said – Chandler Whitmer was pulled in flow for the wildcat offense and it is, was or can be disruptive.

What’s your response to those concerns, criticism?

“The response to that is very simply, does the fact that the defense has to defend the wildcat pass game, the wildcat run game, along with a base offense with Chandler…does that help Chandler or hurt Chandler? In my mind that helps Chandler because they have so much to defend, maybe they can’t spend an inordinate amount of time defending our play-action pass game, defending our normal run game, so, in my mind, it adds value. How much we use it and when we use it? That will be a week-to-week basis. There’s a lot to defend. And we played a team, that to me, knowing the history of Phil Elmassian (UMass defensive coordinator and former secondary and defensive coordinator at Syracuse while DeLeone and head coach Paul Pasqualoni was there) he’s a high pressure coach. The fact that they were vanilla to defend all we did I think helped Chandler.

“I understand that there’s conversation and will be conversation about upsetting the rhythm and all these kinds of things. I understand, also, the pluses, which are, we made a pretty multiple defense fairly vanilla, which in my mind, helped Chandler.”

One more – on senior guard Adam Masters. He graded out an 83 playing three positions Thursday night. That score is pretty high playing one position let alone three.

“Very, very impressed with the flexibility Adam Masters gave us at right guard, right tackle and left tackle,” DeLeone said. “Now people don’t think that’s much or very impressive but it is very impressive. It’s very impressive because A) his footwork changes dramatically from the right side to the left and B) his assignments totally change from guard to tackle. So what he did in the game and to still grade out over 80 percent was remarkable.

“Now, what that allowed us to do was to rotate people and what that is going to do down the line is create competition for positions and create depth and I think that’s our goal, has been, as you know, we’ve been talking about this for six months.”

DC