Some would say Kaaya's biggest deficiency is improvisation. When FSU started mixing things up, as one example, he couldn't adjust and made poorer decisions to hand off or throw out of the RPO calls. At UM, Kaaya worked best when things were predetermined. Coley did that for him and would ultimately run out of bullets. Or, when we went 4-vert so he made some simpler reads.
I agree with almost everything regarding the apparent misunderstanding of the RPO on this board (not sure how, since it's been explained so many times already), but wanted to comment on the Kaaya part.
RPO decision-making should be a very simple pre-snap process of counting hats in the box as well as a sight-read of the cushions from the defensive backs. I don't feel comfortable criticizing Kaaya's improvisation ability because I don't know how much freedom he was given to make adjustments at the line of scrimmage. I know he's flipped run calls in the past but that's only 1 aspect. Either way it's a coach's responsibility to design the offense so that either the QB is trusted with making critical pre-snap adjustments (Bridgewater at UL) or (like most spread teams) he's given multiple plays in the huddle and lines up and looks to the sideline for the final call.
As you alluded to I don't think the offense was well-suited to Kaaya and his lack of mobility only exacerbated the predictability/lack of built-in schematic adjustments issues that made it very easy to gameplan against for defenses with enough talent.
Like most bad offenses, there never seemed to be any flow or integration between the run and pass game. They were distinct entities creating no schematic advantage even when they were individually successful.
Kaaya belongs in either a West Coast offense that utilizes diverse alignments, shifts and route combinations to scheme WRs open quickly or a dominant gap-scheme run game that opens up throwing lanes for play action and 4-verts like you mentioned. It's not debilitating to have a QB that requires pre-determined scheme or reads.
Kirk Cousins runs exactly the WCO I just referred to and has been criticized incessantly for being a see-it-throw-it QB and bad decisionmaker...well now he's about to get around $25 million annual salary. I don't think it's fair to use a few traits of a QB as a scapegoat for all the problems of an offense, and it's concerning that the fanbase is buying into the propaganda that
Richt needs to recruit the BS archetype of the mobile "point guard" QB to run his offense. Why should we narrow the pool of recruits just to optimize a remedial offense and limit the growth potential of the playbook? Do we really want to commit to running an inferior version of the
horizontal offense OSU just showed against Clemson only with a zone blocking scheme in place of the gap (power, counter) scheme?
