I keep hearing the phrase if Williams is slightly better than Wilson……

[Anonymous]

Utah may have a special year.

Looking at Wilson’s numbers it seems like a pretty low bar is all.

His best year IMO was 2014, the yards are nice, the INT’s are nice but only 18 passing TD’s seems low.

I guess if I had a bar for a QB just starting his first year in the program I would put it around Wilson’s 2014 numbers.  He has to limit the turnovers and I would be much happier with completion percentage around 65%.   If we think Williams is going to be a lot better than Wilson I think you have to properly adjust your expectations of the offense.

[Utah]

I think the point isn’t that Williams isn’t that good or won’t be very good.

The point is, we need so little from the passing game. The rest of the team is so good, that even just a little bit will make us great.

I disagree. I think Booker was that amazing that he led us to 19 wins with no passing game.

Joe Williams is good, but not that good. We need Troy Williams this year to be 9-10+ wins again.

We wont be able to rely on the rushing game as much.

Heres where it gets weird:

We don’t need big numbers from Troy Williams. We need efficiency. We need a top 4 efficiency from him and we will be amazing.

Or big numbers. I’ll take both. 😉

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Utah.

[Anonymous]

Yeah I kind of feel you didn’t read what I had to say but yes I agree a more efficient offense will lead to better things. I guess my point I was trying to make is Wilson is a low bar to put standards on. If you have ever weight lifted you don’t stay at 50% of your max and expect to get stronger. I think Williams has a higher ceiling than Wilson and we should expect better than below average. Now win losses I think Wilson has proven he can win games, but we all know at Utah defense wins games and a rush attack.

Utah needs to limit turnovers(Wilson did great the past two seasons), increase the completion percentage and start getting first downs.

Third down conversion rate is still too low but it has improved Utah ranks 47th.  Stanford is 5th, fUCLA 20th, Cal 14th.  I remember many times in 2015 Utah would bury themselves into third and longs way too often. Emulating Stanford starts and ends with that stat IMO.

[Tony (admin)]

Yes good point.  Our 1st and 2nd down efficiency has been very bad the last few years.  That has put us in 3rd and long, which we were simply not good at.  If we can get better on 1st and 2nd, a lot will open up for us.

[Anonymous]

If Troy Williams can achieve a 3:1 passing TD to INT ratio we’ll be fine in the throw game.  Wilson never got better than 2:1.

We need Joe Williams to hold onto the ball.  We need to be plus 15 to 20 on turnovers.  Then everything else will fall into place.

[leftyjace]

For the life of me, I can’t see how we can expect anything less than a major improvement over Wilson. Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy and he’s a Utah Man. But he couldn’t complete more than one read, he had a hard time throwing the ball, and he at times seemed very much run first. Getting someone with a true quarterback perspective (like the 3 gentlemen we have now) will pay major dividends.

I fully expect our offense to run a lot better. Having improved receivers due to better coaching is just going to amplify that.

[UtahSig]

I think you make a good point. I don’t like the whole “if we are just a bit better than Wilson” mentality. I used to look at business plans for work a few jobs ago. I would see all the time these plans that would say “We are going after the X market, which is a $10B market. If we can capture just 1% of that, we will be a $100M company.” No VC wants to invest in an entrepreneur that is trying to capture 1%, of the market. Try to be the biggest player in the market.

It is true that if we had someone just a bit better passer we could have beat UCLA and AZ, but as someone pointed out, we don’t have Booker anymore. I think to stay at the 10 win level we need to be significantly better in the passing game. And, I think we will be.