Quote:
Originally Posted by Coogs
I'm going to go back to the Steelers game again. It looked as if a few lessons were learned against the 49ers, and our blocking was better, receiving personal was better for our system... but didn't have McCluster, and Charles was on the sideline.
Yet we still threw it 24 times, completed 17 of them for 71%. 158 yards, 1 TD, and 0 INT's.
There was nothing there that indicated to me that we couldn't have come out the 2nd half and duplicated those numbers.
I'm not buying that Smith has a ceiling on how many attempts he can throw in a game, and his performance will begin to suffer. Not before the games start for real next week anyway.
I referenced this earlier this off-season. The Chiefs/Bronco's Monday Night game where Montana threw the TD to win it at the gun.
The game against the Steelers last week would have been very similar to the game plan that night in Denver with Montana had it continued for a full game instead of just the first half.
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Some people act like Smith can throw adequately for throws 1-29 and on passes 30+ he suddenly started throwing INTs and incompletions. Reality was that since he was in run-first offenses, he'd often only throw 30+ times in games where he was playing catchup. The catchup parts were in garbage time where the defense was in prevent, but it didn't overcome the bad start - getting few shots make it harder to get it done.
Reid will game-plan for a lot of throws and these throws will be in the same difficulty level as Smith has done well in. Defenses know this, so there's some problems, but Smith will likely have some success and be able to throw a lot more than he did in Harbaugh's run-first offense (which he ran more than he passed even with Andrew Freakin' Luck).