Former Syracuse Orange offensive coordinator George McDonald certainly has a lot to focus on right now as the wide receivers coach for the NC State Wolfpack. So hopefully he's not sitting around reading everything that SU players have to say about his stint running the show because they've been dropping some serious shade ever since 2015 began.
I decided to go back and try to find all of the instances when someone made it abundantly clear that McDonald's up-tempo offensive dreams were the stuff of real-world nightmares. Not that you didn't already know that from the lack of touchdowns.
Leading the not-so-passive-aggresive charge has been Rob Trudo.
"You could definitely tell there were some times where our o-line coach and Coach McDonald weren't on the same terms," Trudo said, "but I have to say I can't tell you what was different. It never showed — well, a couple times when Perles was there — but it never really showed itself with Coach Adam."
"A lot of times we would ask Coach Adam, 'Why are we doing it this way?' and he would say, 'Well, that's how we have to do it,'" Trudo said. "You could see he kind of didn't really agree with the way he was doing it.
Trudo added a parting shot as well when comparing Tim Lester's 2015 simplifications to McDonald's complications.
"This is much of a better fit for us," Trudo said, closing his eyes and pausing to emphasize the third word. "I guess some coaches have philosophies where they've got their system and then they try to make the players fit to it."
Terrel Hunt has been pretty outspoken about his frustrations with McDonald's offense last season as well. In describing how much faith he has in Lester's sets, he reveals just how little he had in McDonald's or the old OC's ability to work in tandem with others.
"Coach Lester's more understanding because he's like, 'We're in this together.'"
Hunt has also been fairly blunt about some of the obvious reasons McDonald's offense was doomed to fail. It also makes you wonder why no one else saw this coming?
"Coach McDonald wanted us to run a different type of offense and sadly we didn't have the tools that we needed for that offense, so we kind of failed," Hunt said.
"Last year we had a ton of plays that we were trying to run and nobody really knew how to run them. Now we're on track and Coach Lester's got us right."
Tim Lester himself has danced around delicate subjects like last year's reliance on one offensive cadence as best he can, but even he can't help but acknowledge how absurd that sounds.
"You can't just use one. which is what we did. We had other ones, but we used one...It was obvious. You could ask any coach."
We're about at that point on the preseason where people stop talking about last season and start focusing on the upcoming one. But cleary, the name of the game in 2015 is "We're not going to be as bad as that again." Since it was McDonald's offense and McDonald's not around anymore to try and explain it, he's going to bear the brunt of it. Rightly so, to be fair.
Should make for some interesting reactions when the Wolfpack and Orange meet in November.