Freeman Pressing; Schinao Doesn't Beleive So, Freeman Disagrees

[yuccaneers]

On Christmas Eve Schinao came to Freeman's defense stating that he did not think he was pressing. Well it turns out Freeman, disagrees with Schiano, and in fact was pressing to make things happen, with some type of Herculean effort, especially after the team began to become mired in a a funk after the offense exploding on the scene during a five week stretch.

Schiano Says Freeman Isn't Pressing
Is Freeman pressing?
“I don’t feel like he’s pressing. I think he’s an aggressive player who has skills and he wants to use them. As I said yesterday, it’s such a fine line between being a great play and pressing or forcing and you don’t ever want to get your quarterback afraid of saying, I’m going to put it in that window. Because now all of a sudden you’re a dud and we don’t want that ever. We never want to take that out of a player. The game management comes with experience. And by that I mean knowing how the whole game is going. We can talk through it and say we’re playing good defense here, let’s make sure, you practice dropping back and seeing the coverage and throwing the ball and that takes a lot of experience to know that one’s a close one, it’s a tight game, we need it, I’m going to take it or we’re doing a great job, let’s not take that one. That may sound easy but it’s not easy. It’s sitting there on a platter for you and you have the skill to do it, but I don’t think Josh is deficient in any of that in any way. He doesn’t have enough years and reps to be really, really great at it yet. And you look at any quarterback who is in that phase right now where he is, in that 50-game areas, that’s where they start to really get it. Now in college you only have them for four years, but if you have a four-year starter, at the end of his junior year, the beginning of his senior year, they really start to get that. And Josh is getting it. He is. You can see him getting, he’s got such a better understanding of the whole game. And I think as I’ve said many times over a long period of time, we’ll get it all of a sudden. But it takes all those reps and all those opportunities because situations are so unique, because a quarterback begins to formulate his own philosophy, his own kind of how he feels it happening in the game. And it would be easy for me to say I think he’s pressing, that’s why he threw four interceptions, but I don’t. I think it’s such a fine line. I look and I say, that one I wish we didn’t throw. That one, I’m good with him throwing it. If they pick it off, let’s get him on the ground and go play defense, because if he doesn’t throw that one then you never get to see that one. And to me that’s a fine line you walk. The ones where you sit there and say, argghhh, those you don’t throw.”

Freeman Pressing
Through some “soul searching,” he concluded he was trying too hard to make plays.

“The position of quarterback is such that when you try to play better and try to do things and play as well as you can, it doesn’t always work out that way,” Freeman said Thursday. “Point blank, we just have to run the offense.

“If you look back at the stretch where we were so explosive, the stuff we were doing really wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. We were just doing our stuff and guys were making plays. But we were letting the system create the plays. And you have to keep that in perspective because sometimes you feel like you’ve got to go out and do something extraordinary, something above and beyond.”

“You have these big games, these huge numbers, and you’re scoring all these points, and you feel like to maintain that, to keep scoring those points and to one-up your previous performances, you have to go out and put together some sort of Herculean effort. But you really don’t.

“All you have to do is run the offense and that’s kind of what we’ve been preaching this week: ‘Let’s get back to the basics and let’s get back to the details, whether it’s route running, progression, whatever it is for everybody. And doing that and us being ourselves, going out and just playing, it’s good enough to win ballgames.’’

[The Anti-Java]

Dude is doing something wrong, whether its in his head is debatable.  He gets rattled easily.  Seems to get hyped up, and throws a quick out 100 mph to a startled WR.  A wide open guy, and its 10 feet over his head or hitting his cleats.  I am pulling for him, but its getting tough.