COMMENTARY: Carroll beginning to utilize other weapons

By: Brandon Wise / Staff Writer

Offenses are run one of two ways: ball control or air it out. Scott Satterfield has accomplished both. After arriving from Toledo in April of 2010, where the offense averaged 438 yards per game, the fans have been waiting to see the playbook open up.

Prior to this week, most of the offense had been very vanilla, running basic plays and routes.

This week, Satterfield dished out different flavors of offense like he was working at Baskin’ Robbins. With a total of 568 yards this week, the Golden Panthers went above and beyond the set benchmark offenses set out for each week, which are 300 yards passing and 100 yards rushing.

The former Toldeo offensive coordinator added sprinkle late in the third quarter when Wesley Carroll lateraled to Jacob Younger, who then found Wayne Times down the field for a 44 yard gain. The design and execution of the play was flawless and being able to throw trick plays into the offense like that can prove affective when a defense is stacked up to stop something else.

Satterfield made sure that the offense kept the Golden Panthers in the game, regardless of what the defense was doing. It is great to finally see this happen because the talent of the offensive side of the ball is too great to just give it to T.Y. Hilton every time.

Under Satterfield, we had not seen Wesley Carroll really get a chance to open up the passing game and fire the ball down the field like that. Prior to this week, the most that Carroll had thrown for this season was 248 yards and two touchdowns against Louisville. The bulk of that was on the two long touchdown passes to Hilton. Other than those two passes, Carroll had less than 100 yards throwing.

Satterfield has helped Carroll have better field vision and understand that there are more people on the field not named T.Y. Hilton.

The tight ends have finally become an entity in the offense. Colt Anderson had two catches for 47 yards and Jonathan Faucher had a spectacular 15-yard touchdown grab.

For the first time this season, Carroll utilized all the weapons that are at his disposal, with 10 different receivers making at least one catch.

Along with the tight ends becoming weapons is the rise of Wayne Times. The junior with 24 catches on the season, only second to Hilton who has 25. Those two creating explosive plays down the field have created a chance for Carroll to become a more efficient passer.

Coming off of a season where he threw 14 interceptions, the Fort Lauderdale native looks more mature and confident in the pocket as he leads the offense down the field.

He has gone his last 120 pass attempts without throwing one interception.

That goes to show how much a year of experience in the Satterfield system can benefit a player like Carroll.

That can only point to good things in Jake Medlock’s future.

There is no doubting the improvement that he has made this season and a lot of that has to do with the coaching that has been done.

It just needs to keep progressing more and more throughout the season.