That one horse race finished yesterday with Tino Sunseri winning the pot for all intents and purposes.  He started for the “Blue team” yesterday and played well, that is if you don’t like deep passes called by your Offensive Coordinator.  He was accurate with a 64% completion rate on 55 attempts and threw for 418 yards.  His main receiver; Shanahan, Street and Saddler all did well but also missed accurate passes in the rainy and windy weather that showed up for the first 2/3s of the scrimmage.

He can make all the short and intermediate throws, especially on called rollouts, and he does that with power behind the ball. But we saw again yesterday that he lacks the arm strength and touch on the deep ball.  That is rather weird in that you’d think that if he can throw strongly between 15-25 yards he should be able to go deep, but that really isn’t the case.  He underthrows on the fly pattern on a continual basis. That 51 yard TD to Shanahan was a great catch and run on Shanahan’s part, not a deep pass by Sunseri.

I particularly paid attention to how Sunseri looked out on the field as far as “generalship” goes and he was fine.  One point to note is that I timed the ‘no-huddle’ from the placement of the ball to the snap probably 50 times and only two (that I counted) were over the 15 second target… plus I saw only one procedure penalty.  Surprisingly for only three weeks in this new offense that went very well – and I think is the basis for Todd Graham to be saying the players are ahead of where he and the staff though they would be.  Sunseri has a good command of the nuts and bolts of this new offense and ran it well yesterday.  The execution of the actual plays had some poor moments though – but he obviously ‘gets’ the no-huddle at this point. (more…)