Tim Cramsey made it plain Tuesday: when Arkansas’ protection breaks down, he believes the quarterback has to own it.
“Yeah, we have to go get the ball out of our (quarterback's) hand,” Cramsey said on Tuesday. “You know, I will say every sack is a quarterback's fault. You know, we've got to get the ball out of our hands and find the open receiver.”
That’s a tough line to land on when the Razorbacks have already allowed 23 sacks through nine games, a total that ties them for No. 105 nationally. There’s no question KJ Jackson has held the ball too long at times, but Cramsey’s explanation also pointed to everything else that has to happen for a play to survive: receivers getting open, backs handling their blocking work and the offensive line holding long enough for the throw to come out.
The numbers show a quarterback who can function when the pocket is clean. Jackson is completing 65.5% of his passes for 1,054 yards and eight touchdowns when he has time.
The trouble starts when the play gets muddy. He has been pressured on 105 dropbacks, according to Pro Football Focus, and his 17.1% pressure to sack ratio ranks 13th-highest nationally.
That figure is lower than fellow SEC passers such as Byrum Brown (Auburn), Arch Manning (Texas), Keelon Russell (Alabama) and Sam Leavitt (LSU).
Those stats don’t identify who blew a block or who missed an opening, but they do show Jackson has not been alone in turning pressured snaps into sacks. Even so, his 3.30-second time to throw is among the worst in the country for quarterbacks with at least 100 dropbacks this season.
Cramsey said the offense’s tempo demands quick decisions once the ball is snapped, and he acknowledged that the whole operation has to work together for it to function.
“I don't know if I talked about it in here last week, but one of our keys of victory last week was protecting the quarterback,” Cramsey continued. “As soon as you say that, all of a sudden everyone thinks the O-line's got to do a good job blocking.
But that's everybody. That's receivers getting open in a timely fashion.
That's running backs doing their job in a block game. That's O-line giving us the 2.83 seconds we need.
That's a quarterback getting the ball out of his hands in that 2.5 seconds that we need.
“That’s everybody in the on the field taking a part in that, and that’s on the next step. That gets us off course, which happened to us a couple times.
You know, we had six sacks, six negative plays, a good portion that in the second half, which got us off course. So, we got to you know got to do a much better job of that.”
Arkansas had several snaps in scoring range that went backward, and one sack in particular looked impossible to pin on Jackson. There was no one open, and the rush was on him almost immediately.
Chris Marshall appeared to be working into the middle of the field on a slant before drifting into double coverage, while Jaden Platt seemed to get lost underneath Auburn’s defense. On third-and-five, with no other receiver close to the sticks, Jackson was dropped before Platt could even get properly released at the second level.
There was also a second-and-12 play in which Cramsey rolled his left-handed quarterback to his right and forced him to throw across his body to a covered Ty Lockwood in the middle of the field. The pass fell incomplete, but the setup was awkward from the start, with the two boundary receivers disappearing off-screen.
Then on third down, Lockwood was used as a pick for Monte Harrison three yards from the line of scrimmage when Arkansas still needed 12. Instead of pushing closer to the chains on either play, the Razorbacks chose to send Max Gilbert out for a tie attempt even though he had already missed two field goals in the game.
Jackson does deserve some blame for intentional grounding with 18 seconds left, a mistake that cost Arkansas a 10-second run-off and left the offense scrambling in the final two plays. But with three games left and a quarterback already fighting confidence issues, Cramsey’s public shot at him on a Tuesday doesn’t help much.
His own words made the bigger point: there are a lot of moving parts before Jackson ever gets a chance to throw. And if protecting the quarterback really is everybody’s job, then the play caller has to count himself in that group too.
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