Does Having Mike Gesicki Mean More 2 TE Sets?

The answer is no. No, I don’t just sit around all day and think about Mike Gesicki and how he and I should hit up the Saloon and get a monkey boy or hit up Zeno’s and get a quality craft brew in State College after a game of HORSE because it would be such a rad time. I don’t just sit around and have visions of him leaping over the entire league catching TD after TD. And no, not every blog I write going forward will be Mike Gesicki inspired. That would be madness and I don’t have time for madness unless Mike says there’s time for madness.

What I do is think about is the future and when I thought about Gesicki the Dolphin’s offense this morning the thought crawled into my head was whether Miami was going to start running more TE sets because everyone in the world knows Gesicki is not here to block and having him out there will indicate to everyone that Miami is passing. Nothing annoyed more than two years ago when Miami was pretty much tipping their hand on when they would snap the ball with their sophisticated snap count of wait for it “Go Go”. The announcers knew it, the defense knew it, people who weren’t born yet knew it and it was all very Dolphins because they never changed it up, so I’m really hoping that Miami doesn’t fall into another frustrating from a fan’s perspective situation. I’m sure Mike will not get any worse at blocking than he already is but I have serious doubts it will be something that he will be asked to improve upon that much and I’m positive it’s something he doesn’t want to even do. Gase and company brought him to the team to go up and snag jump balls over everyone else and run the seams elegantly. They didn’t bring him here to kick out/log the ends. That’s just a fact. But I worry that if I know that then so does everyone else throughout the league.

Pretty safe to say that Gesicki will be the opening day starter at TE but who will be the #2 TE? Though they drafted Smythe in the 4th, I would guess that he won’t be the backup immediately so that really only leaves Gavin Escobar a man that Y’all know won me a Madden title in 2013 who they signed a few months ago. Whoever it is, if Miami does run more 2 TE sets, they will be asked to have a pivotal role on the offense and will also be asked to catch more balls than originally expected just to keep teams honest. It’s like when Miami would run the read option with Tannehill. 95% of the time he handed it off but once in a while he’d keep it and get 8 yards. Teams had to honor that (probably not as much anymore) and it was effective. Miami ran a lot of that last year even with Cutler. Cutler, I don’t think ever kept it and wasn’t nearly effective. Football 101 stuff.

I don’t see a drastic way that the offense will look much different than last year. It’s not like they’re going to start running more plays from under center giving the luxury of having more opportunities of having 2 TEs on the field. They’ll be in the gun often, so does this mean that most of their running game will be running away from Gesicki? Does Gesicki line up in the slot often, which would allow a second TE to be on the line? These are the questions that keep me up at night along with whether Mike would want to split a Hangar 1 from Wings Over Happy Valley and discuss the best things we ever heard from the Willard Preacher. What I can tell you is that Penn State had no problem having Gesicki on the field often but when you’re running the ball with Saquon Barkley in the backfield and its college football, you can get away with things a bit. What I also can tell you is that the PSU coaches came up with very smart ways of moving Gesicki around in motion and lined him up everywhere to take advantage of matchups wherever they could find them and with him being 6’6 there were and still are plenty out there. I do have a lot of faith that Gase will design intelligent, creative ways to use Gesicki the way he’s built to be used. I also have a lot of faith that one day Mike and I will have a catch some time, but both realities will have to wait. I got all the time in the world.

PS-I realize that I made a lot of references to PSU that only people who went or are familiar with Penn State will know. I’m ok with that.