Strictly From A Fan's Viewpoint

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romegajacket

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I watched West Virginia suffer a loss to a great and well talented supercharged South Florida team and a lot of it seemed to me to be WV's own fault. WV appeared to have not taken their best game south. I've already seen WV play much better this year than they showed this week.

Same with Clemson since they didn't appear to bring their best game to GT. Yes, we won the game and yes, we did some things very well...... BUT, we should have lost. We let CU march down the field to score but lucky for us, they missed on 3 FG's.

Defense:
I do realize that Jon Tenuta is GT's sacred cow and woe to thee/thou that speaks against him. GT's linebackers and DL's do an awesome job on a pretty consistent level. The scary part for me is our secondary. I admit that I don't have the trained eye as many of you other posters have, but I am still seeing many pass plays where our opponent has at least one receiver WIDE open but their QB either fails to see him or for whatever reason does not get him the ball. (lucky for us) About the time I'm ready to have the secondary and their coaches hanged at the public square, one of our secondary men steps up and makes an extraordinary great play so I have to change my plans for them. I surely would like to get these secondary problems ironed out at practice.

Penalties:
I don't understand how a team can make so many mistakes just getting lined up on the ball. Don't they go over this stuff at practice anymore?

Overall:
Was anyone was really "WOWWED" by our performance yesterday. The only thing that amazed me was how many mistakes CU made, and we were able to cash in on one of them. If GT takes the attitude that "well, we won so what's the prob dude?", then we'll for sure lose the next game.

We did play somewhat better than that of last week, so that's a plus. I only hope we can keep getting better. I'm curious as to how the coaches will grade this game's film out.
Any of you HS coaches care to share how you would grade us?
 
I was pretty excited by our defensive performance. It's the best they've looked all year - going into the game, we had 15 sacks and today's game we had 7. We held the vaunted Clemson duo to under 100 yards rushing when they slaughtered us last year.

But, they still missed 4 FG's and we still look off in the passing game. Taylor seemed less nervous today, but his receivers need to catch the ball. We have to do something to make the pass a viable threat - Clemson eventually began to figure out the "run-run-pass" pattern and held us to 5-15 on 3rd downs. (What's sad is that at 33%, this is better than our season average.) With the injured hammy, there's no telling how durable Choice will be the rest of the season (and he admitted after the game that he'd been lying all week about how good he felt).

Every conference game is a must-win, and we have two on the road coming up before the Army game. After the Army game is a bye week, and then Virginia Tech on Thursday night. Here's our priorities for these 2 games:
1) Win. While I may want a better passing offense, I'll take wins anyway I can get them.
2) Get the offense fully working. When will the receivers and Taylor finally sync up?
3) Prevent more injuries. We are really banged up as a group. I'm all for Tashard carrying the ball 30 times, but I'm not all for losing him the rest of the year or seeing his effectiveness diminish. With Grant back and effective (6 carries today for 29 yards), we can try to make sure we use Choice smartly.
4) Work in Nesbitt more. We tried it today and it didn't work out so well. But if we were willing to play him today, I imagine we'll see him at least once against Maryland and Miami. (And hopefully a whole lot against Army.)
 
I don't have alot of time right now, but just one thought.

It's not just that we were "lucky" they missed three field goals. We held them to field goal tries instead of caving in and letting them score in the endzone and even if they had made them all, we still would have won 13-12.

I'm not one of the folks that will buy into the whole "Clemson lost the game, we just happened to be the team that the "W" had to go to." crock.
 
romegajacket said:
I watched West Virginia suffer a loss to a great and well talented supercharged South Florida team and a lot of it seemed to me to be WV's own fault. WV appeared to have not taken their best game south. I've already seen WV play much better this year than they showed this week.

Same with Clemson since they didn't appear to bring their best game to GT. Yes, we won the game and yes, we did some things very well...... BUT, we should have lost. We let CU march down the field to score but lucky for us, they missed on 3 FG's.

Defense:
I do realize that Jon Tenuta is GT's sacred cow and woe to thee/thou that speaks against him. GT's linebackers and DL's do an awesome job on a pretty consistent level. The scary part for me is our secondary. I admit that I don't have the trained eye as many of you other posters have, but I am still seeing many pass plays where our opponent has at least one receiver WIDE open but their QB either fails to see him or for whatever reason does not get him the ball. (lucky for us) About the time I'm ready to have the secondary and their coaches hanged at the public square, one of our secondary men steps up and makes an extraordinary great play so I have to change my plans for them. I surely would like to get these secondary problems ironed out at practice.

Penalties:
I don't understand how a team can make so many mistakes just getting lined up on the ball. Don't they go over this stuff at practice anymore?

Overall:
Was anyone was really "WOWWED" by our performance yesterday. The only thing that amazed me was how many mistakes CU made, and we were able to cash in on one of them. If GT takes the attitude that "well, we won so what's the prob dude?", then we'll for sure lose the next game.

We did play somewhat better than that of last week, so that's a plus. I only hope we can keep getting better. I'm curious as to how the coaches will grade this game's film out.
Any of you HS coaches care to share how you would grade us?
Click to expand...

Notice how the only time we sniffed the goal line was because of a blocked punt? And had we not been on the good end of a pass interference call, we might not have even scored a touchdown? Our O-line and passing game don't scare anybody. Notre Dame sucks big-time and Clemson is a fraud.
 
It's not just that they missed 4 field goals, but they also fumbled a punt deep in their territory to set up a field goal for us and had a punt blocked deep inside their own territory and then committed pass interference in their own endzone to set up a TD for us.

Clemson shot themselves in the foot continually in that game. We were very fortunate to win.
 
Rome, My thoughts on the DB's are this and up in the letterman's club the same feelings. When our DT's not DE's are getting great push it makes the QB rush the ball. The last two weeks our DT's have played bad therefore giving the QB's plenty of time.

We need major push up the middle for our defense to be effective.
 
So basically it's always the fault of the team that looses? You guys are too much.

We didn't show much in the passing game yesterday, but we also didn't try to. Yes there are often receivers open but that's true for pretty much any team on any play. Defenses are geared to take certain things away either through pressure, defensive scheme, etc.

In about 90% of the cases, the team that won is the team that deserved to win. It's just as stupid after a game to say "we should have won" when you don't make the plays to get it done, as it is to say "we should have lost". Making the plays when they count is why they play the games. Nothing else really matters.
 
I admit that I don't have the trained eye as many of you other posters have, but I am still seeing many pass plays where our opponent has at least one receiver WIDE open but their QB either fails to see him or for whatever reason does not get him the ball.
Click to expand...
.

That's the whole point of Tenuta's defense.

He figures that you can't cover people forever anyway. (See: Ted Roof's defense) So we blitz to reduce the amount of time we have to cover people. Covering people is hard. You make up for lack of talent at DB by reducing the DB's exposure to the ball.

At least that's the theory. When it works it looks like today. When it doesn't it looks like BC. At least we have a system that works sometimes, though, in contrast to Ted Roof's Bend-Until-You-Give-Up-TDs, base 4-3 nightmare defense.

Incidentally, Word-Daniels had an amazing game, I thought, both in coverage and in run support.


And yes, I do agree that we will need more than good defense and good special teams to win out. We will need to actually sustain TD scoring drives of longer than 9 yards to beat Maryland.
 
Pass coverage is not easy.

When one of our receivers gets open, is your first thought:

(A) "Why aren't they covering him?"

or

(B) "Yes! Our guy ran a great route!"


Our defense is more susceptible to open receivers than most, because we may be blitzing 1-3 guys.
 
More and more, it's becoming less of "Way to go Jackets!" and more of "Wow, thanks <other team>!"
 
They will see these in films today- coaching staff will not be handing out trophies to any of us.

well maybe Wheeler and TC
 
when we get single coverage from DB's why aren't we throwing slants to the inside. Everyone we have played has done this effectively when we blitz ?
 
knoxjacket said:
It's not just that they missed 4 field goals, but they also fumbled a punt deep in their territory to set up a field goal for us and had a punt blocked deep inside their own territory and then committed pass interference in their own endzone to set up a TD for us.

Clemson shot themselves in the foot continually in that game. We were very fortunate to win.
Click to expand...

By this logic, we also should have won the UVA game. So I guess it balances out in the end.
 
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