Week 1 - South Carolina State Analysis

Overall, I would say we looked good. We did not look as good as I was hoping we would, but then again I have high expectations. We looked like the better team by a significant margin, and the game was never in doubt.

Let’s look at the two most important areas for this team. First up is the offensive line. We looked good. We controlled the line of scrimmage as we should against an FCS team. We were not quite as strong up front as I was hoping, but we were close, and we move very well. I was encouraged to see our O line appear to be bigger and stronger than last year, and without losing a step in terms of mobility. As I watched the game, I kept track of how many plays I thought were good or bad. I did not count plays that I considered average, which I defined as about what I expect. Bad plays were plays where obvious missed blocks cost us yards, or nobody missed a block but the line as a whole failed to control the line and create any space. By my count, the offensive line had 14 good plays and 5 bad ones (note: I missed the occasional play due to ESPN3 technical difficulties, and the last ten minutes of the fourth quarter were blacked out entirely).

As I have said before, it is difficult to tell if our line really is much better since I would expect even our bad line last year to do well against an FCS team, but nevertheless, this performance was consistent with us having a pretty good offensive line. The best we can say for now is that we could be significantly improved. It is also possible that we simply outplayed a much weaker opponent, and our O line is about the same. Perhaps most encouraging however was that Will Jackson, one of our starters, went down in the first half and we didn’t miss a beat (after the game Johnson said the injury was not serious). According to Coach Johnson, we have 10 guys who are all more or less interchangeable, which means we will always have fresh players and we can absorb a few injuries without losing much.

My guess for now is that we are better. I would say we didn’t make tremendous strides, but there will be a noticeable improvement in how our offensive line competes this year as compared to the last two. And don’t forget, of the 10 linemen that will be in the rotation, most of those are redshirt freshmen or sophomores, so we should expect to continue improving next year and probably the year after.

Secondly, how was the defense? I tracked those plays as well, the same way I did the offensive line. It ended up being about even, 17 good plays and 18 bad plays. Obviously, I would have rather had much more good plays than bad plays, but at least we had a significant amount of good plays.

Several things were encouraging. But let’s talk about what was discouraging first. Just like last year, our biggest weakness appears to be, well, weakness. South Carolina St. had the most success against us by just hitting us in the mouth. They ran right at us, and they hit a disturbing amount of big runs. I had hoped that another year of growing and hitting the weight room would make our defensive line much stronger. It does not appear to have had much affect. It should be noted that for an FCS team from the MEAC, South Carolina St. has a tremendous offensive line. They start nothing but juniors and seniors, some of whom redshirted so they really are fourth or fifth year players, and four out of their five starters earned preseason All-MEAC recognition. I would say all that means is that its possible their O line will be as good as the average team we will face this season. More than likely, they are not even that good, so the way they ran between the tackles on us is cause for concern.

Additionally, a huge cause for concern was the tackling. There were several plays where we missed tackles. On the first drive, we almost let their QB scramble, slowly, through about 5 tackles, for a touchdown on third and goal from the 10. In fact, I think he may have scored, but it did not matter because the play was called back for a penalty. Still, terrible tackling. There were other plays as well, such as the long 50 yard run that set up the touchdown, which really should have been stuffed for a one yard loss. We had him wrapped up. There was a fourth down and short play where they tried to run right at us, we stuffed it, had two arms around him, and let him fall back, bounce outside, and get the first down. Lastly, on their first drive, Cooper Taylor completely whiffed on the short flare pass to their speedster, which sprung him for the 35 yard run after catch that got them deep into our territory. Taylor approached him off balance and not on his toes, essentially trying to tackle him like a washwoman, and he just ran right by him. Taylor has to know in that spot that its ok to not make the tackle, but you have to get a hand on him, make him take a second to fake you out, make him run a yard or two outside his path to get around you, something, anything to slow him down. Your team will pursue and help you, but you have to impede him somehow, he cant just run right by you like you aren’t even there. Making him hesitate for a split second in that situation literally would have been the difference between the 35 yard gain and something more like a 4 or 5 yard gain.

Those were just the worst examples. We need to tackle better if we are going to be a great team capable of challenging for the ACC title like I think we can. And something tells me some of the players we will face down the road will be harder to tackle than the SC St. ballcarriers.

So what was encouraging about the defense? Number one for me is our ability to make adjustments. Paul Johnson’s stated reason for hiring Al Groh in the first place was to give us a defensive mind with enough experience and enough understanding of his system that we can discern what they are doing to us and what we can change to take that away. Probably the number one reason Johnson has confidence in Groh’s ability to do that was Groh’s performance against Johnson himself in 2008. That game was the only time that, under Johnson, we have had sustained offensive success early and then been shut down by their defense. There have been games where we scored an early touchdown and then did not have much success the rest of the game, such as Clemson in 2009. But think back to that UVA game. We marched 80 yards on our first drive, averaging about over 6.5 yards per play. On drive number two, starting around midfield, we hit a 40 yard pass to Thomas putting us inside the ten, and then scored quickly from there. 14 of the easiest points we have ever scored. And then we scored only a field goal for the next 3 and a half quarters and lost 24-17. I confess that I don’t know what Groh did, but I think he did something.

Yesterday, Groh must have done something as well. On SC St.’s first drive, they went 64 yards to our five before we pushed them back 6 yards and forced a field goal. On their second drive they went 62 yards, but this time we held them at our 26 and they missed a much longer field goal. Those two drives accounted for 120 yards (the first drive was only 58 after we pushed them back) of their 272. Meaning they gained 152 yards on 8 possessions, or a little under 20 yards per possession, after averaging 60 yards per on their first 2. I do not have enough experience with defensive schemes to be able to tell you what if anything changed. But I can tell you that I watch the GT games closely and take notes (and also watch my DVR replay going over many plays in slow motion) and it definitely felt yesterday like we were adjusting to what they were doing, like we were making changes and doing things actively to attack their offensive plan. It was very refreshing to see after two years of Wommack rushing four, dropping seven into coverage, blitzing one linebacker maybe 4 or 5 times a game, and just hoping our players make enough plays to stop them in our base package.

The second most encouraging thing from yesterday was our ability to pressure them. As advertised, we blitz often and we blitz well. The offense appeared to have no idea where the blitz was going to come from on any given play. We consistently were able to get a linebacker into their backfield completely unblocked, usually in time to hit the ballcarrier immediately upon him taking the handoff or in time to pressure the quarterback well before anyone came open. Watching our defense yesterday brought back memories of our good defenses under Tenuta. In fact, this defense may have been even better. Blitzes in a 3-4 scheme can be more complex than a 3-4. (note – we didn’t technically get a sack yesterday, but we did pressure the QB into throwing the ball away a whole bunch, and we did sack him once, but he fumbled and it was recovered by their running back, who ran for a yard or two after recovering. If the QB holds onto the ball, that would have been a sack.)

Additionally, unlike Tenuta’s defenses, we mixed in a significant number of plays where we did not blitz at all. When you are able to blitz well and you establish that you can bring pressure, the offensive coordinator is forced to call blitz friendly plays. Long time Tech fans will probably remember the frustration of watching our pretty good defenses under Tenuta get completely eviscerated by a simply tight end out route, or a routine screen pass. Groh seemed to anticipate those plays pretty well, and not blitz. When you drop eight into coverage when the other team has a play dialed up to beat a blitz, the quarterback will usually have a lot of time but nowhere to go. Blitz friendly plays tend to have a couple of short options in the flat, either a tight end or a running back and then one receiver. That means only one or two routes are going downfield, which is not very hard for 8 guys to cover. The linebackers drop but stay close enough to defend the underneath routes, and the quarterback is often eventually forced to either scramble or just throw it away.

Another big difference, and in my opinion improvement, in Groh’s blitz happy defense as compared to Tenuta’s blitz happy defense is that we blitz less players, but still do so very effectively. When Tenuta used to blitz in his 4-3, which was basically every play, we were usually rushing 4 down linemen and 1 or 2 linebackers. We got pressure to the QB, but that only left 1 or 2 linebackers to cover behind the line. Obviously, the times when it was only one linebacker, one side of the field, or both, was going to be open. If they ran a tight end out to the right, and had a running back flare to the left, one was going to be open and it was likely to be a pretty good gain. Conversely, when Groh blitzes in the 3-4, we only send 3 linemen, and typically one or two linebackers. That often leaves 3 linebackers behind to cover, and the times it doesn’t, we still have 2 linebackers, so we can still cover both sides of the field. The fact that we can rush fewer players and still get very good pressure is in my opinion a testament to the soundness of Groh’s scheme.

The third most encouraging thing I saw from Groh’s defense was our newfound ability to do what I call “playing with our eyes open”. By that I mean I saw our players really trying to anticipate what the offense was doing and react to it. It sounds simple, but many defenses do not do it, and GT has generally been one of them for the past few years. The most obvious example that happens to many defenses with regularity is the simple screen pass. The O line pretends to try to block the D line for a second, and then lets them all go. The running back slips in behind the O line. The QB backpedals and dumps the ball over the 4 D linemen, leaving a bunch of O linemen to block for a running back with no defensive linemen in the way. I always wonder why the 4 D-linemen rushing in don’t realize what is going on sooner, and why they all chase the QB so aggressively. It does not take 4 linemen to tackle a quarterback, and I think it should be pretty obvious that it’s a screen pass. If one or two D linemen in that situation (I would assume the one or two that are behind the others because they can see their fellow linemen getting pressure) would stop rushing and try to find and cover the running back, the play could be shut down. Bud Foster’s defenses at VT do this very well, and you don’t see VT getting beat with many screen passes. Well, as just one example of “playing with our eyes open”, we shut down several attempted screen passes yesterday.

So all of that is good news. The bad news is still simply that SC St. was able to run the ball right at us, much like UGA did in the last game last year. I would expect UGA’s O line and running backs to be substantially better than SC St. So can we stop other teams that try to run right at us and who do it better than SC St. does? Maybe. There are two reasons I say maybe. The problem is that we do not have the big strong D line a 3-4 needs to be great. But there are two ways to counter. One is to simply get better. We are unlikely to get much stronger over the course of a 3 month season. But our technique may improve. We are putting in a new defense and with that comes new techniques. In particular, the D linemen in a 3-4 do a lot more penetrating than a 4-3, so staying low, driving forward, and using active and aggressive hands to gain leverage becomes much more important. We have been practicing all of that since January I am sure, but it is a little different when you start to get game experience. We may improve in those areas, and that could lead to better D line play.

The second reason to be optimistic is, once again, the blitzes. Yesterday Groh established that if we know a running play is coming, there is a pretty good chance Groh will have a guy hitting the running back 4 yards behind the line as he takes the handoff. I don’t know how he kept getting a linebacker through the O line unblocked, but I liked it. (I could figure it out if I had the game on my DVR, but it was only available on espn3, and I don’t get it at my apartment so I had to watch at Panera, and I’d rather not spend another 3 hours there to try to figure this out…)

Some of you may be thinking that this is only SC St., so yeah yeah, we can blitz them, but that doesn’t mean we will have so much success against other teams. Well, not really. Getting a linebacker in on a blitz unblocked means, by definition, that you fooled the O line because no one blocked him. The only way that is not true is if you blitz more than they can block, which means bringing at least 7, which we don’t do. While SC St.’s O line may not be as good as the average team we will face, they probably are just as smart or smarter, and they are incredibly experienced. As mentioned above, all 5 of their starters are at least juniors, and many were initially redshirted. So they have played together for a long time, know each other well and know how to play O line, and know how to play together. As such, they may be one of the hardest O lines to fool that we are going to play. We will see how it plays out, but I expect we may be a very good blitzing team this year.

In summary, I expect that we will see teams move the ball against us this year. We simply do not have the strength up front to be a dominant defense. BUT, in contrast to last year, we will be able to make adjustments this year and make it difficult for offenses to sustain success against us. We will attack them and put pressure on the opposing QB. And perhaps most important, our regular, well disguised and well executed blitzes will give us potential for negative plays. Under Wommack last year, it was so hard to force a punt mostly because teams typically got at least 3 or 4 yards per play, and they so rarely lost yards because we were not aggressively attacking. Obviously, 3 plays in a row of 3 or 4 yards is a first down, and then they would hit much bigger plays too. Under Groh, I think we will see a lot more series where they do something like gain 6, lose 3, gain 5 and punt. Those negative plays are key.

Thus, even though we don’t appear to be physically much better than last year, we are fast, we have some talent, and our scheme gives us a real chance to stop anybody on any given series. That, at the very least, will be much better than last year.

Let’s turn now to the offense. I thought we looked pretty good. The passing attack was awful, and we looked a little sloppy with our execution, but overall no major complaints. The passing attack is not a major complaint mostly because they seemed content to have their secondary back in coverage. If you want to do that, you can probably largely take away our passing attack, but we are going to gash you with the run. And we did. We ran for 384 averaging 6.6 yards per rush. So you sit back in pass coverage all you want, we don’t care.

Additionally, the stats were much worse than they should have been. Tyler Melton didn’t get his career as one of the guys trying to replace Thomas off to a good start. On the interception, the pass hit Melton in the chest for what should have been about a 10 yard gain, and he played it like a good volleyball player with an excellent dig. He bumped it right to the setter, which in this case was an SC St. player. Only he isn’t going to set it Melton, because we are playing football, not *&%$&% volleyball. In fact, THIS IS DIVISION ONE FOOTBALL!! Take those stone hands over to intramurals, brother! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4T26x6GZEw).

There was also a pass interference call on a play that I think Hill would have caught downfield for a bout 30 yards, so that hurt our passing stats. In other news, ESPN3’s commentators need a little work. The commentator on that play talked about what a shame it was that the defensive back was holding Hill, because the pass was “uncatchable”, and if he had only turned he could have picked it off. Ok follow me here. When the pass was about ¾ of the way there, the camera pans over and the DB has Hill locked up in a pretty good Greco Roman wrestling finishing move. Hill fights his way through this hold, and despite being held until the ball hits the ground, the dang thing almost hits him in the foot. Not sure how if I agree with the notion that if Hill was not interfered with, the pass was “uncatchable”. And since he is 6’5, 210 with good hops, I would say there is a better than average chance he catches it over that clown DB.

Throw in those two plays and Nesbitt’s stat line is more like 3-8 for 55-60 yards, and no INT’s, which would have been decent for our offense if not great. So I am not real worried about the passing game for now. The only real damage that stat line did was to Nesbitt’s heisman campaign, and he has only a slightly better chance to win that award than I do, so no big deal. For the record, I think that Nesbitt would have at least a decent argument if the Heisman were actually given to the best player in college football, but its not, so let’s be realistic.

Additionally, don’t be fooled by the fact that we “only” gained 384 yards. The main reason for this was some weird special teams plays like fumbled punts, short punts from them, and the opening kickoff being a failed surprise onside kick. The result of all this was that our average starting field position for the game was our own 42 yard line, which is much closer to their end zone than a typical game. Thus, we simply had fewer yards to gain. In 11 possessions, we only failed to gain 207 yards. To put that in perspective, if we had scored a touchdown on 11 out of 11 possessions, we would have only gained 591 yards. We actually gained more than that last year at Vanderbilt, without scoring on 100% of our possessions (although we may have been close…). Just trust me that the number of possible yards you can gain in a game if you take every possession to the house is usually much higher than 591. (Technically the number of yards we could have gained based on our starting field position was a little higher than that, but they took away some of those yards with 15 yard personal foul penalties, since penalty yards do not count as “yards gained” and we likely would have gained those 15 yards even without the penalties.)

The execution was a little sloppy, but in the first game that is to be expected. It was substantially sloppier last year, and our offense turned out ok last year. This time around we only had 2 turnovers instead of the 3 we had against Jax St., and we had substantially more total fumbles, lost and recovered, last year than we had this year.. I believe we lost our only fumble yesterday (not counting Tarrant getting assaulted on the punt return because they called that interference) whereas last year I think we fumbled 5 times and recovered two of them ourselves.

In other news, both turnovers were pretty fluky. Melton handed them the pick, and Peeples really shouldn’t have fumbled. As for Peeples, I like the guy, I really do. I think he works hard and he is a good blocker. He is fast. But he just seems to have a knack for making mistakes. To be fair, Nesbitt made a handful of bad pitches yesterday, and the one Peeples dropped was a bad pitch. But it wasn’t so bad that it shouldn’t have been caught. I call that fumble more Peeples’ fault than Nesbitt’s. And he didn’t help himself with his running. One play in particular stood out. It was a toss right, and he caught it with a slight lead on the defensive end. I am confident that Roddy, Orwin, Marcus or even Bostic (who looked great by the way, very quick, hits the hole with a purpose and slashes for 7 yards before you know what happened) would have gotten at least 5 yards there. Peeples tiptoes for a second, lets the end catch him, briefly considers cutting back, then tries to go wide and falls down per usual like he is playing freeze tag for a three yard loss. I am afraid to say that he may play his way out of a starting spot here pretty soon.

Overall on offense I think we looked good. Typically you see substantial improvement in terms of being sharp with execution and everyone working together in better rhythm when you go from week 1 to week 2. I expect to see that improvement next week, and we were pretty good anyway.

Lets look at how we did relative to my goals for the game:

Defense

- Hold them under 250 total yards

Failed, but close, only 272.

- Hold them without any touchdowns

Failed, but only gave them one, and not until the second half. However, it came after an atrocious 50 yard run that really should have been tackled for a one yard loss.

- Force 3 and outs on 50% of their first half possessions

Failed, but close. Forced 3 and out on 2 of first 4, and then on 5^th and last possession forced a third and 8 on first three plays, but let them convert with a run up the middle.

Offense

- Score touchdowns on our first three drives

Success. Was maybe a little tougher than I would have liked on series number one, as it took us until fourth down to get first down yardage for the first time, but we scored. (not such a big deal because we would have scored

on third down with pretty much the same play if Allen

hadn’t for some reason run right by the guy who made the

tackle on Nesbitt without even trying to block him.)

- Run for 400 yards

Failed but very close. Would have gotten it (probably) if they had not given us so many 15 yard penalties.

- Score at least 45 points

Failed, but again very close.

- Get Tevin Washington some snaps, and possibly David Sims

Success.

I set these goals very high, so I would say that if we had gotten them, that would have been an A+ overall. Given that, I would say that the offense was an A minus. I would have liked to see them be a little sharper, but it’s the first game, that will come. The defense was a B. I saw plenty of things I liked, but we are a little weaker up front than I wanted, and the tackling has to get better. But a good day overall.

Go Jackets!