Week 2 Analysis - Kansas - Part 1

Absolute disaster. The team’s performance yesterday was so bad that it made me feel like I have let everyone down. Hopefully Kansas will turn out to actually be a decent team, and that week 1 loss to N.D. St. will look like a total fluke by week 6 or so. But for now, I think we have to assume that Kansas is, at best, not very good. And since we made them look pretty good, there really isn’t any way around the fact that we just are not a real good football team right now.

Full analysis and breakdown of the game tape will be forthcoming later this week. For now, lets take a broad look at the game and the rest of the season.

First, let’s run down the big problems. The offensive line appears to have actually gotten worse. Our A backs made basically no plays at all. They caught the pitches and took their space, but when they had chances to make a man miss, they never even came close. Noticeably disappointing in this area was Roddy Jones. The receivers were absolutely awful. I think Melton had a drop. Stephen Hill deserves his own paragraph, so see below. Nesbitt played ok I guess, but missed several throws including the 4^th down game sealer, which was pretty open, and he also didn’t seem like himself running the ball. He was hesitant on many plays and much easier to tackle than usual. The defense didn’t impress me much either. They allowed a touchdown pretty easily every time Kansas got anywhere near the end zone. Holding them to a field goal or two could have made a big difference. We also look really weak up front, maybe even weaker than last year if that is possible.

Stephen Hill dropped a touchdown pass and slipped and fell several other times causing more dropped passes. He failed to make a play on a deep ball because he for some inexplicable reason turned around and backpedaled for 2 or 3 steps with his hands up in the air like a 7 year old playing flag football. He also tripped up Embry Peeples on his 45 yard catch and run, when he was probably headed another 50 yards to the house. Nice tackle. Great game for Stephen. The fact that he later made up for that trip with a 40 yard TD catch changes little in my mind. He has enough physical tools that he should be making plays like that. As a pretty highly recruited receiver who got significant playing time last year, he should be making plays like that a lot more consistently. And he shouldn’t be dropping TD passes, falling down regularly on 10 yard wide open out routes, and spinning circles 45 yards downfield when a deep pass is going to hit him in stride if he simply keeps running.

I think that makes it pretty clear that the loss was a total team effort. Offensively we didn’t perform with anything close to the consistency of last year. We could not get 3 yards when we needed to. We had 3^rd and 6 much more than 3^rd and 2. We did still hit some bigger plays, but consistently gaining at least 3 or 4 yards per play is key to sustaining drives, and that comes mostly from solid offensive line play. Even though the O line wasn’t great, we were able to do it well enough last year to allow our runners to make plays. I thought this year that our O line would be even better, and we would thus be able to sustain drives more consistently, but at least right now our offensive line appears to have regressed back to the 2008 version.

The A backs consistently got tackled in the open field. I remember Roddy Jones specifically at least two or three times catch a pitch and have a ton of space, and only a safety pursing from the inside out. Roddy, every single time, tried to cut outside and got his legs taken out, only gaining 1 or 2 yards on a play where if he could break one tackle, he might have had 20 or 30. I don’t expect him to make that play every time, but I don’t expect him to get tackled every time either. A good running back makes one guy miss in the open field at least more than half the time.

Speaking of tackling, our defense needs a lot of help. We missed tackles all day. It was most noticeable on the 30 yard TD catch and run, where their receiver broke about 7 tackles. The most insulting was that after breaking 4 or 5 tackles, we had him surrounded with 4 guys and some idiot pursuing from behind slammed into him, failed to wrap him up, and managed only to knock him 5 yards forward and right past all the guys we had about to tackle him. That was one of a handful of plays that would have made me laugh out loud if it wasn’t my team screwing up. (one of the other ones was Stephen Hill’s pirouette that I’ve already mentioned. 7 year old. Flag football. %$&!).

You can do a lot of things in terms of coaching with schemes on both offense and defense, but no matter how good Paul Johnson and Al Groh are, you really can’t get past the age old adage that if you don’t block, you don’t gain, and if you don’t tackle, they gain. Blocking and tackling is what the game is all about. And we did both very poorly yesterday, and it caused us to lose to a team that probably isn’t very good.

We did do a couple things well. We gained 400 yards, and hit some big plays on offense. Defensively we made a couple of stops when we absolutely had to in the 4^th quarter. That was encouraging. We also did not quit, and came back and gave ourselves a chance to win. A lot of teams would not have been able to do that after fumbling at their own 40 yard line down by 11 in the 4^th quarter. But our defense stood tall one more time, and our offense then marched 95 yards in a hurry, almost all with the passing game.

So there are some good things. But this game really hurt. It is the first time since UVA in 2008 that we lost a game that we really should have won. On the plus side, as much as it hurts, it doesn’t really change that much about the season. My attitude has been all over the map for the last 24 hours. First, I was depressed and thinking that the season is basically over. Then I started to feel better, and realized that we can still beat UGA. For a while I was thinking of writing that from here on out, as far as I am concerned, every game is just a practice to get better for the UGA game. But now that I have had a full 24 hours to reflect and be a little more rational, I realize that all of the goals the team probably had are still within reach. Realistically, we weren’t going to win the national title this year anyway. Even as good as I thought we could be, we would have had to be unbeaten and get a little luck. I still think Coach Johnson can maybe get us back to that level where we compete for national titles, but apparently it may take a few more years than I was hoping.

However, we can still win the ACC and beat Georgia, which have to be goals #1 and 2 every year. Winning the ACC may not be worth that much after all the losses the conference took yesterday, but it will still get us an orange bowl berth. We will have to get a lot better across the board to do either of those two things, but, as much as this loss hurts, one loss on the road to a bad Big 12 team is not cause to give up on these coaches or players. I believe we can get better, and I believe in these coaches. The rest of the season starts next week at UNC. At this point, you have to figure we are significant underdogs in that game, but I am not giving up just yet.