What. The. $%&!.
The good news? We gutted out a tough win.
The bad news? We had to come from 11 points down in the 4th quarter to barely, barely, beat a bad football team. It took us until the fourth quarter to score a touchdown. We converted less than 1/3 of our third downs. Our first two possessions started at midfield and we netted 3 points.
Wake might have an ok defense I suppose. They held FSU to 10 points through almost three quarters last week, and that was on the road. And FSU, despite the one game against Oklahoma, has looked like a pretty good offense. Then again, Wake allowed a million yards and points in losses to Stanford and Duke. Stanford is really good and the game was played at midnight, but Duke? How do you give up 48 points to Duke?
Maybe its as simple as Wake is not very good against the pass. Duke is a passing team. Wake sure made us look like a good passing team. We completed 11 of 21, for 6.2 yards per pass and 130 total yards. And that was with several drops, including Melton (I think) dropping a 50 yard really good pass from Nesbitt. And Hill dropping most everything we threw to him. Seriously Hill? Anyway, it did seem like every time we went back to pass we had a guy open.
So maybe its as simple as that. Wake has a bad pass defense. We are not very good at exploiting that. But they have a good run defense, and we still cant block anybody. But then again, Wake has been giving up around 5 yards per carry this season, as I pointed out in the pre game analysis. So they aren’t that good of a run defense. So…
We really cant block anybody. My main thought from watching the game last night was “is it possible the offensive line is even worse than it was in 2008”?? Maybe. We now have three games where our best explanation is “we were flat”. At some point, when you keep playing a certain way every week, you cease to be “flat” and start to be just not very good. It did still appear to me that we are not playing with much urgency, but, how can that be every week?
The defense played well, but they were playing against a team with a bunch of terrible QB’s that obviously has to run, since they cant throw, and they have to do it behind a bad offensive line. Glad we could (mostly) stop that team. Great work guys.
And we did make the game much harder on ourselves with a couple of costly turnovers. If you look at the box score, we do appear to be the better team. The problem is the margin. We don’t look much better than Wake, and right now there is a lot of evidence that Wake is not very good.
According to the updated Sagarin ratings after yesterday, we are the #37 team in the country. That is better than I would have thought. We are 10 points better than Wake, 13 points better than Kansas, 3 points worse than UNC and 3 points worse than N.C. State. Again I feel obligated to point out that computer rankings are far from perfect, but they are at least something.
I’ll review the tape today (might extend into tomorrow or Tuesday as well) and the analysis should be up by tomorrow or Tuesday. I don’t expect it to be pretty.
But at least we won. And at least UGA lost. At some point though, we have to start playing better football. If we play like that, we will be in a dogfight with UVA, we could be in a close game with Middle Tennessee (they aren’t terrible) and we may as well not even show up to play the next three, Clemson VT and Miami.
I still think we can play significantly better than this, but at this point, I’m having doubts.
Go Jackets!
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