NC State Review - Week 5

Not terrible, but bad. A decidedly poor performance.

Some might find that surprising, given that we led 42-14 in the 4th quarter, and 45-21 with under a minute remaining. And this was on the road against a conference opponent.

Well, it was a misleading game. Don’t let yourself be misled.

The final score ended up being misleading also. 45-35 thanks to a garbage time TD with 30 seconds left and then a fairly ridiculous fumble return for a TD after that. I don’t usually question Paul, but if you are going to instruct your backup QB to definitely not pitch, why not just take a knee? Is Synjyn really getting that much valuable experience by running the ball and getting tackled? He is not making a read if you won’t let him pitch. We already know the kid can run. I think I’d just take a knee with 30 seconds left, but, oh well.

Anyway, I digress. Misleading score. And I mean that it was misleading when it was 42-12. Why was it misleading? Because NC State is bad. And they are bad in much the same way we were bad last year. Specifically, they have the individual talent to be better, but for whatever reason (attitude, experience, chemistry, leadership, coaching, focus... etc) they just cant seem to get out of their own way.

And Saturday was no exception. They gave us a lot of help. A lot. And, I was sad to see, we needed a bunch of it.

Let’s go possession by possession:

NC State first possession on offense - they drop a deep ball. We didnt really do anything to force the drop (and arguable we committed pass interference but it was not called). Catch that pass and State is in FG range, might even score a TD. But, they dropped it. Thanks State!

GT first possession - Fake punt. That was not so much “help” from State, but still I would rather just go score with the offense. You can get away with a good fake punt, once, most anytime you want. If you start faking punts once every two or three games, teams will be more inclined to watch for it. I did not really want to “use up” some of our element of surprise against an opponent that we really should have beaten easily (although I liked the call. On the road, you want to build momentum early, and letting State get a stop on our first drive could have really hurt. I just wish the offense had not been stopped).

NC State second possession - Another drop, and a missed field goal. Now, this drop wasnt that big of a deal. It was only for a couple yards, it came on third down, and had it been caught, it likely would have been short. But still, cost them a few yards, and might have affected the field goal. And then they missed the field goal (badly). Thanks State!

GT second possession - Needless horse collar penalty. Zenon had nowhere to go, and was about to be tackled for a small loss, bringing up 3rd and 11 at State’s 20 yard line or so. That situation is likely a field goal, unless we convert 3rd and 11. But, State’s defender horse collars Zenon, giving us half the distance to the goal and an automatic first down. Setting up an easy TD. Thanks State!

NC State fourth possession - After driving over 80 yards, and getting to our 2 yard line, NC State commits an illegal formation penalty (or something?) backing them up to the 7, and giving us a much better chance to hold the drive to a FG. Then, after gaining 4 yards to our 3 on the very next play, they commit a personal foul, backing them up to the 18, and eventually setting up 4th and Goal from the 9, which they failed to convert, turning a nearly certain 7 points into 0. Thanks State!

GT seventh possession - On 4th and a short 2 from just inside State’s 4 yard line, State jumps offsides. This play should have given us the first down. The ball was inside the 4, and the first down marker was just outside the 2. Even a small child who takes the time to think about it will realize that half of something less than 4 must be less than 2, but ACC refs do some strange things. From some GT people who were at the game, I understand that the refs stood around, looked real confused, and eventually appeared to mark off the “half the distance” from the 5 yard line, despite the fact that the ball previously had been just inside the 4. Anyway, thanks for trying, State!

GT eighth possession - On 4th and 1 from our own 40 yard line, State unbelievably jumps offsides again. I was dumbfounded. I mean, we are lining up at our own 40, after having been stuffed on short yardage twice on the previous possession. Even Paul Johnson is not that ballsy (or stupid?). Of course we are not going to snap that. We are just trying to see if State is stupid enough to jump again. Apparently they are. And then... And then... most incredibly, they do it AGAIN on the same drive. Holy God. If I wasnt so irritated at the offense for its lackadaisical play, I’d have been laughing pretty hard. The second time was near the goal line again, and likely we would have gone for that if they had not jumped, but we sure appreciate State being so stupid as to not make us even have to try. Thanks State!

NC State eighth possession - the pick 6. Obviously, you could argue this was partially forced. And here, you are probably right. Good play by Isaiah Johnson. But still this play required a bad decision to throw. Very difficult to pick off a good decision. Partial thanks State!

So, that is a lot of help. I would really rather just beat a bad team, on our own. And if they are going to give us so much help, I definitely don’t want to be in a game (21-14) into the fourth quarter. Ouch.

By the way, if you are keeping score at home, you’ll notice that only 1 of our first 5 TD drives involved the offense just driving and scoring. With no help from State. With no key penalties. And no special teams fakes. For the game we only scored 2 such TD’s, and one was greatly aided by a short field after State went for 4th and 1 at its own 38 because they were trailing 35-14. So, not real impressive from the offense.

Why was that exactly? I mean, NC State’s defense is terrible right? How could they hold us to only 415 yards, and get so many frustrating stops?

Well, several reasons. First, I think my general fear came true, and we were a little flat. We appeared lackadaisical to me, and we missed a lot more blocks than we had most games. To be fair to State, they are a pretty fast, quick defense, so maybe they just did a better job avoiding our blocks than other teams had. Hard to say exactly, but we did not look sharp to me. Did not appear to be playing as hard as we can. Honestly, that is not all bad. Its really difficult, if not impossible, to focus and play your best every week. There will be a few flat games here or there. You need to limit them as much as possible, and find a way to win anyway. Obviously, we found a way to win, so that was good.

The second reason is that State, in my opinion, did a pretty good job scheming. I confess, last year many GT fans thought they schemed us well, and I argued that no, their scheme was not what caused us problems. We simply could not block their front 7, and thus we could not get any plays to work.

After this year, I wonder if maybe I was too quick to make that judgment. I mean, their ability to defeat our blocks last year was unquestionably a big problem. But maybe the scheme was a significant factor as well.

Specifically, what they were doing schematically is attacking. I think attacking is always the best strategy no matter what you are doing. On offense, you should be attacking as much as you can, and trying to apply the most pressure on the defense. On defense, you should be blitzing and trying to force mistakes. Playing conservatively, and reacting, is a weak strategy that almost always is not the best strategy.

State attacked in a variety of ways. First, they sent pressure from their defensive ends and linebackers often. When we left players unblocked (routine on option plays) they did not sit there and simply fill their lane as most teams do. Instead, they (usually) hurried forward and attempted to force a quick decision. Essentially, their philosophy appeared to be “let’s see if Tevin can make his reads much faster than he normally has to”. I thought Tevin for the most part did a pretty good job with this, but it did disrupt the timing of our offense and put a lot of pressure on our execution. For a relatively young team that is still lacking experience at the key positions such as QB and O-Line, that was a good strategy.

When their unblocked players were not aggressively rushing forward, they were pinching down and impeding our linemen from getting to the second level. This is the primary reason option schemes leave players unblocked. You want to allow your linemen to get good angles on downfield blocks, and then you make the unblocked guy choose who to defend, and give the ball to the other guy (you “option” him). Well, anytime the other team is trying to do something, its often a good strategy to try to mess it up. By impeding those linemen, they were able to prevent us from getting to our blocks. Lots of teams try to do this, with varying success. State did it well, and in fact, their D-Linemen were often able to impede our linemen for a second, and then rub off and still defend their assignment (almost every time, this was a defensive end, and their assignment was the dive).

Many teams that we play coach their unblocked defensive end to just sit there, and take whoever he is assigned to stop (almost always the dive or the QB). Then our linemen can get downfield, make his block, Tevin has a second to make his read, and we go on our merry way usually hitting a big run downfield. I give State’s coaching staff a lot of credit for not being so passive, and instead attacking.

Another way State attacked is to aggressively pursue the motioning A-back. I like the idea to attack, but this largely backfired. They allowed us to score 21 points in the first quarter despite not blocking very well (which is why I said I thought we were flat despite jumping out to a 21-0 lead) by simply running counter plays.

More specifically, they lined up in a fairly unique manner. Most teams either run a fairly standard 4-3, with 2 safeties, and then cheat at least one member of the secondary, or they just bring a safety up pre snap (which is the same thing as playing a 4-3 and cheating, just without hiding who the 8th man is going to be). The teams that bring a safety up pre snap are basically playing a 4-4, with 4 down linemen and 4 linebackers. Some teams do this but back the corners off to the same level as the safety. Kansas did this. I don’t really know why you would want to. That gives you no run support anywhere near the line of scrimmage on the outside. We typically gash that alignment with rocket tosses and option pitches, which is exactly what we did to Kansas.

State lined up in a modified 4-3, with both safeties very far forward. They had the standard 4 linemen, and then placed their 2 outside linebackers immediately behind and outside those linemen, practically on the line themselves. The middle linebacker was a little further back, and the safeties were a little behind him. However, both safeties were 2-3 yards closer to the line of scrimmage than is typical.

When we motioned the A-Back pre snap, all 3 of the back defenders (the middle linebacker and the safeties) would move quickly to that side. Well, not surprisingly, it took Paul Johnson about 17 seconds to figure this out, and start calling counters. And it took State almost the entire first quarter to adjust. When we run a counter play against that pre snap motion, we have a huge numbers advantage. They are basically running 3 guys completely out of the play, and now only have 3 defenders on the play side (the two defensive linemen and the outside linebacker on that side). Depending on the play, we have 3 or 4 guys to block those 3, and we might have an option to pitch as well.

So, even though we started the game a little flat, we had little trouble hitting big counter plays. Our first and second TD were both counter plays (one counter option pitch to Orwin, one counter handoff to Orwin). Plus Orwin also went on a 28 yard run on a counter hand off.

I was surprised to see State use 9 defenders pretty much only to stop the run. Most teams leave at least 1 safety to defend the pass. Some leave 2 (UNC did this against our base formation, with only 7 guys in the box, and two reasonably deep safeties defending pass first. However, we ran very little base formation against UNC. I do not know why this is, other than obviously CPJ like something about UNC’s alignment against our asymmetrical formations).

State’s formation left them pretty vulnerable to the pass. The early 40 yard pass to Hill was possible because we faked a quick screen to Hill, getting the corner to bite, and because the safety was playing run first and had little to no chance to recover in time. I still am not sure why Hill stopped running and tried to cut back. I think he might have scored if he just kept sprinting.

Unfortunately, Tevin had by far his worst throwing game of the season, or else our offensive numbers might have looked pretty good for this game. For all the “success” State had stopping us, it was largely based on using 9 guys to defend the run, and giving up several wide open passes that we just missed. Tevin badly overthrew Orwin twice, and underthrew him once, in the first half alone. And on two of those, he was WIDE open.

I thought the defense actually played pretty well. Except that we allowed State to run for a bunch of yards, when previously they have had no running game to speak of. But, they played an excellent first quarter, and honestly, with the normal game from the offense, that should have been plenty for an easy win. The defense slacked off several times after the first quarter, but only allowed 14 points before the offense eventually sealed the game.

I am starting to worry if the defense can actually play a complete game. I was quick to give them passes in the early games because “The game was over after the first quarter”, but they still have not looked good for an entire game. I don’t expect them to prevent the other team from scoring any touchdowns at all, but they can at least make the other team work for every drive. State’s 46 yard 1 play TD on a basic running play up the middle was inexcusable. And at the time we were only up by 2 scores (21-7). Its not like the game was out of reach. And that was the first drive of the second half, so its not like we were tired. Plus, we had the same problem against UNC, letting them score two easy TD’s to being the second half.

The defense has looked very good at times (first half against UNC besides first drive, first quarter against NC State) but they need to do it for longer stretches.

I could quote a bunch of stats, but I don’t think they are useful here. Our numbers look bad because we were flat, and Tevin executed poorly in the passing game. And the whole team executed poorly at times in the running game. We still scored points thanks to NC State helping us out a lot.

On the plus side, even with a lackluster performance, State still had to commit so much to the run that we had plenty of wide open passing opportunities. We just did not hit most of them.

On the whole though, I am not too worried. I don’t think we played our best, but we played well enough to get a comfortable conference win on the road. As I said, State has talent. I believe by the end of the year they will have improved enough to make this win look somewhat impressive. They certainly have enough talent to have given us trouble in some previous years, especially in a flat performance.

Of course, there is no way to prove that we actually were flat. But, judging from what Coach and many players said after the game, they seem to agree that we did not play with as much intensity and focus as we should have.

All things considered, I say it was a good day. A win is a win, and we are 5-0. Hopefully, with all the mistakes we made, Paul will get after some people in the film room, we will have a very good week of practice, and we will be ready to string several good games together. This team has the ability to do something pretty special this year, but only if they play their best for most of the rest of the season.

Go Jackets!