Week 8 - Miami Review

Here are some more disturbing numbers:

Opponent	Total Yards	Yards per Play	Offensive Points
Kansas	768	13.5	66
UNC	496	6.9	35
NC State	413	6.5	38
Maryland	386	4.8	21
UVA	296	4.9	14
Miami	211	3.4	7

And to those awful numbers, we added the worst of the season... Ouch.

According to these trends, my calculations predict approximately 140 total yards, 2.7 yards per play, and 0 points against Clemson (kidding... sort of).

Season Averages now:

Opponents	Average Yards	Average Yards per Play	Average Offensive Points
Non Conference	675.3	10.3	59.33
Conference	360.4	5.3	23

Well, this will be a short blog post. No need to dwell on it. I did re watch the tape. As painful as that was.

Not a whole lot of non-obvious stuff to post. Defense played great. Special teams and offense lost us the game.

We consistently put the defense into terrible situations and short fields, and they consistently got stops. Really a great day for the defense.

Special teams, among other problems, had two glaring issues. Laskey inexplicably fumbled the punt into the end zone (here Miami, how would you like 7 points?). And the kickoff team combined a poor kick with poor coverage to give Miami a short field to end the half, when they only had about 60 seconds to try to score. Field the punt normally, and kick the ball off normally, and its probably a 7-7 game at the half, with us getting the ball first in the second half. Sigh.

But, really, the real issues were with the offense. 211 total yards, less than 4 yard per play, and only 7 points pretty much speaks for itself.

So what happened?

Well, our blocking issues continued. Really a tough day to block. Not too surprising. That has been the story against Miami for the last 2 years also. Clearly they have a very athletic defense, and that makes them hard to block. They do not get blocked and stay blocked for very long, by anybody really.

Their defensive tackles largely took away the dive on their own, and gave us problems.

Everywhere else, they did not beat every block, but they beat a lot.

So, give a lot of credit to Miami for playing well.

However, we deserve some of the “Credit” too. We did a fair amount of going to the wrong place. Often we were slow to recognize who to block. An A-back realizes a half second late that the linebacker is his responsibility, not the safety, and by then the linebacker has a half step on him and he can’t get the angle back. Etc. That exact play happened several times, just change the positions of the offensive and defensive player around.

The most egregious example that I remember occurred on third down and 5, on the first drive of the second half. This was the play immediately before we went for it on 4th and 3 and failed to convert. Tevin made a good read on that play, a counter option, and cut upfield. He almost certainly gets the first down, but the A-Back on that side took a very strange arc to get to his block, going way too far wide. He could not get back in front of the linebacker he was supposed to block.

Outside of those blocking errors, we often used poor technique. We went “high” into a lot of block. We were standing up too straight. That causes several problems. Mainly, it allows the other guy to get underneath us and get leverage. “Low man wins” is a common phrase in football, for a good reason. But also, you need to have your knees bent and be low so that you can be ready to move horizontally. We were getting faked out too easily, and letting our assigned man get around us too easily. You have to be able to move horizontally to keep your body squarely in front of theirs.

Playing too high is often caused by fatigue, which I expect was the case for many of these issues. As I have said (probably far too many times), we look like a fatigued team. Especially on the O-Line. When you are beaten up and tired, its hard to get low and move laterally with good quickness. Its hard to fight to get underneath your man and get leverage. And, its easy to just go through the motions and be slow to recognize your blocking assignment.

In addition to those problems, the other main issue we had was getting the ball to the right place. This is Tevin’s job, but I don’t fully blame Tevin. I think he is forcing things. I think the struggles of the rest of the offense have created a situation where Tevin feels a need to be perfect. He is playing like he is afraid to make a mistake. He is playing too methodical, too careful. Perhaps somewhat predictably, that leads to him playing tentatively, and actually making more mistakes. He needs to loosen back up, play full speed, not be afraid to pitch the ball, and be aggressive.

Specifically, against Miami, we missed several pitches. We missed them for several reasons.

First, Tevin makes up his mind too early. On several plays, he failed to make the defense really commit. You could see that he tucks the ball away a step before the pitch comes open. He needs to sprint full speed, make the defense commit, and then take the read. We missed at least two pitches in the first half that were open for 10+ yards a piece.

We missed at least two other pitches because Tevin sees an “opening” and cuts up field. The more egregious of these plays was on third and 7 on our second drive (the play that set up the failed fake punt, on which I think we actually converted and got a poor spot, but I digress). On this play, we called a counter option to the short side, and there was only one defender over there to make a play. If Tevin takes it wide, he either has a pitch or a keep and gets the first down easily. But he saw that the line got a good push, and abandoned the play. There was some space, but there were also 4 or 5 defenders bunched up. They were all blocked, but Tevin could not find a hole big enough and got stopped for a 3 yard gain.

On another play, in the second quarter, we had a great looking option to the wide side of the field. This time we had Orwin as the pitch man, and once again only one defender. There was also a TON of space. This might have been a huge play. But suddenly, Tevin breaks off of his path and follows the dive up field. He moved with such a sense of urgency that I first thought there must be a big hole. But he ran into a bunch of traffic and gained about two yards. I have no idea what he saw there.

On other pitch plays, Miami blitzed a linebacker into the mesh point. This effectively makes Tevin make two reads at once. He has to see the defensive end, decide to keep, and then also see the linebacker and decide to pitch. Its not an easy play. But, this is not an easy game. A couple of times we had possible big gains on these pitches as well, but at this point, Tevin is playing too careful and tentative to make such a quick play. He defaulted to a keep and got a yard or two on all of those plays.

We also missed a couple of dive reads (the rare dive that was actually there) but these were much less of a problem.

To be fair, I do not expect Tevin to play perfectly. That is not possible. A very good QB in this offense will only make the reads maybe 80% of the time. But at this point, I’d be surprised if Tevin is getting the ball where it needs to be 50% of the time. And that is just not enough. The nature of our offense is to take what they are giving us. If we execute properly, only one option will be open. We have to get the ball to the right place, or else a good play will be a bad play.

Miami was giving us the pitch early. We failed to take advantage. If we hit even 2 or 3 of those pitches, each one probably goes for 10 or 15 yards (maybe one goes even further) and we get a drive going and maybe score. At the very least, Miami has to adjust a little bit on defense, and something else opens up.

If we hit a few of those, the flow of the game would have changed drastically.

The good news is that, even as poorly as we played, we still created 10 or so good chances to hit some big plays (in fact we did hit one, on a rocket toss. Very unlucky to have those offsetting penalties.) We just did not give the ball to the right guy.

More good news is that we were only 1 or 2 blocks away from some other plays being pretty successful.

The bad news is that we look tired and sloppy, and we hit hardly any of those plays that were there.

More bad news is I don’t see what is going to change for Clemson. Maybe the bye week will help us, but that is a week away.

I am hoping we can play on adrenaline this week, because its such a big game. But I don’t know if that will last for the entire game. Or if it will be there anyway.

Oh well. I’m ready to move on from that awful performance. I still have faith in these guys. We are a good football team. For a variety of reasons we have not played like it recently. But we have good players and good coaches. I hope we get it back sooner rather than later.

Let’s go Jackets!