The last self inflicted issue to the offense came when we were trailing 34-26. I guess its not fair to say this was entirely self inflicted. VT’s defensive pressure helped. But still, Tevin does not see an A-Back streaking wide open down field. To make matters worse, the pre snap alignment made it fairly apparent what read to make. The pass route was four verticals, meaning both WR’s and A-backs take off running straight downfield. VT had 8 defenders in the box, and only 1 safety patrolling the middle of the field. The likely coverage is that the 2 cornerbacks play man against the WR’s, and the safety is forced to choose which A-back to cover. Before the snap, Tevin should have been ready to simply read the safety, and throw to whichever A-back the safety does not cover. Its possible that I’m oversimplying here. VT could have dropped into a different coverage. The pre snap look could have been a decoy. VT mixes up its defenses enough that maybe Tevin was expecting the non-obvious coverage (maybe rightly so). Nevertheless, the obvious man came wide open, and would have been an easy pass and catch for a big gain.
See the right side A-back below (especially in the replay):
There were also some self inflicted issues from the defense, but mercifully, I don’t have the defensive footage from last year, so I won’t be showing those. I’m sure everybody remembers Attaochu deciding that merely stopping Logan Thomas on 3rd and 19 was not good enough. We simply have to get him on the ground. Forward progress? What’s that? That single play may have changed the game more than any of the plays shown above.
And there were a few other busted assignments, mostly in the secondary. Many of those contributed to allowing VT to convert 3rd and 7 or longer SIX times. Six. Sigh. What may get lost given our poor 3rd down defense is how well the defense played on 1st and 2nd down for much of the game. VT was a good power running team, with David Wilson and Logan Thomas. On paper, they were supposed to push us around and really make it hard to get stops (like UVA did last year). Well, we repeatedly forced 3rd and very long, only to let them convert with an easy pass (a couple of these were tremendous plays by their WR’s, but many were easy passes thanks to poor coverage). This was probably our secondary’s worst game of the season, and might have been Logan Thomas’ best game of the season.
Of course, VT had some self inflicted errors as well (every team does every game). But I think we had far more than our fair share. Clean up some of those and we might well have won that game.
So enough about last year. That was just to show that the teams were, in my opinion, fairly even last year. VT had their usual advantage of being better coached on defense and special teams (they play some of the smartest football in the country in my opinion), but this game was very winnable.
So what has changed heading into this year? Well, first and foremost, VT lost a lot of statistical production. They do return their QB, who every GT fan probably knows pretty well. He is a good player. But just good in my opinion. Not great. Not as good as many people think.
They lost 2000 of their 2600 rushing yards. And most importantly, they lost all everything running back David Wilson (who, by the way, is good enough that I took him with a late pick on my fantasy team). I’m sure whoever VT will run out there at running back will be good. But there is a big difference in being “good” and being David Wilson. I can’t imagine there won’t be drop off here. They also lost nearly 2000 of 3100 receiving yards. Including Danny Coale, the guy who made the ridiculous juggling catch on 3rd and 11 against us last year. If he fails to make that catch, VT is punting from its own end zone. Instead, they have 1st and 10 near midfield. VT also loses a couple of starting O-Linemen.
Now, VT is a good and deep football team. The guys they are replacing those guys with are talented, and while they did not start last year, they did play in the rotation. They have experience. So how much drop off there really will be is a good question. Probably the best thing for us is that we are catching VT in Week 1. Anytime you are replacing several O-Linemen, you’d prefer to have a game or two for them to get in sync. Groh needs to have some complicated blitz packages he can dial up to take advantage of a group of O-Linemen who may not communicate very well. I bet he will.
On the other hand, VT’s defense is absolutely loaded. They return 9 starters. From a very good group last year. There is speculation in Blacksburg that this may be one of their best defenses ever. I’m not sure it will be that good, but its gonna be good. So, our offense will have to deal with that.
So VT should have a worse offense (albeit maybe only slightly) but a better defense. However, I think we will be better on both units. I’m making a couple of assumptions here though. First of all, we lost a few players on defense. Most notably, 2/3 of our starting D-Line, and Julian Burnett, arguably our best linebacker. Certainly our most active linebacker (although some people feel he was not the best at playing his assignments, he was unquestionably very good at finding the ball and hitting people). But I think our defense gets better because we have better depth and another year to learn the scheme. It is Groh’s opinion that his defense learns the most and makes the biggest improvement from year 2 to year 3. Its a complicated defense. Takes a while for things to click. I think this principle is similar to the fact that our offense was statistically better in 2010 than it was in 2008. We had better playmakers in 2008 (Nesbitt for the full year, Dwyer, Thomas). Yet our 2010 offense was better, in my opinion because our players across the board understood the scheme far better.
So, let’s optimistically assume I am right and the defense shows significant improvement. We will have a better defense, and their offense will be slightly worse. Somewhat of an edge for GT (although we gave them 37 points last year so we need to be a lot better). My guess is, if both teams play their to their average level (ie nobody plays an especially good or bad game) then we can hold them to somewhere around 17 points.
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