Duke Preview

Tough game last week.  It was difficult to watch, for me, and I imagine if you are reading this blog, likely difficult to watch for you as well.  However, after several days of reflection, I really am ok with the loss.  For several reasons.  First, its basically as good as a loss can be.  It wasn't a conference loss, so it has no affect on our ability to win the ACC.  It wasn't a loss to UGA, which would be bad for other, more personal reasons.  It was a road loss to a good team, so it doesn't harm our reputation much.  All of those things would make it a pretty good loss already, but to top it off, we have a pretty quick shot at redemption.  Clemson plays Notre Dame in 2 weeks, and we get Clemson the very next game.  Should Clemson beat Notre Dame at home (hardly a long shot, in fact Clemson might be favored), then we would have the opportunity to redeem ourselves and restore our national credibility right away.  Not that I think it needs to be restored too much.  Again a reasonably competitive road loss to a top 10 team is far from embarrassing.

Now some might argue with that "reasonably competitive" part, but I think the notion that we were beaten badly is simply incorrect.  It was 13-7 at halftime and but for a holding penalty (that in my opinion was VERY questionable) it would have been 16-14 midway through the 3rd quarter.  Additionally, we missed two field goals and both of Notre Dame's first two touchdown drives depended upon deep passes on 3rd and long caught thanks to arguable offensive pass interference.  Now, I know, luck usually goes both ways and sure we had an interception in the end zone and there some other plays you could quibble about, but for me, the final score of 30-22 is a pretty good reflection of the game.  Many would argue that 30-22 was misleading because it was really over at 30-7 with under a minute to play.  But I think 30-7 was actually the misleading score.

I thought the defense played really well.  Especially considering they were put in tough situations by the offense and special teams for most of the day.  Tough field position and they were on the field a lot.  The special teams was abysmal.  The offense sputtered due to Notre Dame's good defensive play and our own execution errors.  I probably should have figured as soon as I said last week that "the only thing that would surprise me is us executing poorly on offense", that all but guaranteed we would execute poorly on offense.  My fault.  

I did enjoy making fun of Notre Dame last week for hiring a "consultant" to defend our scheme, but, well, they did a good job.  Had a good game plan and, most importantly, varied what they were doing all day.  A lot of teams we play against mostly play their base, and then make adjustments only when we get something to start working.  Notre Dame varied up their fronts and alignment more proactively, and that might have caused our blockers some issues as we seemingly couldn't get into a rhythm.  We had 70 missed assignments, according to Coach, when a normal week would be more like 15.  

So credit Notre Dame and its coaching staff.  Of course, part of the problem was simply that they beat a lot of blocks as well.  That's talent.  I think one of my big questions going into last week, can the A-backs and WRs play at this level, was answered with a "not yet".  I saw several passes from Thomas that Smelter or Waller would have caught in my opinion.  And their blocking and running on the perimeter left a little to be desired.  I think they all have potential, but their youth showed last week.  

The good news is that the defense looks like it might be a pretty good unit, and the offensive issues are mostly fixable.  On to Duke.  I believe Duke is a good team but I actually think we win comfortably Saturday.  Just based on the way we matchup.  Duke is well coached and a pretty good defense, but I don't think they are very good on offense this year.  Consider our common opponent Tulane.  Yards per play is probably the best "simple" stat to give you a good idea of how well an offense was playing.  Since every offense is trying to gain yards, and yards per play gives you a reasonable sample size of about 60-80 attempts to do something.  Tulane gave up 4.1 yard per play to Maine, 5.7 yards per play to Duke, and 8.6 yards per play to Georgia Tech.  So we averaged nearly 3 yards per play more.  Duke offensively was considerably closer to Maine than to Tech.  

However, this time of year, there isn't much data to go on.  Only a few games.  Duke's offense gained about 4 yards per play on Northwestern, which was actually better than Stanford did against Northwestern.  And Stanford was then up near 7 yards per play against Central Florida and Southern Cal.  Its just hard to tell who is good at what based on so few games.  But my suspicion is that Duke's offense is not very good.  I"m confident that Tulane is not a good defense, and Duke sputtered and took a while to put that game away.

They are good on defense, but I don't think they have Notre Dame's talent.  And a well coached team with only moderate talent is just going to struggle to stop our offense.  They did a good job last year (although that was Thomas' worst game of the  year and we largely beat ourselves with unforced turnovers).  But while Duke might slow us down for a while, I expect we will eventually get to something like 31 or 35 points.  And I think our defense might hold Duke to something like 10 or 14.  Basically I expect this game to look a lot like the 2013 game in Durham, where we only scored 2 TDs on our first 6 possessions, but eventually put that game away 38-14.  

Sirk's passing has not overwhelmed me.  And we were pretty stingy against the run in South Bend, outside of the one 90 yard run.  I don't think its proven yet (Notre Dame may not be a very good offense for all we know) but my suspicion now is that our defensive front is the best its been in years.  And I think Duke is going to find points pretty tough to come by this weekend.  

We need to bounce back, but I'm assuming the team has been focused and had a good week of practice.  Humbling losses have a funny way of doing that.  If we can get this win and continue improving, I still think this team can be very good.  And everything is still possible.  Certainly an ACC championship.  We can still do even better than that, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.  Its a long season and we will need to play a lot better than we did last week before we have any need to worry about national implications.  

First things first, our ACC opener and a matchup of the last two Coastal champs.  Somewhat ironically, the loser of this game has won the ACC Coastal the last two years.  I'm not sure what that means.  Oh well.

As always, let's go Jackets!

Notre Dame Preview

Well first let me apologize for slacking on this blog so far this year.  To be honest I haven't had a whole lot to write.  I expected us to beat Tulane badly.  Duke beat them 37-7 and Tulane's offense looked inept, and I still have a sneaking suspicion that Duke isn't that good this year, and especially that their defense isn't all that great.  Meaning that Tulane must be truly awful.  So beating them 65-10 is what we were supposed to do, and it doesn't tell us much.  (Also noteworthy, Tulane didn't appear to be real well coached.  For those that didn't notice, Matt Jordan's long touchdown run was scored against a defense fielding 9 players.  In a 4-2-3 formation.  In my last blog post I was just joking that UNC played with a 4-3-0 defense last year, because their pass defense was so bad it was like they didn't even have a secondary out there.  Little did I know I was foreshadowing Tulane's defense against us.)

I still think we don't know a whole lot about this team.  We've done nothing so far to change my mind that we might be really good.  So that's the good news.  I still think we might be a playoff contender.  Depends on two things.  Is the defense for real (which really hinges on whether the D-Line is as good as it could be).  And can the new WR's and A-backs play against major college talent.  I think the answer to the second issue is yes.  The jury is still out on the first issue, the defense, but we'll find out a lot about it tomorrow afternoon.

Apparently Notre Dame has hired an option stopping "consultant" to help scheme for our game.  Well I guess our game and the Navy game.  But they play Navy every year and don't normally hire a consultant, so really its for our game.  This guy isn't really a consultant, but the Linebackers coach for Notre Dame last year who was apparently replaced, but they kept him on to scour the country consulting with other coaches and put together a scheme to stop us.  I'm not sure exactly what Brian Kelly thinks his job is, but apparently he is delegating large portions of it to coaches he recently fired but still wants to "consult" with on important matters.

Anyway I'm amused by this new concept, and the fact that it illustrates just exactly how much our offense is in our opponents heads.  Coaches have done this before, consulting in the offseason with LSU and Iowa back when everybody thought they had the "blueprint" to stop us.  (well, and they both did have it I guess - get a defense with 10+ future NFL players on it - its just not one they can share with other coaches).  UGA scheduled Georgia Southern the week before our game a couple times.  If Georgia Southern keeps changing their offense, then UGA may have to stop pretending its a coincidence, just admit they are practicing for our game, and start scheduling Navy in that slot.  Coaches also admit to spending extra time preparing for us.  Lots of coaches have admitted they devote a couple of weeks in spring practice.  Bud Foster at Virginia Tech spent most of August in 2012 putting in a whole new defense just for our Labor Day game.  UGA admitted last year they spent some extra time during both of their bye weeks working on our offense.  And I'm glad they did, since those were the only two games they lost, other than us.  If they had spent more time preparing for South Carolina during South Carolina week, and Florida during Florida week, they might have been 11-1 and playing Bama for a spot in the playoff.  Despite having beaten us 5 years in a row (at that time), we are apparently so far in their heads that we effectively beat them 3 times last year.  Well, I'm taking credit for all three anyway.  

So its not exactly new for a team to do extra stuff to prep for our offense, but calling it a third party consultant is interesting.  Not sure what effect it'll have.  When teams have success against us its usually a personnel issue.  And Notre Dame has some good personnel.  Kelly has stockpiled plenty of talent.  Hard to know what to make of Notre Dame though.  Are they really good, and maybe Texas is ok and UVA is better than people think?  Or are they more mediocre and Texas is just awful?

That the Irish are playing a backup quarterback doesn't make the game any more predictable.  He looked good in making the clutch throw to avoid a disastrous upset in Charlottesville.  But I'm afraid I don't have any significant insights into the game this week.  I can offer my prediction (ie - my guess).  I think we win a close, hard fought game.  But I wouldn't be surprised by much.  Poor offensive execution by us would surprise me.  That's about it.  I expect us, with Thomas and this experienced O-line, to execute the offense well.  Notre Dame still might slow us down if they win their 1 on 1 matchups, and defeat blocks.  But I don't think we'll beat ourselves offensively.  Other than that, most anything could happen.  Here is to hoping that our defense really is improved and we win easily.

The computers generally think we are good.  We rank about 10th in most and Notre Dame is in the 15-20 range.  Phil Steele's power ratings have Notre Dame in the 15-20 range and have Georgia Tech 3rd.  Most computers seem to favor us, but ESPN's index says Notre Dame has a 68% chance to win.  Of course all that stuff is based on trying to compare Alcorn St. and Tulane to Texas and Virginia.  Which is difficult at best, and a fool's errand at worst.  Computer information at this stage of the season is based on such little data that its close to useless anyway.  So we'll just have to wait until gametime to know much of anything.  Can't get here soon enough for me.

Go Jackets!