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Friday, September 25, 2015

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!

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