Miami Review - Pittsburgh Preview

Strange times to be a Tech fan.  This week we find ourselves bigger underdogs to a 3-2 Pittsburgh team, when we are 3-2, than we were last season to an 8-3 UGA team, when we were 3-8.  I guess that's just college football.

Anyway, good news, good news and then bad news.  The good news is that Clemson looks legit.  Yes, they did eventually allow Louisville's offense to get into a rhythm, but they got a lot of stops and really were dealt some bad situations thanks to turnovers.  And Louisville may be one of the best offenses in the country.  I think Clemson's defense is excellent and we shouldn't be too worried, since Louisville's offense in the first half looked very much like our offense, for the game.

The other good news is that we played Miami a pretty even game.  We don't know if Miami deserves their ranking yet, but they are ranked #10.  So, that's something.

The bad news is that we still threw away 14 points on silly turnovers and never really threatened to win the Miami game.  I can sit here and claim we played them even, but if the game were in doubt, maybe they press a little harder for points?

Who knows.  Its over now.  We move on.  I still think we might be a pretty good team but we need to start playing smarter, more efficient football.  Right now we are somewhere in between 2014 and 2015 in that regard.  We need our performance in that regard to move towards 2014.

We've actually, surprisingly (and quietly?) been carried by the defense so far this year.  Besides our terrible habit of allowing the opponent to score a TD on their first possession (4 straight games now), we held Miami to 14 points on 8 possessions after that.  Not bad defense.  And we held Clemson to 14 points on 10 possessions, after the opening drive.  After the respective first drives, we shut out Vanderbilt and allowed Mercer a FG.  And obviously our defense performed well, at least in terms of numbers, against BC.  They still haven't played anybody with a defensive pulse, except VT, against whom they scored 0 points and went three and out on 11 of 15 possessions.  So... hard to say much from the BC game in favor of our defense, but allowing only 14 points is never really a bad thing.

Meaning, while our defense hasn't been pretty and inspires basically no confidence for me to watch... they have put up decent results.

Offensively, we've been...  irritating.  Clemson and BC made us look silly, but we moved the ball well against Miami.  Just couldn't score.  And really looked impressive against Vanderbilt, who doesn't have much name value but does have, statistically, a good defense.

I still don't really know what to make of this team.  My gut thinks we might lack the playmakers and talent to have any real margin for error execution wise, and that might doom us to another bad year.  Maybe 6-6, maybe worse...  But I'm still hoping we can get to 8 or 9 wins.

This game will go a long way toward clarifying.  Pittsburgh is far from overwhelming, but they are average or probably somewhat better than average on both sides of the ball, and its a road game.  Offensively they've put up great numbers.  About 250 yards per game rushing, averaging more than 5 yards per carry, and a team passer rating of about 150.  That's fairly efficient.  They run the ball about 2/3 of the time and do it effectively, so this should be a short game (as always for us, but even moreso).  Might be only 7 or 8 possessions each, unless of course they are stopping us quickly.  Their rush defense has put up excellent numbers so far, but then again they haven't faced a rushing attack like ours, and the opponent's rushing defense numbers aren't a very good predictor of how they'll perform against us anyway.  Their pass defense has been very poor, which is... interesting.  I'm not sure if we can capitalize on that but Justin Thomas has at times been a very effective passer.  We'll see.

I predict a very low possession game.  Close and down to the wire.  Something like 24-21.  Turnovers, or otherwise which team can make the plays late in the game, will win.  I hope its us.  Would be a nice change from what's been normal for the past season and a half.

As always, Let's go Jackets!