Louisville Preview

 Ok, well, I apologize for the wildly incorrect prediction.  

Sadly, what happened I think was that the opponents of GT are not as good as we thought.  FSU is awful.  Even worse than it appeared.  And UCF lost to Tulsa, after not looking all that impressive versus East Carolina (eventually routed them but I think East Carolina is bad).

So, I was overrating GT and our improvement.  We move the ball pretty well on offense but are sloppy with turnovers and inefficient cashing in points.  The O-line is probably not as improved as I had hoped.  The defense is still under talented.  

I do not think Syracuse is all that good, and frankly that game should have been close.  We gave them a 17 point win with turnovers.  But I was incorrect - we were not and are not significantly better than Cuse.  And its looking like 4-7 may have been optimistic.  We might go 3-8 or (gulp) even 2-9.  

Statistically, we are similar to Louisville in terms of yards per play on offense, and yards allowed per play on defense.  But I think Louisville has played a much tougher schedule.  Miami instead of FSU.  Pitt instead of Syracuse.  

So I'm afraid Louisville will beat us pretty easily.  They are solid on offense.  Pitt largely shut them down but Pitt is a good defense.  We are not.  Louisville's defense is not terrible but not good.  I expect us to move the ball.  But we've struggled turning that into points.  Turnovers.  3rd down execution.  Missed FGs.  Etc.  To quantify that, Phil Steele has tracked yards per point for many years.  Measures how efficiently a team turns yards gained into points - really its about efficiently executing.  A team that scores every drive would average 7 points (a TD) for every 50-80 yards gained (the average drive), or about 1 point per 10 yards.  Average tends to be more like 1 point every 15 yards.  1 point every 20 yards is generally bad.  So far this year we have 1362 yards and just 57 points, which is 1 point every 23.7 yards.  That is AWFUL.  Among the worst I've ever seen (although admittedly I don't follow this stat that closely).  

That means, for a single TD, on average, we need to gain about 165 yards.  That's not good.

Anyway, if we clean up the turnovers we might keep it close because Louisville's defense isn't great.  But I expect more of the same from our offense.  I think we need to play risky football to gain those yards - we aren't good enough to move the ball without taking chances.  At least that's what I think I'm seeing.  Sims improvement will really help there but we may be 1-2 years away from that.

I am afraid it'll be something like 38-21 Louisville.

I hope I am just as wrong this week as I was last week.

As always, let's go jackets!