Pitt Preview

So I am doing a terrible job of blogging this year.  Pretty much a lost season for the blog, I just don't have the heart to commit to it at this point.

Anyway, a quick recap of what has been missed - since the UNC game our defense has looked... questionable.  In fact, the football outsiders unit rankings have come out and our defense is 82nd.  Not good at all.  My suspicion is that, before the Duke and UNC games, it might have been up closer to 50th, but I can't prove that.  Duke was an abysmal defensive performance, though at least this time their offense is ok (unlike 2017, when we allowed 43 points on 9 possessions to one of the Coastal's worst ever offenses).

So, we are now a bad offense and a bad defense, ranking, 82nd and 94th, respectively.  Pitt is a great defense (14th) but an offense even worse than ours (98th).  We are at home.  What does that add up to?  Well, probably low scoring, but I wouldn't expect us to have a chance to win without turnovers or other help.

If you expect our Miami success to continue, I would say you may be a victim of the recency bias I talked about in the UNC preview (where our spread was probably about right).  However, it is also possible that we are improving and figuring out the new schemes.  That's the tricky part for year 1 of a change this big.  Like all football teams, we should still expect to see good games and bad games and fluctuations.  But we should also expect to see general improvement as the season wears on.  So how do we tell if the Miami game was mostly a random fluctuation, and we just played well that day - or does it represent signs that we are actually better today than we were 4 weeks ago?

If we are actually better today than 4 weeks ago, then our unit rankings of 82nd and 94th would not really be an accurate reflection of where we stand today (full disclosure, this is an issue for all teams, as all teams should improve a the season wears on, but I'd expect to see significantly more improvement from week 1 to week 13 for a team like us, adjusting to all new schemes and coaches).

So, tomorrow will provide more information.  I expect to see a close game for a while and then eventually a 10-14 point loss, but we'll see.  Maybe we really are improving.  Even given how much better we looked at Miami, we still only scored 7 offensive points in regulation.  Really what happened is we got turnovers, one for a TD, and a special teams TD.  But, we did look a little more consistent and we converted more 3rd downs than we have been converting, so... maybe.  Let's see if we can keep the improvement going tomorrow.

As always, Let's Go Jackets!