This was a very ugly game. Mercifully, unlike some other ugly games we have played this season, it was at least an ugly win. However, I was not prepared to see GT need so much help to beat Duke at home. They fumbled. They kept a GT drive alive with a personal foul after they stopped us on a third down. They failed to score a TD from the 4 yard line right before the half. They threw an awful pass that gave us a pick 6, and probably gave us a 14 point swing. Their FG kicker, who had made something like 18 straight FG’s, missed twice late in the game. And they only lost by 10.
To be fair, we made our usual number of mistakes as well. For a while, it seemed neither team wanted to win. We could have, and probably should have, been up 21-3 about 10 minutes into the game. We fumbled. We committed silly penalties. We blocked very poorly. We allowed an atrocious faked punt.
The punt coverage team actually deserves its own paragraph. It was awful. We, apparently, were not even trying to rush the punter. He had so much extra time that twice he took an extra step or two, presumably to get closer to the line of scrimmage and allow his coverage team to get a head start. One would think that with such a poor rush, we must be running back to block and set up a return. Well, we never appeared to have a return set up either. Surely then, since we are not bothering to rush the punter, and we are not setting up a return, we must be watching for a fake. Well, no, not really. Not at all actually. Our return man, Tarrant, was the guy who actually made the tackle on the fake. Meaning that our other 10 players did not notice the punter running until Tarrant had time to come from 40 yards down field. To make it even worse, most teams are much, much more likely to fake punts around midfield than they are in their own territory. To put it mildly, the punt coverage needs a little work.
I have been saying all season that its common for relatively young teams to make mental mistakes and not play very efficiently. And that we should not necessarily be concerned for future years. Well, it should at the very least be a little concerning when your 11th game of the season is one of your sloppiest. Its one thing to make silly mental mistakes due to inexperience. But you should at least improve as the season progresses.
Instead, Stephen Hill negates our first TD with a block in the back that was absolutely unnecessary (he could have left the field and Allen scores on that play). I know that he didn’t really hit him, he was trying to get out of the way, and it probably shouldn’t have been called. He only hit him, or almost hit him, at all because he was pursuing the Duke player, and the Duke defender stopped abruptly as Allen cut back. I don’t care. Hill needs to realize that he is really only going to be useful as a blocker in that situation if Allen does cut back, and he should be anticipating the cut back. If he had, he would not have been sprinting, and instead would have been ready to seal the defender as he stopped and tried to cut back himself. Instead, because he was sprinting out of control, he almost ran over him, and he gave the referee a chance to miss the call.
Later, on a kickoff, Duke tries to hand us a TD by muffing the catch. Our players I guess don’t know the rule that you can’t advance a muff. Falling on the ball is the right move there, but of course we try to scoop it up, end up knocking it back into their end zone and then not recovering it at all.
Then we drive to Duke’s 10 yard line and lose a fumble because our WR knew to lower his head to brace for contact, but somehow forget to wrap the ball up. Hmm… Trying to think of a good analogy. Anybody ever see that Seinfeld episode where Jerry buys the fancy lock for his door, and then gets robbed because Kramer leaves the door wide open? “It has only one flaw, the door… must be closed!”. Yeah, its kinda like that. We got the head down, but the ball was flailing out there in a chicken wing sort of motion, and basically I saw the fumble coming about 2 seconds before it happened.
Another rather disturbing trend I saw this game was from our running backs. Several times I saw running backs go downfield to block someone, and end up just sort of jogging into space, while (one of) the guy(s) they were presumably supposed to block was making the tackle. On at least 3 or 4 of these plays, the unblocked guy who our blocker ran right by was pretty much the only guy who could make the tackle. Meaning we just turned a possible big gain, or a long TD, into a 1 yard run. I can only assume those are busted assignments. But it looks like they are staring at the guy for a couple seconds as they approach. I don’t understand how they can miss him. Maybe they aren’t supposed to block him, but if they aren’t blocking him, why do they trot into space and end up standing there blocking nobody? At the very least, I am confident there is some combination of busted assignments going on there, and this late in the year we shouldn’t be doing that as often as we are.
There were probably other mistakes. The defense didn’t play great. We had plenty of busted assignments in coverage, and we didn’t exactly appear urgent in trying to pressure the QB. Overall it was just another lackadaisical performance, at least that’s how it appeared, and we made plenty of silly mistakes. We did at least fight back and didn’t give up, but I don’t really want to have to say that after we beat Duke at home. This Duke team is better than some of the pushovers Duke has fielded in recent years, but they still aren’t very good.
Maybe we were looking ahead to UGA? Since VT, we haven’t really had much to play for, unless you count a bowl game. But our players probably assumed they would beat Duke and so we would get to a bowl game. So if you look at it from that perspective, maybe we should have expected a couple of lackadaisical games after the VT loss. The VT game and the 3 previous games were pretty good for us, while we were still in the conference race. We killed ourselves in the one game at Clemson, but played well against UVA, fine against MTSU, and well against VT. 3 out or 4 isn’t bad I guess. Maybe playing UGA will give us something to play for again and re-ignite some of that focus and fire we were starting to get. Or maybe focus isn’t the problem, and we simply aren’t very good. This whole paragraph feels like I am reaching a little too far.
Anyway, here is a look at the game, drive by drive.
GT First Half Drives
| Start | Plays | Yards | Yards/ Play | 3rd downs converted | 4th downs converted | End | Result |
| Duke 49 | 7 | 25 | 3.6 | 1 (1 yd) | 0 | Duke 24 | FG |
| GT 29 | 11 | 56 | 5.1 | 0 | 1 (2 yd) | Duke 15 | Fumble |
| Duke 43 | 4 | 17 | 4.3 | 0 | 0 | Duke 26 | FG |
| GT 22 | 3 | 4 | 1.3 | 0 | 0 | GT 26 | Punt |
| GT 24 | 3 | 9 | 3 | 0 | 0 | GT 33 | Punt |
| GT 35 | 5 | 24 | 4.8 | 0 | 0 | Duke 41 | Downs |
Not a whole lot to look at here. Interesting that we moved the ball as much as we did only converting one third down. 135 yards, at 4 yards per play, is not bad when it pretty much all comes on first and second down. Not sure what to say about our inability to convert third downs, other than it shows a lack of mental toughness.
Duke First Half Drives
| Start | Plays | Yards | Yards/ Play | 3rd downs converted | 4th downs converted | End | Result |
| Duke 16 | 3 | -2 | -0.7 | 0 | 0 | Duke 14 | Punt |
| Duke 20 | 7 | 46 | 6.6 | 0 | 0 | GT 34 | FG |
| Duke 21 | 3 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Duke 27 | Punt |
| Duke 20 | 8 | 53 | 6.6 | 1 (3 yd) | 0 | GT 27 | Fumble |
| Duke 30 | 3 | -4 | -1.3 | 0 | 0 | Duke 26 | Punt |
| Duke 47 | 7 | 53 | 7.6 | 0 | 1 (7 yd) | GT 0 | TD |
| Duke 41 | 9 | 55 | 6.1 | 1 (4 yd) | 0 | GT 4 | FG |
Not atrocious defense, but certainly not very good. We allowed more than 6 yards per play on 4 drives out of only 7. That’s bad. We did at least force two FG’s and a fumble on 3 of those 4, only conceding one TD. But the TD drive was disturbingly easy. We didn’t even force a third down. In other good news, the remaining 3 drives were all 3 and outs. So we got that going for us.
GT Second Half Drives
| Start | Plays | Yards | Yards/ Play | 3rd downs converted | 4th downs converted | End | Result |
| GT 25 | 10 | 48 | 4.8 | 0 | 0 | Duke 27 | FG |
| GT 26 | 9 | 74 | 8.2 | 1 (3 yd) | 0 | Duke 0 | TD |
| GT 41 | 4 | 14 | 3.5 | 1 (1 yd) | 0 | Duke 45 | Fumble |
| GT 20 | 3 | 80 | 26.7 | 1 (9 yd) | 0 | Duke 0 | TD |
| GT 37 | 10 | 41 | 4.1 | 0 | 0 | Duke 22 | End Game |
Better than the first half, but still breathtakingly inconsistent. We did score TD’s on two of only four drives, if you don’t count the drive where we got deep in their territory but the game ended. We also moved the ball at least 41 yards on every drive except one, and that was a drive ended by a fumble. The only thing I was really disappointed by was the first drive. We come out of the half needing a TD to tie it and get some momentum going, and we put together a good drive. We move the ball easily for a while, but then we can’t finish. That was a chance to show some toughness, and we didn’t do it.
Duke Second Half Drives
| Start | Plays | Yards | Yards/ Play | 3rd downs converted | 4th downs converted | End | Result |
| Duke 20 | 8 | 60 | 7.5 | 2 (6,6 yd) | 0 | GT 20 | INT TD |
| Duke 30 | 4 | 22 | 5.5 | 0 | 0 | GT 48 | Punt |
| Duke 24 | 6 | 76 | 12.7 | 1 (3 yd) | 0 | GT 0 | TD |
| Duke 46 | 6 | 38 | 6.3 | 0 | 0 | GT 16 | FG Miss |
| Duke 28 | 8 | 35 | 4.4 | 0 | 0 | GT 37 | FG Miss |
Not saying much when your best drive defensively is one where they average 5.5 yards per play. But we forced a punt, so that’s something I guess. Other than that, we didn’t do much to stop them. Butler made a great play, but the throw was pretty much a gift. And then they missed some FG’s for us.
Here are the stats for the game:
| | GT | Duke |
| Rush Yards | 320 | 109 |
| Yards Per Carry | 5.2 | 4.4 |
| Pass Yards | 334 | 90 |
| Yards Per Attempt | 12.9 | 7.8 |
| Total Yards | 410 | 443 |
| Yards Per Play | 5.9 | 6.5 |
| Points | 30 | 20 |
| Turnovers | 2 | 2 |
Again, not a whole lot to look at there. Interesting that we can beat them in average yards per rush and average yards per pass, but then lose average yards per play. Not that complicated if you think about it, but still, funny.
Anyway, I say we just chalk this up to a game we won because we made the plays needed to win. It wasn’t pretty. In a lot of ways, we arguably got outplayed. But I am sure our players are having a hard time getting motivated. We had higher goals for this year. We have had problems executing all year. Whatever. As long as motivation is not a problem this coming week, let’s just move on and take the win, and bowl eligilibity.
As always, Let’s Go Jackets!
