QB = A+ Combined QB stats 10-14 215 yds, 2 TDs 0 Ints, 247.57 QB Rating. The 2 QB system is officially in place and should help us offensively the rest of this season. RB = A+ Ware and Blue were the featured backs and they did an incredible job against a really good front 7 of Florida. LSU officially has a 3 headed monster at running back. WR = A No dropped passes this week and Randle got behind the secondary on 2 occasions for the biggest plays of the game for LSU. Shepard looks like a valuable weapon heading down the home stretch. Downfield blocking continues to be a strength of this unit. TE = B+ Peterson had a big catch and Joseph had the nice TD reception. Solid blocking all game long by the tight ends. O-line = A+ They simply dominated a very good defensive line and front 7. Pass protection again was excellent and run blocking was dominant for almost the entire game. Overall Offense = A+ Great balance of run and pass. Only issue was conservative play calling early in the 2nd half that allowed Florida to think they had a chance. Then the afterburners were turned on. Game over. D-line = B+ Didn't get enough pressure on the QB today but the secondary took care of that deficiency. Stopped the run well enough, save a couple of big plays that Florida broke loose. LB = B Minter has asserted himself as the middle linebacker on rushing downs and Baker is simply solid as he has been all year long. DB = B+ Great job overall except for the slip by Claiborne on the long TD pass. Brandon Taylor reacted late and could not get over to help. Mathieu took what he wanted. Again. Overall Defense = B+ Considering the void at QB for Florida, LSU's defense was solid but not quite spectacular. Special Teams = C+ A punt partially blocked and a long kickoff return coupled with a 15 yard penalty marred what was a pretty decent day by the special teams. The highlight of course was Wing and that tremendous run. Return game didn't have much of a chance to get going as Florida elected to pooch punt all day long. LSU has the best special teams in the nation in terms of downing it inside the 10 yard line. It was done twice more today. Place kicking was once again flawless. Coaching = A+ Play calling offensively was aggressive when the defense was giving us the deep ball and LSU took advantage of it on 2 occasions to Randle. Defensively we rattled the QBs for Florida enough to not get into any kind of rhythm all day long. We got conservative in the first drive of the 2nd half but came out the next drive and went to the air to put the game away.
I have to agree on your grades this week. I may have given special teams a B+ but I think overall your analysis is spot on. Good job.
It was hard to grade the special teams unit. They did a good job on Florida not breaking one except that one kickoff. Florida started that drive on our side of the field, obviously unacceptable. And we had a partially blocked punt and another punt was not very good. The Wing run can easily cloud what was a pretty lackluster day by the unit.
Good analysis. I posted in the chat room about the play calling getting conservative when we have a big lead, kinda drives me crazy because it seems like we could put the game out of reach. Instead, like you posted, they score once and think they're back in the game.
And it's even more perplexing when the very next drive they do what you think they should have done the drive before. You know the deep passes downfield are there all day long. It's how defenses play us. They play the run. But credit to the 2 big play calls to Randle. We even had another one that we almost hit to Wright for the TD but was just slightly overthrown.
Jarrett Lee was awesome today. 7/10 154 15.4 1 TD. Good stuff. Hand it to our running backs and then let the play action take care of the back field.
Like usual I agree with everything except coaching. Again this week the coaches went total prevent after we went up by 21 points. It caused the players to go flat and against a better team with a QB they might have made a game out of it. I'm not for running up the score but you still gotta mix it up at least a little. Also swapping QBs in the red zone caused us to have to burn at least 1 time out this game (some else said 2). Making it the second game in a row where this has been an issue.
We scored 41 points and racked up 447 yards vs a Florida defense that was ranked 7th nationally (ahead of LSU, mind you). I thought we possibly got a little conservative on the first drive of the 2nd half, but the 3rd down run was 3rd and 1 and give credit to a sensational tackle by the Florida DB. The previous series of downs, Lee connected on a 7 yard pass to keep the chains going. So, on second thought, even I had questioned conservative play calling, but I don't think it was. John Brantley doesn't play defense last time I checked. We burned a timeout on the 4th down where we decided to punt the ball. That was an error on the official's part possibly, as Les tried to argue that we actually wanted a 5 yard delay of game penalty to give Wing some more room, not a timeout.
Gotta disagree on the O-line play. I'm sitting on B+/A-. There were a number of plays in the second half where the Florida linemen were getting great penetration. It may have been due to lack of effort being that we were up the whole second half, but Easley and Floyd were pushing some linemen around. I think what we saw on the first couple drives was A+ material, but they didn't keep it up the whole game.
