im sure meyer will be secretly shooting up his leg while he sleeps friday night/sat morning. nah but hes gonna play. sniff sniff. tebow guarantees they will go all-out from now on. broken legs and all. sniff god bless
I'll tell you a stat I saw that surprised me. We only have 6 sacks this year on 134 pass attempts. That seems a little low to me considering how deep our D-Line is. Granted, alot of teams are resorting to the 3 step drop to get rid of the ball quickly, but still... Another thing is turnovers. We haven't recovered any fumbles (except our own) and only have 3 picks. Does that mean we're due?
In an article from The Advocate this morning may have indirectly shed some light as to answering our "down" sack totals. The article mentioned that last season, our DB's accounted for 12 sacks (or something like that)--primarily due to blitz packages. However, unlike last season, our DB's--specifically our corners, are new, young, raw or all 3. Chevis and Zenon were two very good cover-corners that I never worried about being left "on an island" one-on-one with a WR. If the WR made a play, it was largely due to either a perfect pass or the WR just making a great adjustment and NOT due to poor coverage. This season, with Jai and Hawkins new in terms of starters, and the other contributors Freshmen, it seems possible that the reason we're NOT blitzing with our safeties, etc. is to provide our CB's with more help in the early going of the season. The more the season progresses, and the more confident Jai and Hawkins become, the more likely you'll see us send our safeties. But until they can continually show that they can be trusted in single coverage, with no help from the safeties, then the coaching staff will continue to feel that it's better to give them the safety help. When you send a DB in to blitz, the risk of allowing a BIG gain always increases. It's a matter of "risk vs reward". Is the risk of watching our new CB's lose a little confidence in big games due to an ineffective safety blitz WORTH the reward of it working for that particular play. As it stands now, every CB, reguardless of how talented he is, will get beat deep at some point. They all need to have short-term memories with this. But it's even MORE important to protect them when you can and make sure that you minimize their risk of being beaten deep. We've given up some moderate gains to some rather unimpressive passing offenses (MSU and Auburn) at times, but I rather give up a 20 yard completion than watch a WR make a route adjustment on a CB that resulted in a longer gain and possible score just because inexperience kept our CB from making his own correction in coverage. To sum it up, I think that Miles is handling Jai, Hawkins, Peterson, etc. pretty good right now. Get them comfortable with basic responsibilities first and THEN turn up the heat.
