We have all seen it before. A team with a high flying "unstoppable" offense gets stopped. Or at least slowed down. In almost every case I have seen the team with the unstoppable offense loses that game. Auburn didn't stop the LSU offense. Joe Burrow did pass for over 3oo yards but the team was repeatedly denied touchdowns and 2 minute scoring drives. Yet they did find a way to win in a close, hard fought game. This could be a wakeup call going into the bye week and the Alabama game, We are not going to score 50 or 60 points against the gumps. Saban is too good to let that happen. We are going to need to take advantage of every scoring opportunity and eliminate stupid mistakes like the unsportsmanlike conduct penalties and trash talking. I was a bit disappointed to see the play calling revert back to the leather helmet days. It's like Joe Brady had been calling the plays until yesterday and then Ensminger called them yesterday. There is no reason to have first and goal and run CEH to the right 4 straight times without doing something else, a pass 0r a designed run by Burrow or something, One big thing is that unlike Les Miles, Oeaux has shown an ability and a willingness to learn from his mistakes and to let good assistants do their jobs. Yesterday I heard T Bob Hebert talk about how Miles would even coach the placekick holders himself. Let's hope that vs the tide Brady is back to having more impact in the play calls. We are going to need his creativity.
After seeing the play calling yesterday, my fear is we do the same in 2 weeks. The last 2 times Emsinger play-called the Bama game he did that
It certainly re-established our defense as excellent. Need both to show up ready to play in two weeks. We are currently 16 point dogs.
A win is a win. I'll take an ugly win over the alternative. It was good to see that we were able to grind out a win in what was a sloppy game. Seems like we left at least 10-14 points on the field, mainly due to subpar playcalling. I don't understand why we went conservative in the red zone, and I'll never understand why we attempted to run up the middle so many times directly into their strength. Why not try to spread them out or use some misdirection? The Burrow TD run was the right approach -- he did run up the middle, but we spread the defense out. Special teams play must get cleaned up. The muffed punt was a gift for AU as they only had to go 20 yards to score. The missed PAT's cannot happen, and there was also not downing that punt inside the AU 5. The defense played well. At least half of AU's yards came on only 3 plays. Still, though, we should not have had to sweat an onside kick at the end of the game! Oh well, chalk it up to the weird games in this series.
My concern is the next-level DBs that Bama has... Burrow throws a lot of passes into coverage that are perfect, but a strong DB can make a play on them. I think we are all just a bit traumatized by the last 8 years of Bama games. We'll see.
Isn’t that something? We’ll likely be the #1 team in the first release of the CFP poll by the time that game kicks off, with the top offense (still?), and we’ll be 16 pt underdogs! Wow, that may be some significant motivation right there.
I see where it is a projected 7.5-9.5 spread. It won’t be 16. https://www.actionnetwork.com/ncaaf/lsu-vs-alabama-odds-spread-lookahead-lines-2019
