Why not get him in there on the first possession of the 2nd half and see what happens? Maybe there was no real opportunity to play him in the 1st half, but I can't understand him not seeing the field at all... :geauxtige
:geaux: This disappointed me greatly. I really thought we'd see Shep touch the ball 10 - 12 times tonight and throw the ball. At least put him in and give Florida's "D" something else to think about. Could've been in the game at the same time as JJ, maybe in the slot. Thought this was an opportunity for his "coming out party". Oh well.:rolleye33: :LSU231:
One reason RS wasn't in the game was because Florida had the ball the whole game. When we got it, we didn't do much. :crystal::geaux::crystal::geaux::crystal:
Warning: Long post...nobody is forced to read it but you may be forced to scroll through it. What about those other plays when he was in and Georgia knew he was gonna run but still couldn't stop him? He had the majority of the yards on our second scoring drive and Danielson noted that he was close to taking the 18-yard carry to the house. He looked pretty good on those plays. Our O-line is still jumping offsides at home, do we take them out and not put them back in because they made a mistake? Our D-line was flagged like five times in the first half on Saturday, did we take them out of the game? He's a true freshman and he's gonna make mistakes, but he helped us out in the Georgia game and looked good when he was in there for multiple plays on one drive. I couldn't believe that we didn't play Shepard on Saturday. It blew my mind. Nothing was working for us on offense after a certain point. Florida has great talent and so does LSU, but we might have one guy that's even more talented than anyone on Florida's D and we didn't play him. We have no explosiveness on offense for some reason, and from all accounts (even LSU's D), Shepard is the hardest guy to stop. I think he's led us in rushing (yards per attempt) in every game he has been in and he has always seemed to go forward with the ball (another positive). Les Miles has been saying that he definitely needs to see more touches and will, but then another game passes and he hasn't really used him. I know some people didn't agree with me when I was critical of Miles for not playing him in the 2nd half against State (when he looked good in the 1st half). I was upset because I could see the trend. We give him a about 4-5 touches early on and then you don't see him in each game. That's stupid to me. If he's even successful on one play, you put him in there and run the one play. Run it here and there until they show that they can stop it. And I know there are many that thought we didn't want to show much with him until we played the big boys. Well, I think we can put that theory to rest (especially him passing it against Florida). With this staff, if you haven't seen it in the first three games, you usually aren't going to see it. But anyway, maybe he wouldn't have done much against Florida, but we'll never know. We had a perfect opportunity to use him inside of Florida's 10-yard-line. Yet, we opted for three straight runs by our RBs. We ran an option to KW on 1st (terrible call since KW hasn't been getting much recently and EVERYONE has been stating how bad we've been running the option). The 2nd down call was a run out of the shotgun which works well for us (because the D doesn't know what's coming!). I had no problem with that. The 3rd down call was another awful, drawn out run with no imagination. The result is that we didn't make it in. Putting Shepard in there would have drawn attention whether he took the ball or not and could have spread the D out more so we could make it in. Make the D have to GUESS! It just doesn't make sense. Great players come to LSU to play in huge games and have an impact against teams like Florida, Alabama, Georgia, etc. They don't come here to be played on and off without any reasonable explanation when they're having some success and the team needs the help. Also, everyone says that he is just a stand-up guy in addition to being incredibly talented - a true leader. He's the type of guy you want to get involved as much as possible with your team. Hell, they were saying he was one of LSU's best recruiters last year. He was one of the main reasons that Loston, Randle and Montgomery came here (some of our biggest recruits). Montgomery said it was 80% Shepard that convinced him to go to LSU. So there are many reasons that Shepard should be getting in the game more. His 6.5 yard per touch is just one of the reasons. The coaches need to wake up on this one.
