Last Edited: 11/8/2012 12:57:45 PM by bobcat695

• OL Breakdown: Tettleton certainly deserves some criticism, but he's running for his life on nearly every play.
• OL Breakdown: Venham deserves some criticism, but he's got four or five guys in his face almost immediately after the snap.
• OL Breakdown: Tettleton sacked four times (is that the right stat?)
• OL Breakdown: Boykin and Blankenship met in the backfield how many times?

On the other side.

• DL Breakdown: Gashed for 5-6 yard carries, repetitively.
• DL Breakdown: Virtually no pressure on BG QB.
• DL Breakdown: Literally carried into the end zone (Granted that was LBs and DBs after virtually no contact from the DL)

I am a firm believer in the value of linemen. We have been working on those positions for years. Last night's performance defies that fact. BG and Miami beat our butts in the trenches. More often than not, you lose the trenches, you lose the war

 

One thing about special teams is that I think Frank and the boys simply got out-coached.  BG looked at some film and noticed a few things.

- the line doesnt block for long.  One punch, then they are going down field
- the "wall" doesnt have thier $hit together and doesnt know which direction to block
- the punter is too close the snapper (needs to drop back a yard)
- the punter takes too long to kick
- the long snapper is more worried about blocking than snapping the ball

They looked at the tapes, and it proved to be the game changer.  Not to mention, I think that roughing the punter was a good move on BG's part (whether it was intentional or not).  They already blocked one, okay let's get in his head even more and rough him up - not try and hurt him, but knock him on his tail.  I think it was a good move.

I still thought that OU had a good chance to win because OU's first offenseive series of each half was spectacular (probably because Blankenship was on the field) and I thought they had a real good chance.  But then, TT starts running around like a drunken sailor and has no protection from his line - you are correct however, some his fault, some the OL fault. 

Here's my biggest fear - worst case scenario is that the Bobcats lose the next two and end up at 8-4.  There is a reality that OU will miss a bowl game....  Wouldn't that be an absolute shame?!?!?!?

1. No defending the punting. It was an embarrassing debacle to say the least. The depths of the debacle was what was most surprising. We have skirted these type punting issues all year. Troubling they haven't been corrected by the 10th game, which leads me to believe maybe with the personnel at hand they simply aren't correctable. I'm talking the whole bunch there coaching, schemes, snapper and punter. Who hasn't held their collective breaths ANYTIME we go back to punt this year.

2. Aside from the punting, I thought it actually was a pretty even football game, just as the bookies predicted, as the spot was -1.5 at kick-off.

3. Many posters have gone off on the defense. I'm not one of them. I thought they actually held up pretty well last night. Yea, Samuels ran for a ton of yards, but again taking away the field position our punting woes contributed to, BG had only ONE true legit scoring drive and even it came on a fake that  had BG Homer Bentley faked out of his jock. Yea, Samuel carried half the team into the endzone on those short-runs, but who amongst us hasn't trumpted the effort when we have seen either Beau or Boykin do so this year as well. I think we called it great individual effort. Giving credit where credit is due, Samuel had a few of those last night.

4. The two offensive drives that we scored on were beauties and textbook. Beau was a workhorse and ran with a purpose. I know we have gone to the 2 back rotation, but when it was obvious that for whatever reason Beau was the hot-hand, why he didn't get more of the carries is baffling. I thought early in the year we were going to kill him from overuse, but that certainly wasn't the case last nite.

5. Moral of the story, the BG punting game put us in lousy field position all night. Our punting game essentially handed BG 19 points. With BG's top-rated MAC defense it simply was too much to overcome.

6. I also don't buy into the lack of "effort" BS either. Take away the punting gifts to BG and that could have easily been an OHIO 14-7 win and the masses would be hurmphing about what a "great" effort we gave.

At the beginning of the season all the talk was about the hurry up offense that we learned from Troy, yada, yada. We did well against Penn State with the hurry up by wearing down their defense. The first series of last nights game I said to my friends "the hurry up is really throwing BG off balance".  On the next offensive series we abandoned the hurry up and BG's defense started to dominate. Why did we not continue what was clearly working. The ESPN announcers actually commented on how well we were able to move the ball downfield and score. I blame this one more on play calling and failure to adjust. Even after the pathetic punting blunders we continued to try the same plays that were clearly not working.