sutomcat
No recent Cali or Iggy awards; Mr Irrelevant
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- Aug 15, 2011
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Wow, what a depressing game to watch. Tough to stomach after 2 weeks of waiting.
I was struck by how much smaller and weaker we appeared to be. That is to be expected against Clemson. But Duke? Really?
The team we destroyed last year on their field just physically dominated us.
One lesson to take from this is that when a team embarrasses another team, it may come back to bite them later. Duke played really hard. It looked like they wanted it more. Props to them...they made a ton of mistakes and frankly, I don’t think they are a very good team, but they were clearly the better team today and clearly deserved to get the win.
When I compare how the offense has changed from when Eric was the QB to since Tommy took over, I don’t see much difference in big plays. We might even have more big plays with Tommy as the QB. The huge difference to me lies in sustained drives. We seemed to have a lot of long, sustained drives when Eric was here. These have largely disappeared under Tommy.
Why? No question the OL has been part of the issue.. It was crappy under Eric as well, though they ended up decent for his senior season. Last year the OL might have been the worst OL at SU in 100 years. It has improved some this year. Things aren’t great. But they are doing good enough to generally give Tommy enough time to run plays.
I think the quality of the WRs has gone down since Eric was the QB. That is part of the problem.
Taj is fast and a good WR. He has pretty good hands. Not very physical. He gets run off his route way too often. If it comes down to a 50-50 game, he isn’t going to win very often. Nice route for the long TD at the start of the game. Was open again on a deep route, and I think should have been the catch (it wasn’t easy but was catchable). Your lead WR needs to make those plays.
Wish he was more physical and tough.
Nykeim looks better this season and gets open a lot. He has dropped a couple of short ones over the middle that a slot guy has to catch and made a couple of mental errors that really hurt today. One play he was in motion and starting running forward before the ball was snapped. He had a couple of issues attempting to return KOs as well.
Courtney is getting some run now and struggling some. Should have had that one long pass thrown to him. A BCS WR has to make that catch. I think he dropped another short one in the flat too. He has talent and I think will eventually be a good WR. But he is triggering now.
Good to see at least a few attempts to pass the ball to the TEs. Good coaches make game plans to take advantage of the resources they have to work with. Our coaches need to do better at this.
Again, back to the question...why can’t this team complete sustained drives? What is the root cause?
Part is our inability to run the ball. The OL is struggling to open decent holes. This is slowly getting better and with Tucker as the RB, there is hope for improvement. But there are still too many runs for short yardage. Part of it is poor pass blocking. We get beat really quickly by DL way too early. Even when the OL has only 3 to block, they routinely miss someone and give Tommy little time to make a play. This is a huge issue. Servais is really struggling. Duke has a couple of good DEs but wow, Servais gets beat badly far too often. Bergeron seems to be doing a little better but does not appear to be solid. The interior of the line was awful early but looks to have become decent here. Props to them for that.
A big issue though is Tommy. If the defense is able to take away Tommy’s primary option, 99% of the time, the play will be a sack, Tommy running OB for a loss or an incomplete pass. Tommy rarely is able to find his second option. Tommy is rarely able to make something of a broken play. He has gotten better this year running for a first down when his first option is covered (or Tommy just doesn’t feel good about throwing to him). Part of that is surely that until today, he was fully healthy. But he is really bad at finding someone open on the run. He is really bad at throwing on the run period. For whatever reason, he is not good saving a broken play. He has no moves in the open field. I don’t remember him breaking a tackle. Ever. He goes down very easily. In some ways, he is the anti-thesis of Eric Dungey. That wouldn’t be a big problem if he played for a team with a great OL that rarely has breakdowns. It is a huge deal for this team and this OL.
The coaches seem aware the OL is a problem. We switched the OTs this week, Didn’t seem to help much. We made a major fundamental change in philosophy and ran a lot of plays with Tommy behind center, instead of using the shotgun. Stephen Bailey said this was done to give Tommy a chance to run some play action to get the WRs a little more breathing room.
Didn’t seem to work much.
I think Duke did the usual approach against the Babers offense. Play the corners on an island in man and load up the box to take away the run. They sat on the short routes to the flat or over the middle, and largely took them away from us. To do this, they left themselves really exposed to long passes. I think they decided they would take their changes getting beat long, relying on their great DEs to put pressure on Tommy and trying to take away Tommy’s primary target whenever possible.
This disrupted SU’s offense and got them to run a lot of low percentage long passing plays. Sometimes the SU WRs couldn’t get open. A lot of time, the Duke pass rush disrupted Tommy from getting a pass off. A few times the SU WRs dropped balls. And a few times Tommy just missed WRs who were wide open.
We can expect more of this in the future. Until we can beat other teams long consistently when we are defended this way, it is going to keep happening. Even Liberty will try this next week.
Let’s take defense a bit. I worried losing Cisco was going to hurt us defending the run the most. That proved true. We have a lot of really young guys playing now. They aren’t physically to play. When the other team has the ball, it looks like a team of men playing a team of boys. They got worn down as the game went on, as the offense again was incredibly bad at holding on to the ball and giving them a rest.
Garrett Williams got picked on again and Duke had some success throwing it his way. More than anyone else has so far this year. Iffy had his worst game of the season. Bobo abused him pretty badly. Not good.
Our pass rush was not very good...pretty the worst it has been this season. Not good. When we had pressure, it was usually because of a blitz. I thought the SU DL and LBs got worn down and the Duke OL had their way with them most of the game. Some of this was because our guys don’t know what to do...some because they are just not physically ready to play. Hoping they will get better as time goes on. I think so.
Injuries
Carter got hurt early. That proved to be the beginning of the end. He came back in the second half but hurt again. It looked like a shoulder injury. Not good. For a time, we had a walk on come in to replace him. We have so few safeties left, losing him would be a killer.
Cantin-Arcu hurt his knee. It looked pretty serious. His play this year has been up and down but his talent is undeniable and if he is out for a long time, again, it would be devastating.
Tucker also got hurt. Not sure what his injury is. He limped off the field but it wasn’t a big limp. Maybe he will be able to play next week?
And of course, Tommy got hurt. When Dino says it doesn’t look good, that is not a good sign. At this point, I would be really happy if he got back for the games in November.
This is a serious issue. Is Tommy struggling? Yes. Is he playing great? No, I don’t think even his biggest supporters would say that. But the drop off from him to the other QBs is a major one. If we have to play without Tommy for a while, we have really serious issues.
I am hoping Rex can run the ball and we can do some stuff featuring that ability. For a team struggling mightily to put together sustained drives, it is not good news to introduce a QB who appears to have little ability to throw the ball accurately. If Tommy can’t play, I think Liberty should probably be favored next week. We just lost the most winnable conference game on the schedule. Badly.
Liberty has decent talent. They are probably going to be able to run the ball well against us. I think everyone will for the rest of this year. I hope we can find a way to move the ball and put some points up. Otherwise, it is going to be a very very long rest of the season. Especially after seeing NC State and BC, two of the teams we were counting on being wins at home, looking very good today.
I was struck by how much smaller and weaker we appeared to be. That is to be expected against Clemson. But Duke? Really?
The team we destroyed last year on their field just physically dominated us.
One lesson to take from this is that when a team embarrasses another team, it may come back to bite them later. Duke played really hard. It looked like they wanted it more. Props to them...they made a ton of mistakes and frankly, I don’t think they are a very good team, but they were clearly the better team today and clearly deserved to get the win.
When I compare how the offense has changed from when Eric was the QB to since Tommy took over, I don’t see much difference in big plays. We might even have more big plays with Tommy as the QB. The huge difference to me lies in sustained drives. We seemed to have a lot of long, sustained drives when Eric was here. These have largely disappeared under Tommy.
Why? No question the OL has been part of the issue.. It was crappy under Eric as well, though they ended up decent for his senior season. Last year the OL might have been the worst OL at SU in 100 years. It has improved some this year. Things aren’t great. But they are doing good enough to generally give Tommy enough time to run plays.
I think the quality of the WRs has gone down since Eric was the QB. That is part of the problem.
Taj is fast and a good WR. He has pretty good hands. Not very physical. He gets run off his route way too often. If it comes down to a 50-50 game, he isn’t going to win very often. Nice route for the long TD at the start of the game. Was open again on a deep route, and I think should have been the catch (it wasn’t easy but was catchable). Your lead WR needs to make those plays.
Wish he was more physical and tough.
Nykeim looks better this season and gets open a lot. He has dropped a couple of short ones over the middle that a slot guy has to catch and made a couple of mental errors that really hurt today. One play he was in motion and starting running forward before the ball was snapped. He had a couple of issues attempting to return KOs as well.
Courtney is getting some run now and struggling some. Should have had that one long pass thrown to him. A BCS WR has to make that catch. I think he dropped another short one in the flat too. He has talent and I think will eventually be a good WR. But he is triggering now.
Good to see at least a few attempts to pass the ball to the TEs. Good coaches make game plans to take advantage of the resources they have to work with. Our coaches need to do better at this.
Again, back to the question...why can’t this team complete sustained drives? What is the root cause?
Part is our inability to run the ball. The OL is struggling to open decent holes. This is slowly getting better and with Tucker as the RB, there is hope for improvement. But there are still too many runs for short yardage. Part of it is poor pass blocking. We get beat really quickly by DL way too early. Even when the OL has only 3 to block, they routinely miss someone and give Tommy little time to make a play. This is a huge issue. Servais is really struggling. Duke has a couple of good DEs but wow, Servais gets beat badly far too often. Bergeron seems to be doing a little better but does not appear to be solid. The interior of the line was awful early but looks to have become decent here. Props to them for that.
A big issue though is Tommy. If the defense is able to take away Tommy’s primary option, 99% of the time, the play will be a sack, Tommy running OB for a loss or an incomplete pass. Tommy rarely is able to find his second option. Tommy is rarely able to make something of a broken play. He has gotten better this year running for a first down when his first option is covered (or Tommy just doesn’t feel good about throwing to him). Part of that is surely that until today, he was fully healthy. But he is really bad at finding someone open on the run. He is really bad at throwing on the run period. For whatever reason, he is not good saving a broken play. He has no moves in the open field. I don’t remember him breaking a tackle. Ever. He goes down very easily. In some ways, he is the anti-thesis of Eric Dungey. That wouldn’t be a big problem if he played for a team with a great OL that rarely has breakdowns. It is a huge deal for this team and this OL.
The coaches seem aware the OL is a problem. We switched the OTs this week, Didn’t seem to help much. We made a major fundamental change in philosophy and ran a lot of plays with Tommy behind center, instead of using the shotgun. Stephen Bailey said this was done to give Tommy a chance to run some play action to get the WRs a little more breathing room.
Didn’t seem to work much.
I think Duke did the usual approach against the Babers offense. Play the corners on an island in man and load up the box to take away the run. They sat on the short routes to the flat or over the middle, and largely took them away from us. To do this, they left themselves really exposed to long passes. I think they decided they would take their changes getting beat long, relying on their great DEs to put pressure on Tommy and trying to take away Tommy’s primary target whenever possible.
This disrupted SU’s offense and got them to run a lot of low percentage long passing plays. Sometimes the SU WRs couldn’t get open. A lot of time, the Duke pass rush disrupted Tommy from getting a pass off. A few times the SU WRs dropped balls. And a few times Tommy just missed WRs who were wide open.
We can expect more of this in the future. Until we can beat other teams long consistently when we are defended this way, it is going to keep happening. Even Liberty will try this next week.
Let’s take defense a bit. I worried losing Cisco was going to hurt us defending the run the most. That proved true. We have a lot of really young guys playing now. They aren’t physically to play. When the other team has the ball, it looks like a team of men playing a team of boys. They got worn down as the game went on, as the offense again was incredibly bad at holding on to the ball and giving them a rest.
Garrett Williams got picked on again and Duke had some success throwing it his way. More than anyone else has so far this year. Iffy had his worst game of the season. Bobo abused him pretty badly. Not good.
Our pass rush was not very good...pretty the worst it has been this season. Not good. When we had pressure, it was usually because of a blitz. I thought the SU DL and LBs got worn down and the Duke OL had their way with them most of the game. Some of this was because our guys don’t know what to do...some because they are just not physically ready to play. Hoping they will get better as time goes on. I think so.
Injuries
Carter got hurt early. That proved to be the beginning of the end. He came back in the second half but hurt again. It looked like a shoulder injury. Not good. For a time, we had a walk on come in to replace him. We have so few safeties left, losing him would be a killer.
Cantin-Arcu hurt his knee. It looked pretty serious. His play this year has been up and down but his talent is undeniable and if he is out for a long time, again, it would be devastating.
Tucker also got hurt. Not sure what his injury is. He limped off the field but it wasn’t a big limp. Maybe he will be able to play next week?
And of course, Tommy got hurt. When Dino says it doesn’t look good, that is not a good sign. At this point, I would be really happy if he got back for the games in November.
This is a serious issue. Is Tommy struggling? Yes. Is he playing great? No, I don’t think even his biggest supporters would say that. But the drop off from him to the other QBs is a major one. If we have to play without Tommy for a while, we have really serious issues.
I am hoping Rex can run the ball and we can do some stuff featuring that ability. For a team struggling mightily to put together sustained drives, it is not good news to introduce a QB who appears to have little ability to throw the ball accurately. If Tommy can’t play, I think Liberty should probably be favored next week. We just lost the most winnable conference game on the schedule. Badly.
Liberty has decent talent. They are probably going to be able to run the ball well against us. I think everyone will for the rest of this year. I hope we can find a way to move the ball and put some points up. Otherwise, it is going to be a very very long rest of the season. Especially after seeing NC State and BC, two of the teams we were counting on being wins at home, looking very good today.