sutomcat
No recent Cali or Iggy awards; Mr Irrelevant
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- Aug 15, 2011
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Can’t say much about the tailgate. It was my wife’s birthday so I. arrived pretty late so I could spend as much time as possible with her on her day. Looked like it was well attended. I brought a couple of friends and I know they had a wonderful time.
The screening tents get more efficient with each game. No issues again with mobile ticketing. All good with the fan experience here.
11 tubas. The SUMB sounded very good. They did some razzle dazzle dance moves during the halftime show that were amusing.
The woman who sang the alma mater and NA was solid. As was the sound for it. PA announcements are maybe slightly better than earlier games but still mostly unintelligible. As are the announcements from the refs on their terrible calls.
When the NA played, some red and blue lights went on, which was a nice touch. Later, they all lit up green. Not sure why but it was interesting. After every SU score and a bunch of other times, the lights turned orange. This makes the stadium pretty dark. Nice effect but not as orange as I was hoping. It made the all white student student temporarily turn orange, which was cool.
There was a lot of hubbub about the first player entrance for a night game. They did turn most of the lights out, but only for a really short time and there was a lot of light from the scoreboards so it never got really dark. It was okay but leaving the whole stadium pitch black, or almost pitch black, would make for a much more dramatic entrance. I hope they decided to go conservative to start and will go darker for future night games.
Still no entrance song. Word is there is work being done on this and I suspect we will see this attempted before the end of the season. I am thinking the Clemson game, the next night game, would be a good time to do this.
My friends (this was their first game at the renovated facility) kept asking me, where do I see the score? Where do I see the score? For Rutgers, it was where are the down and distance? They addressed that by adding down and distance to the center hung scoreboard but I agree with my friends. The way the score is presented, on the ribbon boards in the corner, along with team logos and other stuff that doesn’t belong there, makes it way too hard to see the score. For football, where scoring isn’t that volatile, this isn’t a big deal. It really will be for basketball.
One of my friends works as a security guard at the dome. He pointed to the retired football numbers on the eastern wall of the roof. Said all the guards were mystified wondering who that #7 was on the other side of the scoreboard, all by itself. Who wore #7? I pointed out the banner said Billy Joel. And that the 7 referred to the number of concerts he has played at the dome.
This was a hell of a game. I think Liberty is a darned good team. They are into the game winning 15 of their last 16 games. They were ranked 26th and 27th in the country. Willis is a heck of a QB and they have a lot of good athletes. I would say their defense put about as many hard hits on SU players as I have seen in a long time. A number of them appeared to me to be cheap hits, with targeting involved, Seemed like Shrader got hit in the head every time he ran the ball. But they hit hard. Still can’t believe the guy who knocked Garrett’s helmet off didn’t get ejected, or even penalized. Now personally, from what I saw, it wasn’t a blatant target but it was strongly in the questionable range, and all season, every time there is a question about a possible target, if it is even close, it is called targeting. But I only saw one replay….maybe I am totally off base here.
Question for those who watched at home: It looked like when a bad call was reviewed, the incompetent refs did the review themselves. They gathered around a monitor and watched each one. Is that what happened, or was that just an FYI for them? No crew should ever be allowed to review their own calls. Especially a bunch of bumbling fools like that group. Where did they come from? The field judge was a woman and appeared to be the most competent ref on the crew.
It was an interesting decision to start Shrader against Liberty. With the emergence of Tucker as a big time running back, everyone is going to play 7 men in the box against all the rest of the season. I think this is a given. I would think you would want the QB who can make a defense pay for trying to take the run away at all costs, rather than the guy who is more of a run game. Just my opinion here…I think Dino saw the offense was hopelessly broken, and had been broken for a couple of years and that a chance needed to be made. Unfortunately for Tommy, it is easier to replace the QB than the rest of the offense.
Thought Garrett did okay for his first start. He obviously didn’t throw it well but he managed the offense well. Looked like he audibled to his safe route on a couple of blitzes to get a couple of nice gains. That is something that almost never seems to happen with Tommy running things. He definitely looks more comfortable running the option that Tommy and is far better at getting people to miss, bouncing off players and moving the pile than Tommy. Though I suspect Tommy is probably faster and might get more long runs than Garrett.
I, like so many in the dome, was really unhappy with the super conservative offense Gilbert called in the fourth quarter. It looked like he did not trust Garrett to throw the ball and decided to take his chances with Tucker and Garrett running it no matter what. I think this all stems from one play Garrett made; his worst play of the game IMHO. I think it happened late in the 3rd quarter. The call was a delayed screen, and was designed for Garrett to fall back a bit to get the DL to advance and open up space behind them for a screen pass. I think Tucker was the intended receiver. Anyway, Liberty called a blitz and one of their defenders got in Shrader’s face earlier than desired. Shrader did not try to avoid him or throw it away. Instead, it looked like he tried to float a ball over the defender to his target. But he was rushed, and throw it way too high and way too low and we were very fortunate it fell into an open area of the field and was not intercepted. I think they killed Gilbert’s confidence in Shrader passing it, even for screens. I hope Garrett learns from that play.
Davis started at guard. Yay. I think Vet started at RT and Servais again started at C. Servais was awful with his shotgun snaps for most of the first quarter, once making 6 poor snaps in a row. Very disappointing to see a senior almost singlehandedly destroy a couple of drives. I understand he was moved recently but when you made an awful play a couple of times in a row, you have to make adjustments and stop the problem from happening again. To his credit, he eventually got his act together and there was only a couple bad snaps from that point forward. I will say the constant stream of untouched defenders coming into the QB’s face on passing plays has suddenly stopped since Davis took over at OG and Servais was moved to C. Also should note that I saw Tucker, who has been very poor at picking up blitzes early in the season, did a much better job at this last night.
It was great to see Harris start and get a couple of touches early. I suspect getting him the ball a lot was a big part of the game plan but he stopped playing after the first couple of series and I never saw him return. Suspect he re-injured himself. Not good. This might also be part of Gilbert’s reluctance to throw the ball late. There aren’t a lot of reliable receivers out there to throw it to right now. Harris was out. Benson was out; he did not play again as far as I could tell. Shrader threw one ball to Sharod Johnson and he dropped it. Queeley is not having a good start to the season and it looks like he is struggling to get separation against his guy.
Good to see Alford get more PT. He appears to be a major beneficiary of PT with Harris out. He seems to get open consistently and I wish we would try and throw to him more often.
With Benson out, we were really in a pickle with Elmore sitting out the last game before his return. Mang played a lot and has been a godsend for this offense. Not much of a threat catching the ball yet but the kid can block pretty well. Maher got some PT and seemed to do okay. And we saw a lot of Josh Ilaoa coming in as a second TE on 3rd and short situations. That will end with Chris playing again next week.
Thought Dino coached a pretty good game but made a couple of bad decisions. I disliked his decision to try a 50 yard plus FG in the first half around the 35 when he cold have gone for it on 4th and 4 (I believe that was the yardage). But I really disliked the decision to punt on 4th and 1 in the fourth quarter. The defense had been on the field a lot, was clearly getting gassed and it just didn’t make sense from a probability perspective. Props to the defense for bailing him out (though it took a remarkable goal line stand to do it) and props again to the defense for getting a turnover late in the game, which essentially bailed out Gilbert and his clueless play calling down the stretch.
If Sterlin called just one or two play action passes in those last couple of drives, I would have felt a lot better about his ability as an OC. Liberty had everyone running up to the LOS. You have to keep them somewhat honest when this is happening. Sigh.
Okay, can’t write a review without giving Sean Tucker, the best player on the field last night, some serious props. Wow. Liberty did something a lot that all ACC teams do against our run heavy offense, dialing up run blitzes into the holes they think we are running into. This has been extremely effective but it was not last night. Sean showed extraordinary vision and cutting ability to get past the blitzers and was great getting people to miss in tight spaces just past the LOS. This just doesn’t happen very often; it is really hard to do. But Sean was doing it routinely, all game long. He broke lots of tackles, moved the pile and was a bad man. I think it is safe to say he is our best RB since Walter Reyes. I wonder if he shows up wearing 44 for the Wake Forest game? I suspect he will.
Let’s talk about the other star of this game. The defense. Yes, they gave up 21 points and yes, they gave up 14 of them way too quickly. But they also made that epic goal line stand to keep us in the game and bailed out the failed offense again by getting that turnover against a team that does not turn the ball over. Awesome.
Gotta talk about Cody Roscoe. Okay, he took advantage of Kingsley being out, getting more PT and for the first game, quietly had a terrific game. Ditto for the Rutgers game. Now Kingsley comes back for Liberty and Roscoe has another exceptional game. I wonder if anyone picked him to lead the team in sacks in the Cali Awards? I bet not. Props to the kid for working hard and stepping up to a new level for his final season.
Caleb has really stepped up this season as well. Great to see for SU fans wondering who is going to play DE next season. One thing I really like about Tony White is that he plays a lot of players and because of this, is rarely going to get caught in a situation where all he has to work with are a bunch of inexperienced player for one position group. Great to see Kingsley out there again. Looked like he might have tweaked his injury at one point. I think he was the guy that really made the play to lock Willis up on 4th and goal and keep him out of the end zone. Josh Black has been kind of quiet to date. Darton made some plays again. Saw him being worked in at DE some plays last night as McKinley and Harper are taking up most of the snaps inside now.
Mikel Jones was great. Again. Easy to take him for granted but he seems to be in the right place a lot. Wax and Thompson…ditto. I struggle to decide which LB is better. And Cartin-Arku made a bunch of good plays last night as well.
Rough day for Chestnut, who showed he is human after all. Really got abused in the fourth quarter. I hope he learns from it. Other teams will look to attack him the same way and use his Uber aggressive play against the run against him.
Good to have Garrett Williams back and playing well. Who would have thought two of our best players are both named Garrett? Simmons got burned again on a lazy long pass to the sideline but otherwise looked good. I like what I see from Barron. He is a big reason we are so much better against the run than we were last season. He seems to play more at rover with each game.
Coley is playing a lot more with Carter out and I thought he did well. That said, I hope Carter comes back soon. He does things others cannot do.
Courtney Jackson has taken over the PR job and was very conservative playing it last night. Far too conservative I think. Tough when you have a punter who was so inconsistent and kicked a lot of low short balls. But he had a number of changes to return a punt and didn’t even try once (if memory serves).
Williams had a couple of good punts and a couple of bad ones. This is what freshman do. I am confident he is going to be very good one day. Hope that day comes soon. Thought Szymt didn’t have a great day. Missed on a long one and while he made the game winner, it was not hit well and had the same low trajectory on both FG attempts. So low that they can be blocked. He did kick off pretty well.
Speaking of kick offs, the KOR coverage team was top notch. I think we gave up a big punt return but were otherwise good there. Don’t think we tried to return a kick off either. I wonder how often that happens?
We started off the game with a number of penalties and I was really mad about it. Especially after the last couple of games. But the rash of penalties ended early and things were good after that.
This is a team struggling to learn how to win games. I believe we had lost 12 of our last 15 games coming in. Liberty was on a similar streak in the other direction. Given a close game with teams going in such different directions, it would have been very surprising to see the team that has been losing find a way to win. But it happened and that is a very good thing.
Props to the fans who showed. These fans are the die hards and they made noise a lot of the bandwagon people would never make. Great job. And I have to again give major props to the students, who showed in big numbers again, and made a ton of noise again. It looks like they are having fun and seeing wins is going to help ensure they come back for more. IMHO, the new roof make the dome noticeably louder than it was before. Good seeing the other team having problems hearing signals and running into penalties related to crowd noise.
The FSU game is going to be an interesting one. Two programs going in opposite directions. I hope that continues…..
The screening tents get more efficient with each game. No issues again with mobile ticketing. All good with the fan experience here.
11 tubas. The SUMB sounded very good. They did some razzle dazzle dance moves during the halftime show that were amusing.
The woman who sang the alma mater and NA was solid. As was the sound for it. PA announcements are maybe slightly better than earlier games but still mostly unintelligible. As are the announcements from the refs on their terrible calls.
When the NA played, some red and blue lights went on, which was a nice touch. Later, they all lit up green. Not sure why but it was interesting. After every SU score and a bunch of other times, the lights turned orange. This makes the stadium pretty dark. Nice effect but not as orange as I was hoping. It made the all white student student temporarily turn orange, which was cool.
There was a lot of hubbub about the first player entrance for a night game. They did turn most of the lights out, but only for a really short time and there was a lot of light from the scoreboards so it never got really dark. It was okay but leaving the whole stadium pitch black, or almost pitch black, would make for a much more dramatic entrance. I hope they decided to go conservative to start and will go darker for future night games.
Still no entrance song. Word is there is work being done on this and I suspect we will see this attempted before the end of the season. I am thinking the Clemson game, the next night game, would be a good time to do this.
My friends (this was their first game at the renovated facility) kept asking me, where do I see the score? Where do I see the score? For Rutgers, it was where are the down and distance? They addressed that by adding down and distance to the center hung scoreboard but I agree with my friends. The way the score is presented, on the ribbon boards in the corner, along with team logos and other stuff that doesn’t belong there, makes it way too hard to see the score. For football, where scoring isn’t that volatile, this isn’t a big deal. It really will be for basketball.
One of my friends works as a security guard at the dome. He pointed to the retired football numbers on the eastern wall of the roof. Said all the guards were mystified wondering who that #7 was on the other side of the scoreboard, all by itself. Who wore #7? I pointed out the banner said Billy Joel. And that the 7 referred to the number of concerts he has played at the dome.
This was a hell of a game. I think Liberty is a darned good team. They are into the game winning 15 of their last 16 games. They were ranked 26th and 27th in the country. Willis is a heck of a QB and they have a lot of good athletes. I would say their defense put about as many hard hits on SU players as I have seen in a long time. A number of them appeared to me to be cheap hits, with targeting involved, Seemed like Shrader got hit in the head every time he ran the ball. But they hit hard. Still can’t believe the guy who knocked Garrett’s helmet off didn’t get ejected, or even penalized. Now personally, from what I saw, it wasn’t a blatant target but it was strongly in the questionable range, and all season, every time there is a question about a possible target, if it is even close, it is called targeting. But I only saw one replay….maybe I am totally off base here.
Question for those who watched at home: It looked like when a bad call was reviewed, the incompetent refs did the review themselves. They gathered around a monitor and watched each one. Is that what happened, or was that just an FYI for them? No crew should ever be allowed to review their own calls. Especially a bunch of bumbling fools like that group. Where did they come from? The field judge was a woman and appeared to be the most competent ref on the crew.
It was an interesting decision to start Shrader against Liberty. With the emergence of Tucker as a big time running back, everyone is going to play 7 men in the box against all the rest of the season. I think this is a given. I would think you would want the QB who can make a defense pay for trying to take the run away at all costs, rather than the guy who is more of a run game. Just my opinion here…I think Dino saw the offense was hopelessly broken, and had been broken for a couple of years and that a chance needed to be made. Unfortunately for Tommy, it is easier to replace the QB than the rest of the offense.
Thought Garrett did okay for his first start. He obviously didn’t throw it well but he managed the offense well. Looked like he audibled to his safe route on a couple of blitzes to get a couple of nice gains. That is something that almost never seems to happen with Tommy running things. He definitely looks more comfortable running the option that Tommy and is far better at getting people to miss, bouncing off players and moving the pile than Tommy. Though I suspect Tommy is probably faster and might get more long runs than Garrett.
I, like so many in the dome, was really unhappy with the super conservative offense Gilbert called in the fourth quarter. It looked like he did not trust Garrett to throw the ball and decided to take his chances with Tucker and Garrett running it no matter what. I think this all stems from one play Garrett made; his worst play of the game IMHO. I think it happened late in the 3rd quarter. The call was a delayed screen, and was designed for Garrett to fall back a bit to get the DL to advance and open up space behind them for a screen pass. I think Tucker was the intended receiver. Anyway, Liberty called a blitz and one of their defenders got in Shrader’s face earlier than desired. Shrader did not try to avoid him or throw it away. Instead, it looked like he tried to float a ball over the defender to his target. But he was rushed, and throw it way too high and way too low and we were very fortunate it fell into an open area of the field and was not intercepted. I think they killed Gilbert’s confidence in Shrader passing it, even for screens. I hope Garrett learns from that play.
Davis started at guard. Yay. I think Vet started at RT and Servais again started at C. Servais was awful with his shotgun snaps for most of the first quarter, once making 6 poor snaps in a row. Very disappointing to see a senior almost singlehandedly destroy a couple of drives. I understand he was moved recently but when you made an awful play a couple of times in a row, you have to make adjustments and stop the problem from happening again. To his credit, he eventually got his act together and there was only a couple bad snaps from that point forward. I will say the constant stream of untouched defenders coming into the QB’s face on passing plays has suddenly stopped since Davis took over at OG and Servais was moved to C. Also should note that I saw Tucker, who has been very poor at picking up blitzes early in the season, did a much better job at this last night.
It was great to see Harris start and get a couple of touches early. I suspect getting him the ball a lot was a big part of the game plan but he stopped playing after the first couple of series and I never saw him return. Suspect he re-injured himself. Not good. This might also be part of Gilbert’s reluctance to throw the ball late. There aren’t a lot of reliable receivers out there to throw it to right now. Harris was out. Benson was out; he did not play again as far as I could tell. Shrader threw one ball to Sharod Johnson and he dropped it. Queeley is not having a good start to the season and it looks like he is struggling to get separation against his guy.
Good to see Alford get more PT. He appears to be a major beneficiary of PT with Harris out. He seems to get open consistently and I wish we would try and throw to him more often.
With Benson out, we were really in a pickle with Elmore sitting out the last game before his return. Mang played a lot and has been a godsend for this offense. Not much of a threat catching the ball yet but the kid can block pretty well. Maher got some PT and seemed to do okay. And we saw a lot of Josh Ilaoa coming in as a second TE on 3rd and short situations. That will end with Chris playing again next week.
Thought Dino coached a pretty good game but made a couple of bad decisions. I disliked his decision to try a 50 yard plus FG in the first half around the 35 when he cold have gone for it on 4th and 4 (I believe that was the yardage). But I really disliked the decision to punt on 4th and 1 in the fourth quarter. The defense had been on the field a lot, was clearly getting gassed and it just didn’t make sense from a probability perspective. Props to the defense for bailing him out (though it took a remarkable goal line stand to do it) and props again to the defense for getting a turnover late in the game, which essentially bailed out Gilbert and his clueless play calling down the stretch.
If Sterlin called just one or two play action passes in those last couple of drives, I would have felt a lot better about his ability as an OC. Liberty had everyone running up to the LOS. You have to keep them somewhat honest when this is happening. Sigh.
Okay, can’t write a review without giving Sean Tucker, the best player on the field last night, some serious props. Wow. Liberty did something a lot that all ACC teams do against our run heavy offense, dialing up run blitzes into the holes they think we are running into. This has been extremely effective but it was not last night. Sean showed extraordinary vision and cutting ability to get past the blitzers and was great getting people to miss in tight spaces just past the LOS. This just doesn’t happen very often; it is really hard to do. But Sean was doing it routinely, all game long. He broke lots of tackles, moved the pile and was a bad man. I think it is safe to say he is our best RB since Walter Reyes. I wonder if he shows up wearing 44 for the Wake Forest game? I suspect he will.
Let’s talk about the other star of this game. The defense. Yes, they gave up 21 points and yes, they gave up 14 of them way too quickly. But they also made that epic goal line stand to keep us in the game and bailed out the failed offense again by getting that turnover against a team that does not turn the ball over. Awesome.
Gotta talk about Cody Roscoe. Okay, he took advantage of Kingsley being out, getting more PT and for the first game, quietly had a terrific game. Ditto for the Rutgers game. Now Kingsley comes back for Liberty and Roscoe has another exceptional game. I wonder if anyone picked him to lead the team in sacks in the Cali Awards? I bet not. Props to the kid for working hard and stepping up to a new level for his final season.
Caleb has really stepped up this season as well. Great to see for SU fans wondering who is going to play DE next season. One thing I really like about Tony White is that he plays a lot of players and because of this, is rarely going to get caught in a situation where all he has to work with are a bunch of inexperienced player for one position group. Great to see Kingsley out there again. Looked like he might have tweaked his injury at one point. I think he was the guy that really made the play to lock Willis up on 4th and goal and keep him out of the end zone. Josh Black has been kind of quiet to date. Darton made some plays again. Saw him being worked in at DE some plays last night as McKinley and Harper are taking up most of the snaps inside now.
Mikel Jones was great. Again. Easy to take him for granted but he seems to be in the right place a lot. Wax and Thompson…ditto. I struggle to decide which LB is better. And Cartin-Arku made a bunch of good plays last night as well.
Rough day for Chestnut, who showed he is human after all. Really got abused in the fourth quarter. I hope he learns from it. Other teams will look to attack him the same way and use his Uber aggressive play against the run against him.
Good to have Garrett Williams back and playing well. Who would have thought two of our best players are both named Garrett? Simmons got burned again on a lazy long pass to the sideline but otherwise looked good. I like what I see from Barron. He is a big reason we are so much better against the run than we were last season. He seems to play more at rover with each game.
Coley is playing a lot more with Carter out and I thought he did well. That said, I hope Carter comes back soon. He does things others cannot do.
Courtney Jackson has taken over the PR job and was very conservative playing it last night. Far too conservative I think. Tough when you have a punter who was so inconsistent and kicked a lot of low short balls. But he had a number of changes to return a punt and didn’t even try once (if memory serves).
Williams had a couple of good punts and a couple of bad ones. This is what freshman do. I am confident he is going to be very good one day. Hope that day comes soon. Thought Szymt didn’t have a great day. Missed on a long one and while he made the game winner, it was not hit well and had the same low trajectory on both FG attempts. So low that they can be blocked. He did kick off pretty well.
Speaking of kick offs, the KOR coverage team was top notch. I think we gave up a big punt return but were otherwise good there. Don’t think we tried to return a kick off either. I wonder how often that happens?
We started off the game with a number of penalties and I was really mad about it. Especially after the last couple of games. But the rash of penalties ended early and things were good after that.
This is a team struggling to learn how to win games. I believe we had lost 12 of our last 15 games coming in. Liberty was on a similar streak in the other direction. Given a close game with teams going in such different directions, it would have been very surprising to see the team that has been losing find a way to win. But it happened and that is a very good thing.
Props to the fans who showed. These fans are the die hards and they made noise a lot of the bandwagon people would never make. Great job. And I have to again give major props to the students, who showed in big numbers again, and made a ton of noise again. It looks like they are having fun and seeing wins is going to help ensure they come back for more. IMHO, the new roof make the dome noticeably louder than it was before. Good seeing the other team having problems hearing signals and running into penalties related to crowd noise.
The FSU game is going to be an interesting one. Two programs going in opposite directions. I hope that continues…..
