sutomcat
No recent Cali or Iggy awards; Mr Irrelevant
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2011
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I have been in North Carolina since Thursday, staying with a friend and getting some golf in. Also enjoying NC BBQ. Still not 100% sure about that Eastern Carolina vinegar sauce but it is growing on me.
In the Raleigh region. Drove to Winston Salem on Saturday afternoon. A little less than 2 hours. Got there shortly after 5 pm. TexanMark had the tailgate well underway. Big turnout (around 70)? Everyone seemed to be having a good time. The kegs of beer helped with that.
Wake is a great place for visiting fans to tailgate at. There is a pay lot maybe 300 yards from the stadium with lots of room and they allow grilling and open containers. Just a lot more room and a lot more convenience than other ACC schools. Had good discussions with a lot of diehard fans, met up with some old friends, made some new friends. Wonderful tailgate. Another great job by Mark.
Headed over to the stadium about 20 minutes before kickoff. Easy walk, no problems with our electronic tickets or getting through the security scanners. Looked at their concessions. Didn’t see anything special or interesting there. They have a small stadium with just one level and one concourse, but it is very wide and has large open open airspaces behind the endzones. They allow food trucks to drive into the stadium perimeter and set up in the end zones. Pretty cool, though most of them seemed to be selling cold treats. Not good on a cold late fall night.
Wake fans were pretty friendly. No confrontations of any kind. Never have had any problems with Wake fans. A lot of the young fans there, presumably students, were wearing animal costumes. Young furries. I remarked on this to my friend and said ‘it must be a Wake thing’. A Wake fan overheard me, and assured me this was not a Wake thing. That he sees people dresses up in these type of costumes on games on TV all the time. I see one or two students in a student section dress up in something weird most college games too but not 100-200 kids. A bunch more came to the game wearing what looked like adult Dr Carter one piece pajamas. No issues with it. They seemed like good kids. But it is different to me.
Wake did not have a good crowd. We were on the student section side of the field, which appeared to have more fans than the other side. The side I could see clearly had a ton of empty seats. Was maybe 15% full. I think the side we were sitting in was more like 50% full. I think it holds 32K. Guessing there were about 15K actually there. They made almost no noise. Very quiet crowd. The student section is usually loud but not the Wake students. The crowd seemed older and very chill.
Wake’s PA system was really loud. Maybe the loudest PA I have ever heard at a football game. They played blaring songs after every play, until just before the ball was snapped. Played their piped in noise longer when Syracuse had the ball to try and get some kind of home field advantage. Pretty sleazy and the noise gave me a headache.
They have a nice replay scoreboard in one of the end zones. The one with grass. A bunch of people brought blankets and sat or lay on them. Old school for sure.
It was cold. Weather.com said it was 43 at the coldest during the game but it felt colder. The wind got stronger as the game went on and by the fourth quarter, I was getting cold, even wearing 5 layers. Make one appreciate a heated dome.
They had a first down chant. When they got one, and they got a lot of them, the PA guy would say ‘Another first down for Wake……’ and some of the crowd would say ‘Forest’. Not sure we can translate that or make use of it.
Let’s talk about the game. My expectations were low given we were down 3 starting OL. Was very pleasantly surprised by the play of the backups. Enrique played LT and I thought was terrific. We made a major mistake playing Davis all season at RT. He is much better at OG, where he was last night. Vet moved to RT, where he was good but I think he was our weakest pass blocker. His hold took away a key TD at a point where we were taking control of the game. Still, he was playing out of position and I think he did well considering this. Ilaoa played center and I thought he played well. Other than the one early snap that wrecked a drive, he was good.
It was predicable that Cruz and Ilaoa were going to start but I was really interested to see who the other starter was going to be. It ended up being transfer Jakob Bradford. And he also played well. Props to all of the replacements. I think this gives some insight into the starting lineup at OL next year.
Pretty sure we will see Ilaoa at center and Enrique at LT. Bradford is probably going to be one of the OGs, along with Ellis. RT looks to be wide open. If Bleich returns and is healthy, maybe Bradford moves to RT. Anyway, I feel better about the OL for next season after this game. There is hope there.
It was great to see the offense move the ball consistently (except for that awful 3rd quarter). Garrett looked sharp and very good. Lots of good passes and good decisions on where to pass the ball. It was great to see our WRs getting open consistently. Wake played man coverage all game long and dared us to throw it long and we took advantage of this and burned them deep repeatedly. Just missed with a number of other long passes. Our replacement OL players appeared to do a much better job pass blocking than some of the injured starters. They also opened some decent holes for Sean to run through (though he did some serious free lancing as well to get extra yards), Nice to see Sean getting good yardage consistently again.
I think we probably win the game if Mikel Jones did not get hurt early. All the starters we have lost have hurt but losing him hurts the most. We just didn’t have our rock in the middle and this was, I think, a huge key towards Wake’s success running the ball.
The only way we could stop Wake from running was to get our safeties into the box and commit them to run support. To do this, we had to put our CBs in man and hope they could cover a good group of Wake WRs. Thought we did a decent job of this but Perry was just too good and he abused Johnson pretty badly. And Duce got hurt fairly early, which meant we had to out Jeremiah Wilson, a true frosh, out there at the other CB position for most of the game. He did pretty well but we lost a lot without Duce on the field. After getting torched in man in the first half, I think we went with a soft zone coverage most of the second half but Wake just took the day 5-10 yard passes to their WRs and marched down the field that way (with some runs mixed in). It is hard to beat a good passing team with your top 2 CBs injured. Would have loved to have seen us play them with Garrett and a healthy Duce out there.
My only issue with Garrett was him taking those two huge sacks near the end of the first half. He has to throw the ball away there. We lost at least 3 points there and Wake got the ball back with some time on the clock and scored that late TD to end the half. This completely changed the game; We didn’t have much margin for error and that was tough to overcome.
Special teams were pretty good. Andre missed a couple and did not have a good game. Max struggled punting early but I think he got better as the game went on. Brady was great kicking off. And our KO return unit was impressive all game long. That was good to see.
Nice Syracuse turnout last night. We had a couple thousand and our fans were louder than theirs most of the game.
That BC game is going to define the season. If we can find a way to win, I think the season is a success. Especially if we win our bowl game. I am hoping Duce can play. BC has a couple of good WRs and not much else. That might be enough to cause big issues for us.
In the Raleigh region. Drove to Winston Salem on Saturday afternoon. A little less than 2 hours. Got there shortly after 5 pm. TexanMark had the tailgate well underway. Big turnout (around 70)? Everyone seemed to be having a good time. The kegs of beer helped with that.
Wake is a great place for visiting fans to tailgate at. There is a pay lot maybe 300 yards from the stadium with lots of room and they allow grilling and open containers. Just a lot more room and a lot more convenience than other ACC schools. Had good discussions with a lot of diehard fans, met up with some old friends, made some new friends. Wonderful tailgate. Another great job by Mark.
Headed over to the stadium about 20 minutes before kickoff. Easy walk, no problems with our electronic tickets or getting through the security scanners. Looked at their concessions. Didn’t see anything special or interesting there. They have a small stadium with just one level and one concourse, but it is very wide and has large open open airspaces behind the endzones. They allow food trucks to drive into the stadium perimeter and set up in the end zones. Pretty cool, though most of them seemed to be selling cold treats. Not good on a cold late fall night.
Wake fans were pretty friendly. No confrontations of any kind. Never have had any problems with Wake fans. A lot of the young fans there, presumably students, were wearing animal costumes. Young furries. I remarked on this to my friend and said ‘it must be a Wake thing’. A Wake fan overheard me, and assured me this was not a Wake thing. That he sees people dresses up in these type of costumes on games on TV all the time. I see one or two students in a student section dress up in something weird most college games too but not 100-200 kids. A bunch more came to the game wearing what looked like adult Dr Carter one piece pajamas. No issues with it. They seemed like good kids. But it is different to me.
Wake did not have a good crowd. We were on the student section side of the field, which appeared to have more fans than the other side. The side I could see clearly had a ton of empty seats. Was maybe 15% full. I think the side we were sitting in was more like 50% full. I think it holds 32K. Guessing there were about 15K actually there. They made almost no noise. Very quiet crowd. The student section is usually loud but not the Wake students. The crowd seemed older and very chill.
Wake’s PA system was really loud. Maybe the loudest PA I have ever heard at a football game. They played blaring songs after every play, until just before the ball was snapped. Played their piped in noise longer when Syracuse had the ball to try and get some kind of home field advantage. Pretty sleazy and the noise gave me a headache.
They have a nice replay scoreboard in one of the end zones. The one with grass. A bunch of people brought blankets and sat or lay on them. Old school for sure.
It was cold. Weather.com said it was 43 at the coldest during the game but it felt colder. The wind got stronger as the game went on and by the fourth quarter, I was getting cold, even wearing 5 layers. Make one appreciate a heated dome.
They had a first down chant. When they got one, and they got a lot of them, the PA guy would say ‘Another first down for Wake……’ and some of the crowd would say ‘Forest’. Not sure we can translate that or make use of it.
Let’s talk about the game. My expectations were low given we were down 3 starting OL. Was very pleasantly surprised by the play of the backups. Enrique played LT and I thought was terrific. We made a major mistake playing Davis all season at RT. He is much better at OG, where he was last night. Vet moved to RT, where he was good but I think he was our weakest pass blocker. His hold took away a key TD at a point where we were taking control of the game. Still, he was playing out of position and I think he did well considering this. Ilaoa played center and I thought he played well. Other than the one early snap that wrecked a drive, he was good.
It was predicable that Cruz and Ilaoa were going to start but I was really interested to see who the other starter was going to be. It ended up being transfer Jakob Bradford. And he also played well. Props to all of the replacements. I think this gives some insight into the starting lineup at OL next year.
Pretty sure we will see Ilaoa at center and Enrique at LT. Bradford is probably going to be one of the OGs, along with Ellis. RT looks to be wide open. If Bleich returns and is healthy, maybe Bradford moves to RT. Anyway, I feel better about the OL for next season after this game. There is hope there.
It was great to see the offense move the ball consistently (except for that awful 3rd quarter). Garrett looked sharp and very good. Lots of good passes and good decisions on where to pass the ball. It was great to see our WRs getting open consistently. Wake played man coverage all game long and dared us to throw it long and we took advantage of this and burned them deep repeatedly. Just missed with a number of other long passes. Our replacement OL players appeared to do a much better job pass blocking than some of the injured starters. They also opened some decent holes for Sean to run through (though he did some serious free lancing as well to get extra yards), Nice to see Sean getting good yardage consistently again.
I think we probably win the game if Mikel Jones did not get hurt early. All the starters we have lost have hurt but losing him hurts the most. We just didn’t have our rock in the middle and this was, I think, a huge key towards Wake’s success running the ball.
The only way we could stop Wake from running was to get our safeties into the box and commit them to run support. To do this, we had to put our CBs in man and hope they could cover a good group of Wake WRs. Thought we did a decent job of this but Perry was just too good and he abused Johnson pretty badly. And Duce got hurt fairly early, which meant we had to out Jeremiah Wilson, a true frosh, out there at the other CB position for most of the game. He did pretty well but we lost a lot without Duce on the field. After getting torched in man in the first half, I think we went with a soft zone coverage most of the second half but Wake just took the day 5-10 yard passes to their WRs and marched down the field that way (with some runs mixed in). It is hard to beat a good passing team with your top 2 CBs injured. Would have loved to have seen us play them with Garrett and a healthy Duce out there.
My only issue with Garrett was him taking those two huge sacks near the end of the first half. He has to throw the ball away there. We lost at least 3 points there and Wake got the ball back with some time on the clock and scored that late TD to end the half. This completely changed the game; We didn’t have much margin for error and that was tough to overcome.
Special teams were pretty good. Andre missed a couple and did not have a good game. Max struggled punting early but I think he got better as the game went on. Brady was great kicking off. And our KO return unit was impressive all game long. That was good to see.
Nice Syracuse turnout last night. We had a couple thousand and our fans were louder than theirs most of the game.
That BC game is going to define the season. If we can find a way to win, I think the season is a success. Especially if we win our bowl game. I am hoping Duce can play. BC has a couple of good WRs and not much else. That might be enough to cause big issues for us.